Amanda Cockrell

Selected Works

Contemporary Novels

In the face of the Vietnam War and a culture violently remaking itself, Ellen and Jerry navigate anti-war riots, the draft, a back-to-the-land commune, and women's rising fed-up-ness, to stumble finally not exactly to solid ground but to a place to breathe.

What We Keep Is Not Always What Will Stay

Saints and soldiers and the Untied Church of Dog

Pomegranate Seed

The Hollywood blacklist and a delayed funeral

Roman Novels

The Borderlands series

A half-British officer on the northern edges of the Empire

The Centurions quartet

Brothers and rivals in the Legions of first century Rome

The Wall at the Edge of the World

A legionary surgeon and the Antonine Wall

A sequel to Legions of the Mist

The Legions of the Mist

The last campaign of the Ninth Legion Hispana

The Horse Catchers trilogy

The Horse Catchers Trilogy

Mythological novels of the coming of the horse to the American Southwest

The Deer Dancers trilogy

The Deer Dancers Trilogy

Mythological novels of the beginning of art

Children's books

Shadow Castle

By my mother, Marian Cockrell, the story of an enchanted castle on the edge of Fairyland

Quick Links

Twitter

E-mail me at amandacockrell@gmail.com

Events

International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts

Orlando, FL March 15-18

"Here @ Home" WDBJ7

3:00 p.m. March 27!

Coyote Weather book launch

6:00 p.m. Friday April 21

at Book No Further

Downtown Roanoke

Author and Artist Evening

May 19 at Art on First

Downtown Roanoke

Tinker Mountain Summer Workshops
June 11-16, 2023

This week-long residential workshop at Hollins University in Virginia is the perfect length and setting for an intensive kick-start to your writing. There will be a lot of seminars to choose from. Here's mine:

Beyond Corsets and Dragons: World Building in Historical Fiction and Fantasy

This "write now" workshop will focus on how to be at home in another world — that of your historical or fantasy novel, because the first thing for both is world building. It's tricky to create a fully realized world, but your book is going to depend on going beyond dragons and corsets. We'll use prompts suggested by the nature of each participant's work to write short scenes that put the reader in the complex setting of your novel without need of the dreaded expository lump. You'll either research or design from scratch and then practice painting that world on each page for the reader. You can bring a work in progress or start something entirely new and all levels of experience are welcome. You'll write daily and respond to each other's work. If you are inclined to read ahead, here are three books to dip into that exemplify successful world building: Hild by Nicola Griffith, The Golem and the Jinni by Helene Wecker, and The Summer Before the War by Helen Simonson. These are hefty books and you don't need to finish them, just sample one or some, and think about how their authors are doing it.

Here's where to sign up

Reading from Coyote Weather

Hollins University MFA program in Children's Literature and Illustration

7:30 p.m.

June 28, 2023

Visual Arts Center Room 119

Shadow of the Eagle

book launch reading and talk

(past event)

Link to recorded reading and book talk

News

Coyote Weather

I have a new historical novel, Coyote Weather. This one is one set during the Vietnam War in the US and published by Northampton House Press.

Here's the thumbnail:

Coyote weather is the feral, hungry season, when everything is drought-stricken and ready to catch fire.

In the face of the Vietnam War and a culture violently remaking itself, Jerry has stubbornly made no plans for the future because he doesn't think that, in the shadow of Vietnam, the Cold War and atomic bomb drills, there is going to be one. Ellen is determined to have a plan, because nothing else seems capable of keeping the world from tilting. And the Ghost, who isn't exactly dead, just wants to go home to a place that won't let him in, the small California town where they all grew up.

It's 1967 and the world is going to hell in a hand basket.

The country is forcibly sending its young men to fight in a deeply unpopular war.

African Americans have had enough of Jim Crow.

Women have had enough of a lot of things.

And over it all looms the politics of the Cold War and the real possibility of a nuclear war.

Together and separately, Ellen and Jerry navigate the shifting territory of war and anti-war riots, mistaken marriages, a back-to-the-land commune, the draft, and women's consciousness-raising, to name of few of the obstacles in their path. For Jerry, the conviction that if he goes to Vietnam he'll come back crazy pushes him into one final desperate act. Ellen, convinced that Jerry has left them no future together, retreats into a critical mistake in an attempt to anchor her life. In the end, while Ellen and Jerry find that ultimately not much can be planned, they discover that what is given can't be turned away from.