Showing results by author "Joseph Santiago" in All Categories

Are you passionate about building thriving and inclusive communities? Do you want to make a positive impact on the lives of people around you? Look no further than "Community Development Frameworks: Building Thriving and Inclusive Communities." This comprehensive guide is specifically crafted for individuals actively involved in community development and planning, regardless of their level of experience. Whether you are a beginner or an expert in leading groups, this book offers practical insights and frameworks that can be readily applied to your own community development projects. The ...

Some games are played for money. This one is played for reality. Shanghai, 1926. Meilin wants music. Jue wants the rush of the next perfect hand. What they get is taken. When a high-stakes Mahjong game draws the attention of Xenon—an ancient predator shaped by Greek philosophy and immortal hunger—the twins become collateral in a silent war that stretches from the International Settlement to Prohibition-era New York. Across the ocean waits Livia: Roman, ruthless, and building a modern empire out of jazz clubs, blood routes, and broken loyalties. But vampires are only the surface. Above ...

At Black Pond, people come looking for relief, revelation, healing, and a way back to themselves. What they find is a chapel, a ceremony space, a community built around transformation—and a threshold where genuine encounter and dangerous hunger can wear almost the same face. As James Carpenter draws the wounded, the faithful, the skeptical, and the spiritually hungry into his orbit, the question is no longer whether something real is happening there. It is. The question is what kind of world is being built around it, who pays the cost, and what survives once the experience ends and ...

In Over Here Growing a Soul: The Works of Mr. Joe, Joseph Santiago gathers a body of writing that is intimate, searching, and vividly alive to the textures of ordinary life. These pieces move through memory, place, longing, mortality, imagination, desire, and becoming, always returning to the deeper question of how a person makes meaning that can endure beyond the moment. Thoughtful, strange, playful, and emotionally resonant, this collection invites readers into a world where even the smallest experience can open into philosophy, tenderness, wonder, and hard-won insight. Across essays, ...

POCKET UNIVERSE ADVENTURES: THE GALLEY In 1802, Tommy Bracken cooks below deck on the Persephone, where heat, salt, and routine are the only things keeping men human. Then the crew stops asking for seconds. A wreck drifts alongside. And Tommy realizes something out there isn’t just hungry. It’s watching. He survives the voyage, but the world doesn’t go back to normal. On shore, Tommy and Wallace build a place with a simple promise: a room where people eat like they matter. The Galley becomes a refuge, then a rumor, then a magnet—drawing in the bruised and brilliant, the cautious and...

The World Voice Project Book Series invites you to become part of one of the largest emerging community learning networks (CLNs) seeking to encourage a participatory culture through which everyone can share their works, thoughts, and art in order to express who they are on a global scale. Contributors share their stories while inviting the listener to step into their shoes and be part of their life by association.

YOU DIDN’T BUY THIS BOOK. YOU PICKED UP A NODE. In New Orleans, a “normal” lunch turns into an intake line—forms, name tags, and rules that start acting like they’ve always been true. When the room tries to file people into permanent categories, Mara does the only thing that works: she makes reality messy again. Today. Right now. This weather. This shift. No forever-words. But the storm doesn’t stop at the door. A service entrance peels open into the City of Echoing Pages—a metropolis built from book spines, ink-lamps, and sentences that rearrange themselves when you blink. ...

You didn’t buy this book. You picked up a Node. Inside are pocket universes, quick tales that open like doors. Each one drops you into a different room with different lighting, different stakes, different rules. A wet New Orleans street where paperwork has teeth. A corridor where “help” wears a smile and still asks for your surrender. A conversation that turns into a test without anyone admitting it is a test. Worlds that feel separate until you realize they are all running the same engine. These stories are meant to be stepped into. You will recognize the moments because you have ...

When numbers and neighborhood stories meet, something powerful wakes up. Parish Stories: Data-to-Story Labs is a field guide for cultural creatives who want to work with data without losing their voice, their humor, or their community in the process. This book was built in and for places like New Orleans—and for every parish, county, borough, and neighborhood that knows it is more than a statistic. It treats “cultural creative” broadly: not just artists and writers, but anyone who carries culture into their work and connects it back to the people they serve—teaching artists and ...

You picked up a Node—an ordinary-looking object with an unfair advantage: it turns everyday life into a readable map. A Pocket Universe is a room you can enter without leaving your life. The world outside stays the same—work, family, love, money, hunger, pride—but the noise stops pretending it’s neutral. You start noticing what was always there: who gets rewarded, who gets punished, who benefits when you stay confused, and what it costs to accept the role you’re being offered. That pattern is the Great Game: the invisible trade of attention, status, fear, desire, and control. It ...

