Whimby Shines: & Other Stories
Heartwarming tales of friendship, discovery, and finding your place in a world full of surprises.
Whimby Shines: & Stories is a collection of five stories for kids and the kid in all of us. In the title story a shorebird teams up with a star on her first migration. Three frogs help an adventurous pig discover he can swim in Kirby Buckle. On their path to becoming passionate birders, a boy and his parents experience mother nature's highs and lows in Bird Aquarium. Empty Library is about two gifted new readers who contribute to the magic of reading, and writing, with the help of a dedicated librarian. In Our Alone Walk two rodents embark on a spiritual search for their missing friend. Themes like the value of friendship and trying new things run through the collection. Striking pen and ink illustrations were done by Dessa Thompson.
About Cirque Author — Sean Ulman
Sean lives in Seward and is the author of the novel Seward Soundboard (Cirque Press 2020). He hosts a radio show featuring local writers reading their work live on the air, Seward Sound Words (91.7 KIBH FM).
Eric Gordon Johnson was born in Fairbanks and raised in Anchorage, Alaska. A retired geotechnical engineer, he is also a mountain runner, cross-country skier, clarinet player, and tenor with the Anchorage Concert Chorus and Anchorage Opera Chorus. He earned his MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Alaska Anchorage in 2020. His poetry, fiction, and memoir have appeared in Cirque, Alaska Humanities Forum, Anchorage Daily News, and Anchorage Remembers. He lives with his wife near Chugach State Park above Anchorage.
Woody Hume grew up on a Quaker farm “Back East,” where horses, birds, wildflowers, and walks to “look for signs of Spring” shaped his love of the natural world. A career in botany took him through the equatorial world and to the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, where he completed a thesis on tropical ethnobotany for Friends World College. In Costa Rica, he was drawn into ranch life, horses, criollo cattle, and rainforest country. He later left academia for the Western Range, working from camp cook helper to horse wrangler to cow herd boss. He now writes from an old ranch headquarters, looking out over pastures and mountains.
Doug Capra is an Alaska historian, writer, naturalist, and former educator who has lived in Alaska since 1971. He taught in the Aleutian Islands and Seward before spending eighteen years as a ranger at Kenai Fjords National Park. He has written extensively about Alaska history, including several books on Seward and the Kenai region, and has served on the board of the Alaska Historical Society. In 2023 they presented him with the Evangeline Atwood award for his work. His writing also includes plays, historical interpretation, photography, and writing on Rockwell Kent and Alaska Nellie. Doug lives in Seward, Alaska, with his wife, Cindy.
Tabbert received a BA in English and a PhD in English linguistics from the University of Iowa. He taught at Bowling Green State University in Ohio and at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks. His major research project was gathering data for and compiling the Dictionary of Alaskan English (1991). It is an “on-historical-principles” record of words that are unique to or highly characteristic of English used in Alaska. It was well reviewed in scholarly journals and in Alaskan publications, and it received a special commendation from the Alaska Library Association.
Tess Gallagher —- author of eleven books of poetry, lives and writes in her hometown of Port Angeles, Washington, and her cottage in Co. Slingo in the West of Ireland. Her most recent collection, Is, Is Not, was published in 2019 by Graywolf Press and documents political and meditational crosscurrents in her Irish and American Lives. In 2023, she was honored as the first and only American author presented with the Lifetime Achievement Award in Poetry from the Foundation of Rome.
Larri Irene Spengler grew up in the interior of Alaska, far from any coast. Delta Junction, a small town 100 miles southeast of Fairbanks, offered few organized things to do. One blessing of this childhood was that, without even realizing it, Larri absorbed the value of space to do “nothing,” which she has come to believe is essential to an engaged, balanced life.