Paying attention to the truth, in writing
When I was five years old I stood alone one day at a round mahogany table in our living room. I placed a sheet of paper on the table and with a pencil I printed firmly in block letters: A LITTLE GIRL. I heard my mother coming and took up the paper to leave, because I knew that I needed to be alone to write a true story. A LITTLE GIRL remained imprinted in the table’s leatherette top. Seventy years later the table sits in my nephew’s home, and my first story’s title remains there: the promise of telling what matters most.
Books
“I’m often on fire with love for my patients. Sometimes I’m frozen with fear—for them, with them, of them.”
Glowing in the Dark, Stories of Wounded Healers by Judith Day is a book of fiction that portrays the inner worlds of several physicians—psychiatrists and an ICU doctor—as they discover healing through encounters with other people. In authentic voices and a range of moods, these three compelling stories follow each healer’s personal, unconventional path on an unprescribed journey.
The stories are evocative, disturbing, sometimes erotic, sometimes funny, always heartful. Like wounding, like healing, the stories are not what you expect.
PURCHASE for discount ($11.00) at https://shop.ingramspark.com/b/084?UShTBlM6aEvGKUFSghAr0tEavlLXGsf7SVx1a0T5JhW
“Beautiful and wise, Glowing in the Dark offers a triptych of compelling and complex psychological dramas. Judith Day writes with sorely-needed empathy, in prose graceful and precise. Her characters reveal lives that are heartbreaking, brutal, erotic, and ultimately affirming.”—John Henry Fleming, author of Songs for the Deaf and Professor of Creative Writing at the University of South Florida
“Miss Florida could have another orgasm, or she could get up and take the rollers out of her hair and start the day.”
Going Where They Belong is a collection of nine stories told by and about teenagers, mid-lifers, and elders. They are about settled lives and drastically disordered ones, working people, dying people. They are about people you have never met and others you see every day; sometimes, they are people you know very well, people you work and live with. You may find they are about you.
Like all of us, the characters are finding their way forward in the face of loss. They are furious and funny, hurtful and helpful. Stumbling and blind, enlightening slowly, they are all going where they belong.
PURCHASE for discount ($13.00) at https://shop.ingramspark.com/b/084?37PU8zpuD8rEbcmhY6c1A5qS3aoxfSxYwGK5npmRhoI
“Judith Day’s Going Where They Belong is a book of gentle kindnesses….Told with a simplicity of language that expresses complexity of character, these stories place you squarely inside the quiet calamities of ordinary beings….these stories inhabit you with their specific and wonderful detail, their wit, their compassion.”—Linda Saldaña, review in Eclectica
Available for purchase at links above or at local bookstores
or from Amazon.com (both books in print or Kindle; Going also in audiobook)
or at Bookshop.org (print)—here you can order online and specify payment will go to the independent bookstore of your choice; the book will be mailed to you
E-BOOK available on Kindle, Nook, Kobo, Apple Books, Hoopla and most other platforms
AUDIOBOOK for Going Where They Belong available on Audible, Nook, Google Play, Kobo, and most other platforms
VIDEO on YouTube.com of “Royal Flush by Judith Day,” story from Going Where They Belong: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kKBU8WH3xtk&list=TLPQMjUwNzIwMjQWoGEdtJhYyA&index=1
***** 10-MINUTE VIDEO excerpt from Glowing in the Dark book release, 9/23/23: https://youtu.be/qyXYKsTSlyM
Other Publications and Awards:
“The Embrace” was published in Bottomfish (predecessor of Red Wheelbarrow), Volume 19, Spring 1998, DeAnza College.
“Life Sentence” was published in Behind the Yellow Wallpaper, New Tales of Madness, edited by Rose Yndigoyen and published by New Lit Salon Press, 2014.
“The Sundown Side of the Rock” was published in Canyon Voices, Issue 10, Fall 2014, Arizona State University.
“Royal Flush” was published in the spring 2015 issue of Persimmon Tree, www.persimmontree.org.
“Stupid Buddha” was published in the April/May 2015 issue of The Otter, online journal no longer exists.
“If You Lived Here” was published in Buffalo Almanack, Issue 13, September 2016, and was the winner of that issue’s Inkslinger Award.
“Cabbie” was a finalist in the 2017 Orison Anthology Award in Fiction.
“Who Will Watch You Die?” was published in Eclectica, Jan/Feb 2023, eclectica.org: https://www.eclectica.org/v27n1/jday.html.
“Crystal Monkey” was published in Pilgrimage, Issue 44, 2023, Colorado State University, Pueblo, http://www.pilgrimagepress.org.
books@judithday.com
P.O. Box 936, Monte Rio, California 95462
Judith Day 