GG / Earth: T-2N7F4D : AP-8C11B9 : DS-RVN-4K2M You’re not holding a book. You’re holding a Node—a pocket-sized access point into the Great Game, where modern life stops pretending it’s random. Pocket Universe: Great Game NOLA Dispatches is a grounded speculative fiction collection set in New Orleans—where storms, stories, and power collide, and where the future shows up early wearing a polite smile. These dispatches move fast: near-future, mythic, sometimes funny, sometimes sharp, always human. Inside, you’ll cross worlds built from the same raw materials as your own: systems, ...

What do you do with the strange, sharp, beautiful burden of being alive? In I Didn’t Want To Create a New Sadness, Joseph Santiago offers a compelling collection of short stories that move through sorrow, memory, longing, identity, humor, and the strange emotional weather of modern life. These stories do not simply entertain—they linger, question, unsettle, and illuminate. Across intimate reflections, uncanny encounters, and deeply human moments, Santiago explores what it means to carry grief, wrestle with change, laugh in the middle of pain, and keep searching for meaning in a world ...

WELCOME TO THE GREAT GAME. You didn’t just pick up a book. You triggered a side quest. Inside these pages are pocket universes stitched together with chaos, caffeine, and the kind of questions you usually ask at 3 a.m. when your Wi-Fi’s out and you’re staring at the ceiling. You’ll meet cursed wanderers who turn paperwork into holy rituals, gods who treat the multiverse like their personal TikTok, and algorithms trying to understand why humans cry over dog videos. This isn’t just a story collection—it’s a playground for anyone who’s ever wanted to poke the universe and see ...

You didn’t pick up a book. You picked up a Node—a pocket doorway into a set of worlds where stories don’t describe reality. They shape it. In Sector Folio-7, a catastrophic cascade has begun. Worlds are bleeding into each other, rules are breaking, and a city built from living pages is starting to collapse from the inside. Streets repeat out of order. People forget who they are mid-sentence. And “plot holes”—literal voids—open in the ground and swallow entire blocks. Mara Keene is a Scriptor tasked with keeping this place intact. She enters the City of Echoing Pages to recover...

Toad’s Terrible, No-Good, Very Excellent Adventure (How Not to Quest Properly) What happens when an imp with the self-preservation instincts of a sock in a tornado, a wizard who can’t stop turning things into chickens, a ghost rabbit with a talent for bad decisions, and a knight-turned-frog who just wants some peace get tangled in a fate-woven disaster? Well… this. Toad, an imp with a talent for absolutely the wrong kind of mischief, has been "banished" (read: promoted) to the Mortal Realm. Osric, a wizard desperately trying to master magic without creating more poultry, has somehow ...

What if fate came with a settings menu… and you’ve never checked what’s turned on by default? Subscribe to Fate drops you into the Great Game—a universe where gods argue over neural nets, lunar engineers discover their survival is a televised challenge, economies run on reputation, and a tiny gray “smudge” can derail a perfectly calibrated season of conflict. Inside this pocket-sized book you’ll find: An All-Father who wakes up to discover mortals have patched the code of creation. Moon colonists fighting for water, oxygen, and the right to be more than someone else’s ...

Open Anywhere: Be the Player — Pocket Worlds for Busy Days is a book for people with too much life and not enough day. Part story, part sly nudge, it treats everyday reality like the Great Game—not a competition, but a living system that reacts when you do. Open to any page and you’ll drop into a tiny “pocket world”: a short scene, a sharp idea, and a way to press on your world so it presses back in a better shape. This isn’t a manual or a pep talk. It’s the opposite of homework. You’ll find the hidden axis in a stubborn conversation by moving a chair six inches. You’ll ...

Unlock the transformative potential of nonviolent activism and become a catalyst for positive social change with this comprehensive training manual. Rooted in the principles and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., this guide empowers individuals to embrace the powerful philosophy of Kingian Nonviolence and create a more just and compassionate world. Prepare for action by understanding the importance of education, research, and strategic planning in driving effective nonviolent campaigns. Gain insights into successful coalition building and advocacy efforts while embracing the values of ...

Are you ready to embark on a transformative journey toward mastering the art of conflict resolution and effective communication? "Navigating Life's Conflicts: Strategies for Effective De-Escalation and Communication" invites you to step into the heart of true-to-life scenarios where tensions rise, emotions flare, and understanding seems out of reach. In this immersive and scenario-driven approach, you'll not only learn invaluable conflict resolution skills, but you'll also apply them in these true-to-life situations, challenging yourself to navigate the complexities of human interaction. ...

The Pocket Universe Playbook Gate of Aesir · Pocket Universe Saga Stories you can walk into. This book is a set of doors—into places, people, and ideas that might not exist yet. Step through, look around, take notes, and—if you like—choose what happens next. Each story stands on its own and hands you something you can carry back to your day: a turn of phrase that opens a room, a small shift that changes the mood, a new way to see the block you live on. Inside you’ll roam pop-up neighborhoods, corner shops that bend time, meetings that flip from drift to decision, and nights where ...