And what a Sale! Take 30% off everything Stone Gathering for 30 days. Sale includes New Subscriptions, Extended Subscriptions, Gift Subscriptions, Complete Sets, and Single Issues. Think about who might benefit from these pocket-sized treasure chests filled with beautifully wrought, powerful, inspiring short literature. What a boon and a blessing in these pandemic times! Stone  Gathering makes a perfect gift, add-on gift, or stocking stuffer.

Like so many book-oriented small businesses, Stone Gathering needs a big boost to close out 2020, which has been disastrous in way too many ways. (We will persevere—no worries; but, oof, what a year!) And it’s never been more important to shop small. So, for 30 days, get 30% off!** Just look at these prices!

• Subscriptions and Gift Subscriptions: 1 year—$29.40; 2 years–$56.00
• Complete Sets (Volume I, Issues 1-5) –$35.00*
• Single issues (current and back) — $7.70* | ***

Yes, every single Stone Gathering thing is 30% off for 30 days. But this sale is not available in the online store. Please order by email (in the contact bar above). You will receive an invoice by return email, which can then be paid online or by putting a check in the mail.

• *Sales tax and shipping costs apply to sets and single issues.
• **Sale prices are good through 12/15/2020
• ***We do not typically sell single issues; we try to rely on independent booksellers and other book-friendly sellers for those retail sales. Due to pandemic conditions, however, bookseller and other vendor orders have been excruciatingly thin. So, we are making this temporary exception. We have made all current and back single issues available for sale through 12/15/20.

A big thank you to Molly Beth Griffin who provided the cover photo for the upcoming Winter 2020/21 issue. It’s absolutely gorgeous!

We’ve trimmed things down here while we reconsider how best to serve you, our readers and supporters, with this website.

But the welcome mat is still out and the Stone Gathering store is still open. Click on the “store” header on our menu tab, or click here  to purchase:

• • • • • • • • subscriptions
              • gift subscriptions
              • Complete sets of Volume 1
              • a sample copy

Subscriptions may also be purchased by mail. Please send a check ($42/1year or $80/2 years) to: Danielle Dufy Literary, PO Box 334, Brainerd, MN 56401. Make the check to DDL.

SINGLE ISSUES: To purchase single issues, please check with your local indie bookseller or contact Scout & Morgan Books, where Judith has committed to stocking all current and back issues during this pandemic and beyond. Give her a call at 763-689-2474. We’ll have our updated list of sellers in the sidebar soon, along with links to their websites.

The Fall 2020 Stone Gathering features work by Ross Gay, Siri Myhrom, Lucille Clifton, Rebecca Baggett, Christopher DeWan, Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, Jericho Brown, Michael Kleber-Diggs, Marvin Bell, Amy Baskin, January Gill O’Neil, Danusha Laméris, Nicole Borg, Joseph Gross, Anna George Meek, Debra Gwartney, Elizabeth Alexander, Brian Doyle, Amy Wray Irish, Octavio Solis, Maya Stein, and Danez Smith. Each issue of Stone Gathering is a pocket-sized treasure chest, filled with beautifully wrought, inspiring, powerful short literature, delivered right to your home. What a boon and a blessing in these pandemic times!

Questions? You can always reach us through the “contact” bar on the menu. You can also follow our Stone Gathering page on Face Book and message us there.

Thank you for your business, your support, and your patience! Stay tuned!

Deborah Jacobs, Publisher and Editor

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Danielle Dufy Literary is a new and very independent literary company committed to getting more short literature that matters into the hands and hearts of a wider readership. To that end, we publish Stone Gathering: A Reader–a collection of poems, small fictions, and short essays–4 times each year: there are four quarterly issues and, when feasible, a complimentary annual (themed) special issue.

Stone Gathering is published under the imprint French Press Editions: “portable, affordable, collectible literature.” French Press Editions are 5 x 7, 72-page, perfect bound paperbacks, modestly priced at $10.95 for single issues, and only $42 and $80, respectively, for 1-year and 2-year subscriptions.

More than a handful of the pieces that comprise the first three Stone Gathering Readers have to do with kindness. That’s not surprising, I suppose, since Stone Gathering was named after my grandchildren’s habit of finding, painting, and giving away kindness rocks. And since kindness is so central to our mission at Danielle Dufy Literary, I wanted to find a way to celebrate World Kindness Day with you all. And since I don’t have additional permission from contributors to reprint any of their pieces online, I’ll post something I wrote: it’s my Afterword to the Winter issue. I hope you enjoy it!

Kindness in Winter  by Deborah Jacobs

Are we more kind in winter? I think we are. In times of scarcity and hardship? Yes, we are. Even when darkness outlasts light? Yes. In spring we may be more exuberant, for sure; in summer more glorious; in fall more colorful. But in winter? We are more kind.

Here in Minnesota, winter can begin in November and last until April: and, while I don’t care for the cold, snow, or ice, I do love the spirit of it all. Because for me (at least until it becomes a cabin-feverish-hanging-on-by-my-fingernails-waiting-for-spring marathon), winter is the season of giving, of generosity, of kindness.

It’s no coincidence that winter is bracketed by and peppered with holidays of giving–whether it’s the giving of food, gifts, light, hope, or love. From Thanksgiving to Christmas, from Hanukkah to Kwanzaa, from New Year’s Eve to Chinese New Year, from Valentine’s Day to Easter which (whether you’re Christian or not) signifies–with its chicks and bunnies, eggs and gift baskets, flowers and all that color(!)–the great nourishing gift of Spring itself: the promise of life, the end of scarcity.

But first, winter–our season to give, even in scarcity, perhaps because of scarcity. Do we have more fellow feeling, are we more protective of each other, more sheltering and nourishing of each other when it seems more necessary? when perhaps we feel mutually vulnerable? We are. And despite our furnaces humming along, our super-thick insulation, our heated autos (and auto seats!); despite our Ugg boots, our moisture-wicking long undies, our extra scarves and mittens; despite our heated garages, our plowed and salted and sanded roads; despite our local (or big box, or online) stores with plentiful groceries at the ready–we humans can’t quite shake our primal sense of winter as a threat, a threat we share with our fellow humans.

It’s part of our human DNA, after all; it’s in our genes to worry about winter. But so, it seems, is the generosity of spirit that kicks in, that seems automatically to accompany winter’s more spare aspects; there’s a settling in of kindness that seems as natural as the settling in of a new season.

There’s a whole school of thought that argues our age of excess, of rampant consumerism is rendering us (especially us Americans) less capable of generosity, less inclined toward kindness. It says because we have too much, and yet never enough, we’ve grown too cautious, too selfish to be generous. Those arguments sure sound like they could be true. But I don’t entirely buy them. My evidence? The human in winter.

We plow out a neighbor or bring in her wood; we sew quilts for the homeless, knit hats for newborns, stock the local food pantry, give books for shut-ins to enjoy; we lend someone our elbow on the ice, invite people in for hot chocolate or hot toddies, read to each other before the fire, make and bake, and make and bake some more. These are great kindnesses, large and small–necessary kindnesses, especially now. And they’re coming soon to a winter near you.

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