Save Your Own Life

These are stories rooted in Kansas soil, in country roads and small towns, in characters you swear you have met before, men and women who tug at your heart and get under your skin. The landscape where they live is both familiar and exotic, deeply felt and vividly described, from a writer clearly at home in the natural world. Save Your Own Life is a strong and satisfying collection, with language that can punch you in the solar plexus-just the right phrase, just what you have always known. -Sharman Apt Russell, author of Standing in the Light: My Life as a Pantheist and Hunger: An Unnatural History In Save Your Own Life Amy Sage Webb establishes herself as a major Midwestern voice who is not afraid to both love and critique the people of her region. Webb cares about her characters, and she instills them with personality and heart-and with needs we can both feel and understand. She knows the world of work, and what she turns her narrative lens upon teaches us something about who we are and how we can live: fully, completely, intentionally. Her characters' struggles-for love, for appreciation, for success-mirror our own. Webb is a writer who knows her stuff. From the details within her stories to the architecture of story itself, her hand is steady, her gaze is sure. -Kevin Rabas, author of Bird's Horn, Lisa's Flying Electric Piano, Spider Face Reading Amy Sage Webb is a delight. Save Your Own Life is full of mismatched people attracting and repelling each other. Brothers are in love with the same woman at different times. An LA artist and KC food writer meet in his mis-built studio. The husband of a mentally ill woman remains "fixed and ever-blooming," like dreams doomed in a desert. In "The Memory of Water" a woman older than any in her veterinary class has the task of running donor horses until they die, but dealing with death brings her warmth and romance. "The Wedding Gift" is a gift in itself. The robust stories in Save Your Own Life are full of surprises, are clear, open and singing all through. -Thomas Fox Averill, author of rode and Secrets of the Tsil Café