Melissa Walker – författare

A timeless and romantic ghost story that will haunt readers long after the last page is turned. When Callie's life is cut short by a tragic accident in her hometown of Charleston, South Carolina, her spirit travels to another dimension called the Prism. Here she meets a striking and mysterious ghost named Thatcher, who guides her as she learns how to bring peace to those she left behind. But Callie soon uncovers a dark secret about the spirit world: some of the souls in it are angry, and they desperately want revenge. These souls are willing to do whatever it takes to stay on Earth, threatening the existence of everyone she ever cared about. Perfect for fans of Gayle Forman's If I Stay and Lauren Oliver's Before I Fall, this thoughtful and suspenseful novel will have readers eager to read the sequel, Dust to Dust.

Perfect for fans of If I Stay or Imaginary Girls, Dust to Dust is the mysterious, thoughtful, and poignant sequel to Melissa Walker's haunting and heartbreaking novel Ashes to Ashes. When Callie McPhee miraculously recovers from a tragic accident that should have taken her life, she thought her connection to the ghost world would be severed forever. And that she would never see Thatcher-the ghost she fell in love with in the hereafter-again. But when she receives unexpected signs from Thatcher, she's led down a dark road toward the angry souls who once tried to steal her soul's energy for another chance at life. Now Callie must prevent the real world and the spirit world from colliding, and that could mean saying good-bye to people she'd never imagined she'd lose.

Winner of the 2023 AASECT Book Award for General Audience!Weaving together somatic psychotherapy, dance/movement therapy, and sex therapy approaches, this uniquely interdisciplinary and practical book offers guidance on how to strengthen your connection with pleasure, receptivity, and ecstasy in an embodied way.Melissa Walker contextualizes the erotic body as being embedded in a sex-negative culture. Taking an experiential somatic approach, this book helps readers map the erotic self to establish a whole-body sexuality, becoming an important sexuality ally in a larger social movement toward erotic inclusiveness. This groundbreaking text illuminates how to shed the harmful messages that an individual has internalized about their sexuality, to learn the language of their somatic self, and begin to build a whole-body appreciation for their creative potential.Filled with questions, guided experientials, and map-building practices that help readers learn more about themselves, this book is essential reading for sex therapists to navigate the vast map of sexuality to create true health and sexual evolution.

Winner of the 2023 AASECT Book Award for General Audience!Weaving together somatic psychotherapy, dance/movement therapy, and sex therapy approaches, this uniquely interdisciplinary and practical book offers guidance on how to strengthen your connection with pleasure, receptivity, and ecstasy in an embodied way.Melissa Walker contextualizes the erotic body as being embedded in a sex-negative culture. Taking an experiential somatic approach, this book helps readers map the erotic self to establish a whole-body sexuality, becoming an important sexuality ally in a larger social movement toward erotic inclusiveness. This groundbreaking text illuminates how to shed the harmful messages that an individual has internalized about their sexuality, to learn the language of their somatic self, and begin to build a whole-body appreciation for their creative potential.Filled with questions, guided experientials, and map-building practices that help readers learn more about themselves, this book is essential reading for sex therapists to navigate the vast map of sexuality to create true health and sexual evolution.

Kansas Boy: The Memoir of A. J. Bolinger offers the twenty-first-century reader delightful and revealing insights on life during an era of dramatic change in American history. Bolinger describes those years as 'bursting with energy, wild with ambition.' The Kansas of his childhood and young adulthood was a place where life was lived at a rapid pace: investors pursued fortunes as town developers, settlers sought to establish prosperous farms and ranches, and reformers tried to create an ideal society. A. J. opens his account with a vividly detailed description of the prairie itself, including how the frontier settlements of Kansas were in the process of becoming established communities. Born and raised in Elk County, Kansas, he tells stories of ranching and cattle drives. Retelling some of the legends of early Kansas, he debunks more than a few frontier myths. As he moves toward adulthood his accounts of farming and small-town life grow increasingly aware of the agricultural crisis of the 1880s and 1890s faced by farmers and small-town businesses as they struggled with the growing power of corporations, in particular the railroads. In doing so he offers ground-level insights into the appeal of the Populist movement and the rise of the People' Party. The challenges result in the Bolinger family's move to the city of Topeka where A. J. attends Washburn College. As a college student he helps temperance activist Carry Nation wage her antisaloon campaign and goes to Washburn's new law school. His first step in pursuing what would be a lifelong career in the law is to replicate his family's and his era's pattern of moving to where new opportunities lay: the Oklahoma territory.A. J. Bolinger (1881-1977) offers today's reader a deeply felt memoir with keen insights and thoughtful commentary that is by turns startlingly progressive and deeply conservative. He offers us a richer understanding of life on the prairies and plains of the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth century.

