A Piece of Sky, A Grain of Rice: A Memoir in Four Meditations

In this layered collage of memory within memory, Hale recreates for readers her kaleidoscopic experience of a decades-long journey to acceptance and insight. Writer, prodigal daughter, single parent, Buddhist disciple, and, late in midlife, a newlywed, she is transformed through an unconventional relationship with a female spiritual teacher and an odd ritual of repeated tattooing with her two young adult children. "Christine Hale's evocation of the bewildering complexities of life as a mother, daughter, wife (and ex-wife), and student of Buddhism is both a poem and a letter to those she has worked so long and hard to understand. On a journey that takes her through emotional and actual hurricanes, love and cruelty, urgent losses, and painful gains, she climbs to sometimes unnervingly high altitudes as she experiences "the joy and the sorrow of samsara." In beautiful, clear language, Hale explores the wounds life gives us, the wounds we give ourselves, and the long process of healing." -Sarah Stone, author of The True Sources of the Nile Christine Hale is the author of a novel, Basil's Dream (Livingston Press 2009); National Book Award finalist Joan Silber says, "Basil's Dream...seems to prove fiction can go where other forms can't." Ms. Hale's creative nonfiction has appeared in Arts & Letters, Spry, Still, Hippocampus, and Prime Number, among other journals. A fellow of MacDowell, Ucross, Hedgebrook, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, she earned her MFA from Warren Wilson College. She teaches in the Antioch University-Los Angeles Low-Residency MFA Program as well as the Great Smokies Writing Program in Asheville, North Carolina, where she and her husband live.