Book Review: Turning Points

Turning Points. Renee James (for Off-Campus Writers' Workshop), Windy City Publishers, June 13 2021, Paperback and E-Book, 344 pages.

Review by Marssie Mencotti.

This anthology was created to celebrate Off Campus Writers' Workshop's 75th anniversary. OCWW members, working together for more than a year, created Turning Points, a collection of fiction and creative non-fiction. The anthology features a forward by Fred Shafer and a preface by Scott Turow, along with 43 pieces that cover a wide spectrum of genres. They were composed by authors who range from first-time short story writers to extensively published writers of short and long fiction as well as non-fiction. This is an impressive collection of carefully curated work. Each piece is put forward with a depth of care and thoughtfulness that continues to impress long after the first reading.

This anthology is like opening several boxes of Forrest Gump’s chocolates. Each selection is its own experience of delights and fears, childlike perspectives, friendship, ostracism, diverse life choices, days well or not well-lived, science fiction, future fiction, personal memoir, and more. There are stories here that fuel hours of conversation or snap tightly into non-conversation when we recognize ourselves too closely in the characters. I am resisting the temptation to single out certain pieces that impressed me, but I know these confused and troubled people who have wanted babies and ignored babies, who survived cancer and did not survive cancer, or who have had strange, truncated love for their parents and persevered through shocking trauma since childhood. I have shared some part of my life with most of them, and here they are captured in concise, richly descriptive, exquisitely edited prose.

This is an excellent anthology. It is well written and edited, and it is thoughtfully assembled here for our exceptional reading and thinking experience. I will hereby contradict myself and mention one or two entries from each of the six sections of the anthology. I found them all quite wonderful, but a few will stay with me for a long time.

This is the book you buy to share with a good friend, a book club, a family member who is thoughtful and loves to look at the world alongside excellent writers, or editors and friends who share their vision to entertain and engage you as a reader. These selections will be well remembered and discussed in-depth for a long time. So if you’re looking for evidence of your Turning Points, you may well find them here.