About
Kathleen Coskran's collection of short stories, The High Price of Everything, won a Minnesota Book Award as did Tanzania on Tuesday: Writing by American Women Abroad which she co-edited. She is the recipient of numerous awards, fellowships and residencies including a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Bush Artist's Fellowship, and two grants from the Minnesota State Arts Board. She currently posts flash fiction on her blog called Pocket Stories: see Pocket Stories button above to read them. She was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Ethiopia and has lived and taught in Kenya, China, and Nepal. She currently hosts the annual Malmo Art Colony in central Minnesota and lives in Minneapolis.
New Book!
Married to Amazement is a celebration of the life passages we all experience with a brush of wonder and amazement. It's not a pollyanna approach, there is loss and error here, nobody escapes pain, but the foundational gifts of author Kathleen Coskran's life have been wonder, through undeserved luck, she says, and an instinct for paying attention. She also includes essays that acknowledge and celebrate, "that final human experience, death."
​
She ends with the realization that the third Peace Corps goal, "to help promote a better understanding of other people on the part of Americans" was the gift, the amazing gift, that formed and transformed her life. "We speak different languages," she writes, "eat different foods, have different practices and opinions, but we share this beautiful, fragile planet and must continue to learn, to see, and to listen to one another."
​
Those words are more important than ever in these fragile times.
​
Available at amazon.com, barnesandnoble.com and independent bookstores everywhere.
Pocket Stories
Why stories? A story is the most universal narrative, told by everybody around the world. We all lean forward when somebody says let me tell you about the time when . . . We wait for the and then as the story unfolds in our mind's eye. We see him crouched there, hear her voice, feel the stroke of the cat against our leg, hold our breath when the door creaks. Stories are words at their most powerful. Stories make us laugh, cry, sweat, hold our breath, fall in love, and remind us of the infinite ways we are human. Nobody is too young or too old for a story.
These stories are short, (what some call flash fiction.) Coskran calls them "Pocket Stories," a title inspired by the Beatrice Schenk de Regniers poem “Keep a Poem in Your Pocket, "because, (paraphrasing de Regniers), if you keep a story in your pocket and a picture in your head, you’ll never feel lonely at night when you’re in bed.
Introducing
The Pocket Stories Collection
Stories are words at their most powerful; they make us laugh, cry, faill in love, and remind us of the infinite ways we are human, of the way we are.
Contact me to order:
kathleen.coskran@gmail.com​​​
These stories are short—pocket stories—a name inspired by the Beatrice Schenk de Regniers poem, "Keep a Poem in Your Pocket." The stories are offered here because, paraphrasing de Regniers, if you keep a story in your pocket and a picture in your head, you’ll never feel lonely at night when you’re in bed.
The stories organized themselves as life does, simply, as The Way We Are, and are currently available in three volumes: The Way We Are: Families; The Way We Are: Love, Lust, and Leaving; and The Way We Are: Two Together. There are the others on the way.​
My Books
Contact me to order:
kathleen.coskran@gmail.com
Coskran, teacher, volunteer and adventurer, leads us as pilgrims from Minnesota to Africa, Asia, South America, and a Louisiana prison, showing us how beautiful we are-each of us, and the earth we call home.
Kathleen Wedl,
author of Ordinary Time
These are truly fabulous. Each a perfect fit (and I carry them through the day) ... thank you!
Comment on Pocket Stories Blog
Kathleen Coskran has the ability to write about Big Issues in commonplace contexts, to break your heart, and to put it back together. That's a mouthful, I guess, but I don't quite know how else to describe this remarkable collection of stories.
Minneapolis Star Tribune
"The High Price of Everything is a stunning debut that reveals the disparate worlds of Georgia and Africa."
Publisher's Weekly