Pip: Emma Palova’s site has been busy — memoirs, grief guides, and a ten-year literary milestone out of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula all landing in the same week.
Mara: We’re covering a regional publishing celebration, a memoir about breaking cycles of family trauma, and a guide to supporting people through grief. Real range.
Pip: Let’s start with the U.P. literary community and what a decade of regional storytelling looks like.
U.P. Reader Turns Ten
Mara: The U.P. Reader, published by Modern History Press and sponsored by the Upper Peninsula Publishers and Authors Association, just hit its tenth annual edition — and the post describes it as “a hefty magazine” containing “seventy-plus short works” that take “readers on a road trip from the Keweenaw to the Soo and from Menominee to Ironwood.”
Pip: So the whole geography of the Upper Peninsula, rendered in short fiction and nonfiction. That’s not a magazine, that’s a portrait.
Mara: A decade of that portrait, which is worth pausing on. The UPPAA has sustained a regional literary community long enough to hit a genuine anniversary milestone.
Pip: The post also mentions a book giveaway — and LAF in Muskegon signals that this literary energy isn’t contained to the U.P. alone.
Mara: Healing and memoir are next, and they bring a very different kind of road trip.
Breaking the Cycle: A Memoir of Survival
Pip: Jennifer Montiel’s book asks a hard question — what happens to the people raised inside narcissistic family systems, and is there actually a way out?
Mara: The post on Raised by Silence lays it out directly: the book “tells the story of breaking free from emotional abuse, manipulation, and generational trauma” and “explores the lasting effects of narcissistic parenting while offering hope to those searching for healing.”
Pip: That phrase — hope to those searching — is doing real work. This isn’t a clinical diagnosis book; it’s written from inside the experience.
Mara: Right, and the post emphasizes practical application too. It describes the book as encouraging readers to “recognize unhealthy patterns, establish healthy boundaries, and build a future defined by resilience instead of fear.” It’s an award-winning title, and a signed copy is up for giveaway.
Pip: Resilience instead of fear is a clean through-line. Andrew Allen Smith is working adjacent territory — but from the outside looking in.
What to Say, and What to Leave Unsaid
Mara: Andrew Allen Smith’s book What Not to Say to People Who are Grieving starts from a place of radical generosity — the post is explicit that it “was not intended to point fingers at anyone.”
Pip: That framing matters. A book about what not to say could easily read as a list of indictments. Smith heads that off directly.
Mara: He does. The post reads: “We know that everyone, no matter what they said or did, had positive intentions as they helped us in the grieving process. They genuinely wanted to help in someway.” The book is addressed to helpers, not accusers.
Pip: What this means in practice is that the book functions as a field guide — here is what actually helped, here is what didn’t, and both pieces of information come wrapped in gratitude.
Mara: The stated hope is precise: that the book helps “at least one person have a better idea of what helped and comforted us while we were grieving.” Smith covered this in one podcast episodes on the site, both available for listeners.
Mara: A regional literary anniversary, a memoir about inherited pain, a grief guide written in gratitude — these posts are all, in different ways, about community holding people up.
Pip: More of that on the next one, presumably. Emma Palova’s feed doesn’t seem to slow down.
feeling fantastic.
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