Hold Your Fire: Stories Celebrating the Creative Spark

"Readers looking for short bursts of inspiration will be pleased."—Publishers Weekly 

Creativity comes from many places, but often the initial spark of inspiration can be traced to something or someone who challenged us to first put pen to paper or brush to canvas, to pick up a camera, to look at the world with new eyes. Maybe it was the lyrics of a favorite album. Maybe it was the encouragement from a beloved teacher. Maybe it was seeing a wonder of the natural world.

Maybe it was just a feeling deep down inside that demanded to be set free, a voice ready to be heard, a story begging to be told.

Hold Your Fire is a collection of nineteen short stories celebrating the power and influence of inspiration in all its forms—art, literature, music, astronomy, science, inventions, epiphanies.

Here you will find stories of people being inspired as well as stories of people inspiring someone else. Stories not only of artistic inspiration but of scientific discoveries. The “Eureka!” moments that change the whole world and the small moments when someone dares to fight one more day.

From a romance about a teenager’s attempts to win over his first crush with poetry to musicians and artists harnessing the inspiration of unexpected muses to a fairy tale princess seeking for happiness, every story in this anthology shines brightly. And since every fire casts a shadow, there are also a few horror stories that thrive in the dark.

Hold Your Fire: Stories Celebrating the Creative Spark is the sixth anthology edited by Lisa Mangum and published by WordFire Press in support of the Don Hodge Memorial Scholarship fund for the Superstars Writing Seminars.

“Hold Your Fire is an exceptional collection of stories, written by an all star cast of authors, that kept this reader turning pages in anticipation from one story to the next.”—Kaye Lynn Booth at Writing to be Read

Lisa Mangum has worked in publishing since 1997. She has been the Managing Editor for Shadow Mountain since 2014 and has worked with several New York Times best-selling authors. Lisa is also the author of four national best-selling YA novels (The Hourglass Door trilogy and After Hello), and several short stories and novellas. She has edited six anthologies about fantastical creatures. She graduated with honors from the University of Utah, and currently lives in Taylorsville, Utah, with her husband, Tracy.