Wanda Fischer

It’s a novel about baseball–and life.

 Three strangers met by chance in 1972 with one thing in common: baseball. They want to become major league baseball players. They were star pitchers on the baseball teams in their respective home towns, and baseball is what brought them together to play for a minor-league team in a remote town in western New York.

Drafted by the Montreal Expos to play in Single-A baseball in Jamestown, New York, they find that everyone else on the team had also been high school standouts and champions, and they must fight for the spot to make their mark in this highly competitive world of Major League Baseball.

The book describes their journey–triumphs and tears, challenges and championships–and demonstrates what can happen when young people make split-second decisions that can have lifelong impacts on their lives.

A romance story with roots in the air! Bumps will make a fine companion as you head on vacation to the beach or the mountains. Follow Amy Moran and Brian Emerson, as they meet by chance on an airplane, and their different worlds collide just before Christmas. A blizzard strands her in Kansas City, Missouri, for several days, opening an entirely different Christmas than the one she expected.  She also doesnt’t expect the interference of Brian’s mother and the appearance of a mysterious ghost.

Handprints

After their husbands commit them to a state mental institution in Massachusetts, two women become friends. Were they–and the other women who filled the place–even mentally ill? Anne was eccentric, to be sure, and her Boston fireman husband decided it was more than he could bear. Edna loved to read and write poetry; her husband said she wasn’t “a good wife,” so he called the constable and had her taken away to the state mental hospital. She craved companionship and found Anne during her first night at the place. Edna called Anne “Anne of Green Gables”; she told everyone who’d listen that she was Edna St. Vincent Millay. This novella looks at the way they cope with spending the rest of their lives in a state mental institution with humor and Anne’s visitors from the outside world–and how they make a Christmas surprise visit to the site of the old mental hospital as spirits after their deaths.

The Genius and the KGB

In the late 1960s, the Soviet Union dubbed Aleksi Zhakarov a genius. They removed him from his parents and sent him for special education. He earned a doctorate by the same time when most people graduate from college. However, he was never allowed out of protective custody to live a normal life. He always wondered what the rest of the world looked like. Thanks to a major conference in Munich, he meets other scientists, one of whom helps him escape from his KGB guards. He arrives at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, meets several other Soviet defectors, but remains convinced that the KGB is still after him. This story delves into his paranoia, what happens to him, and how it affects his MIT co-workers.

The Audition

Time: The early 1960s. Ted Mack’s Original Amateur Hour is on the road, seeking contestants for the show. A seventh-grader thinks she has what it takes to make the show. She’s been singing since she was two years old. She’s never had any formal training. She begs her father to take her to the auditions. What will she find when she gets there?

Teacups

Many years ago, young Mary Ann became enchanted with the teacup ride at Disneyland in California, thanks to a classmate who showed her photos of the ride. She’d always wanted to swirl and twirl in one of those gaily-decorated cups, but, alas, never had the chance. Take a journey with her in this short story as she remembers that magical obsession from many years ago and attempts to bring her elderly self into the three-dimensional world that had only been a square Kodak photo.