A Return to Emptiness

A Colorado Book Award finalist, A Return to Emptiness is a collection of short stories about life, loss, and love. In Ransick’s words, ＂Loss is common to us all, yet multifarious in individual experience. I wrote these stories not primarily to describe loss but to circumscribe it--which is to say that I drew a circle of narratives round the experience to both locate and limit it. I was vaguely aware of this at the time of the writing. It’s quite clear now. ＂Nobody gets out of this life without experiencing loss, as well as what is offered in recompense to those with the humility and quietude to accept emptiness. Stories are an ancient way of communicating experience and a collection of short fiction is a unique and complex symbol set that can, in the best cases, fill a void, turn loss to gain. If I had my way, this book would do that for the reader.＂

Chris Ransick, Denver Poet Laureate from 2006-2010, is an award winning author of five books of poetry and fiction, most recently Language for the Living and the Dead (2013). He has worked as a journalist, editor, professor, and speaker, and has served on his city’s public library board, his state’s humanities board of directors, and on the PEN Freedom to Write Committee. His first book, Never Summer, won a 2003 Colorado Book Award for Poetry and all his titles are available in new editions from Conundrum Press. Since 2005, Chris has been a faculty member and Book Project Mentor at Lighthouse Writers Workshop, Denver’s reknowned independent creative writing school, which awarded him the 2013 Beacon Award for Teaching Excellence. Chris Ransick passed away in 2019.