In the years after World War I, Southern farm women found their world changing. A postwar plunge in farm prices stretched into a twenty-year agricultural depression and New Deal programs eventually transformed the economy. Many families left their land to make way for larger commercial farms. New industries and the intervention of big government in once insular communities marked a turning point in the struggle of upcountry women-forcing new choices and the redefinition of traditional ways of life. Melissa Walker's All We Knew Was to Farm draws on interviews, archives, and family and government records to reconstruct the conflict between rural women and bewildering and unsettling change. Some women adapted by becoming partners in farm operations, adopting the roles of consumers and homemakers, taking off-farm jobs, or leaving the land. The material lives of rural upcountry women improved dramatically by midcentury-yet in becoming middle class, Walker concludes, the women found their experiences both broadened and circumscribed.

Examining oral history narratives of more than five hundred farmers from all the southern states, Melissa Walker explores how farmers recall their agrarian past and the lessons that they draw from that past. These farmers understood that their way of life was passing--indeed many of them would be pushed off the land forever--and so they told stories to preserve a sense that their way of life mattered. Landowners and sharecroppers; native-born farmers and immigrants, African Americans and whites; and men and women narrate the compelling story of how the rural South was modernized in the twentieth century. Southern Farmers and Their Stories tells the tale of southern rural transformation as it has never been told before--in the words of the farmers themselves.

Whole-Body Intimacy allows couples and their therapists to deepen their understanding of the essential components of intimate relationships and create meaningful sexual connection.This book brings somatic sex therapy into the interpersonal realm by applying Walker's Somatic-Concentric Sex Therapy (S-CST) model to the sexual intimacy of couples and those in intimate relationships. Offering a whole-body somatic approach to intimacy, this book embeds cognitive and emotional components within body-to-body sexuality and can be modulated to help individuals navigate common sexual difficulties, such as desire difference or other sexual challenges as the body changes and encounters medical or health events across the lifespan. Chapters provide full coverage on assumptions about intimacy, desire difference, the sexual response cycle, attachment, bodyful practices, as well as a guide to embodied consent. With experiential guides and reflective questions to help the readers apply the material directly to their relationship, this book takes readers on a whole-person, three-dimensional journey that integrates all aspects of the social-sexual self within an interpersonal connection. Readers will increase knowledge of desires, boundaries, relational patterns, and growth edges in intimate relationships.This book is an essential resource for therapists, clients of sex therapy, relational therapy, couples counseling, and premarital counseling, as well as those looking to deepen their understanding of intimate relationships.

Whole-Body Intimacy allows couples and their therapists to deepen their understanding of the essential components of intimate relationships and create meaningful sexual connection.This book brings somatic sex therapy into the interpersonal realm by applying Walker's Somatic-Concentric Sex Therapy (S-CST) model to the sexual intimacy of couples and those in intimate relationships. Offering a whole-body somatic approach to intimacy, this book embeds cognitive and emotional components within body-to-body sexuality and can be modulated to help individuals navigate common sexual difficulties, such as desire difference or other sexual challenges as the body changes and encounters medical or health events across the lifespan. Chapters provide full coverage on assumptions about intimacy, desire difference, the sexual response cycle, attachment, bodyful practices, as well as a guide to embodied consent. With experiential guides and reflective questions to help the readers apply the material directly to their relationship, this book takes readers on a whole-person, three-dimensional journey that integrates all aspects of the social-sexual self within an interpersonal connection. Readers will increase knowledge of desires, boundaries, relational patterns, and growth edges in intimate relationships.This book is an essential resource for therapists, clients of sex therapy, relational therapy, couples counseling, and premarital counseling, as well as those looking to deepen their understanding of intimate relationships.

It was hard times, French Carpenter Clark recalls, a sentiment unanimously echoed by the sixteen other women who talk about their lives in Country Women Cope with Hard Times. Born between 1890 and 1940 in eastern Tennessee and western South Carolina, these women grew up on farms, in labor camps, and in remote towns during an era when the region's agricultural system changed dramatically. As daughters and wives, they milked cows, raised livestock, planted and harvested crops, worked in textile mills, sold butter and eggs, preserved food, made cloth, sewed clothes, and practiced remarkable resourcefulness. Their recollections paint a vivid picture of rural life in the first half of the twentieth century for a class of women underrepresented in historical accounts.Through her edited interviews with these women, Melissa Walker provides firsthand descriptions of the influence of modernization on ordinary people struggling through the agricultural depression of the 1920s and 1930s and its aftermath. Their oral histories make plain the challenges such women faced and the self-sacrificing ways they found to confront hardship. While the women detail the difficulties of their existence--the drought years, early freezes, low crop prices, and tenant farming--they also recall the good times and the neighborly assistance of well-developed mutual aid networks, of which women were the primary participants.

This in-depth, process-oriented guide takes students through theresearch process step-by-step, following five students from across thedisciplines throughout their research projects—from developinginterests, investigating sources, and focusing ideas to drafting,revising, and producing finished papers.