We asked the 97 contributors to the Nancy Drew Anthology (Silver Birch Press, October 2016) to send photos featuring the book in their home environments. Author Stephanie R. Pearmain provided this portrait of herself and collection in the cactus garden at the University of Arizona, Tucson (October 2016). Stephanie contributed the poem “My Nancy Drew,” featured below, to the 212-page anthology.
My Nancy Drew
by Stephanie R. Pearmain
Burning beds
Colonial houses with ghosts, spiders’ webs, and secrets
Waiting to be discovered.
A quest through dark, echoing library halls
After an eclectic fieldtrip to a hole-in-the-wall bookshop
To purchase the Egyptian Book of the Dead.
Old clocks
That tick like whispers telling the secret of time
While it continues slipping away too silently to hear.
Summer at the pool,
The dewy smell of dawn at the beach
And the promise of endless playful, sunny days.
A record player
Spinning eerie songs beneath a window pried open,
The scent of lilac sneaking in.
The sound of vinyl
And Dad’s footsteps upstairs,
The crackling soundtrack of carefree, lazy days.
Mystery
And piercing screams,
Cliffside caves and hidden stairs.
A maze of tunnel-like paths
Meandering through a childhood when hours still seemed like
days.
Made up stories in a diary, kept in the safety of the locket
that is my heart.
A bridge haunted by inevitable truths,
The crumbling walls of childhood
Reveal stolen gems and lost telegrams,
A trunk of treasured memories resurfacing
Beneath a sun casting rays over the dark shadows,
Giving rise to a woman who stands waving goodbye,
hieroglyph etchings and a dusty old book
with a beautifully faded yellow spine.
PHOTO: It’s the cactus garden at the university of Arizona.Tucson, October 2016
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Stephanie R. Pearmain received an MFA in Creative Writing for Children and Young Adults from Hollins University and a BA in Religious Studies and History from the University of Arizona. She teaches courses in Children’s & Young Adult Literature and publishing at the University of Arizona and does freelance editing as well. She has been a reader for the Andrea Brown Literary Agency, a reviewer for Children’s Literature Database (picture books through novels), and is currently a fiction reader for the online literary magazine YARN. Her children’s book, Animal BFFs, was published by Scholastic in 2012, and a personal essay was published in an anthology by Spruce Mountain Press the same year. She is founder of the new online children’s lit publication Tucson Tales.. Visit her at stephaniepearmanin.com.
Find the Nancy Drew Anthology at Amazon.com.
Silver Birch Press 