Books
Along the Watchtower
Set against the closing years of the Cold War, Constance Squires's debut novel introduces the family of Army Major Collins, as told through the eyes of Lucinda Collins-the vibrant, headstrong eldest daughter.
In spare, heart-wrenchingly beautiful prose, Squires offers us a rare glimpse into the experiences and sacrifices of an American military family-a powerful story that reveals what it really means to fight for the things we believe in and to defend the ones we love.
Live from Medicine Park
Now Available as an Audiobook
Documentary filmmaker Ray Wheeler is down on his luck. Embroiled in a lawsuit, he is reeling from the consequences of a near-fatal shooting on his last film, and has just lost his teaching gig. Broke and beleaguered, he can’t afford to be particular about his next project. So when a former student invites him to film the comeback of Lena Wells, an iconic rock-and-roll singer who hit it big in the seventies, three decades earlier, he reluctantly agrees—even though he doesn’t like her music.
When Ray arrives at Lena’s hometown of Medicine Park, Oklahoma, a defunct resort community, he is determined to approach his topic with the professional detachment that has guided his career. His work ethic is modeled on the prime directive of Star Trek: never interfere with an alien civilization. But with only five days left before Lena’s comeback concert, Ray quickly runs afoul of his subject, who places him on a one-week probation. The terms: impress her or else.
It doesn’t take long before Ray violates his own ethical standards. Drawn romantically toward Lena, he also fails to prevent himself from interfering with the lives of the people closest to her, including her only son, Gram, whose paternity is a mystery even to himself; her daughter-in-law, Jettie; and the enigmatic guitar player Cyril Dodge. When disaster strikes Ray’s set again, this time in Medicine Park, he must face truths he has avoided for too long—about love, relationships, and responsibility.
An ode to both southwestern Oklahoma and rock music, Live from Medicine Park is a bittersweet reflection on the search for identity and purpose amid tragedy. As the novel reaches its climax, Ray sets out on one last adventure to set things right. Redemption may be possible—but only on its own terms.
Hit Your Brights: Stories
Hit Your Brights captures people in tough spots, often of their own making. Fusing humor and tragedy, these thirteen gritty stories keep readers in suspense. Danger lurks, the needle skips, the bomb goes off, and the empties pile up. Outcomes are unpredictable, but the car always starts, and, sometimes, love wins.
Constance Squires casts the diminished circumstances of her characters with authentic detail familiar to any reader who has spent time in flyover country—a swath of boom-and-bust middle America that often seems forgotten. Here, marriages, families, and friendships all hit crisis points in a mutable world of army bases, casinos, truck stops, churches, and bars.
Hit Your Brights showcases a virtuosic range of styles and perspectives. The title story, told in second person, excavates the rationalizations of an alcoholic stumbling through the inexorable progress of her disease. After downing nine Rolling Rocks and three tequila shots, she races her car to the nearest liquor store before it closes, turning on her high beams to ease her double vision.
In “Dopamine Agonistes,” a family man, recently diagnosed with Parkinson’s, ventures out to a casino and meets a child he tries to help. Other stories focus on people who find themselves in difficult, potentially violent situations. In “Wounding Radius,” two young women are checking on their marijuana crop in the Wichita Mountains outside of Fort Sill when they are discovered by a troubled soldier who has gone AWOL. And in “An Unscheduled Stop,” a mother traveling with her baby encounters diners at a roadside McDonald’s who might—or might not—be child traffickers.
Beautifully crafted, with a distinctly modern edge, the stories in Hit Your Brights give voice to women and men, young and old, overlooked and disenfranchised, who inhabit worlds that feel at once strange and familiar.
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Low April Sun
On the morning of April 19, 1995, Delaney Travis steps into the Social Security office in Oklahoma City to obtain an ID for her new job. Moments later, an explosion shatters the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building into rubble. Her boyfriend Keith and half-sister Edie are left to assume the worst--that Delaney perished in the bombing, despite lack of definitive proof. Twenty years later, now married and bonded by the tragedy, Edie and Keith's lives are upended when they begin to receive mysterious Facebook messages from someone claiming to be Delaney.
Desperate for closure, the couple embarks on separate journeys, each aiming for an artists' community in New Mexico that may hold answers. Alongside their quest is August, a recovering alcoholic with a haunting connection to the bombing. Raised in the separatist compound of Elohim City, August harbors secrets about Timothy McVeigh, the perpetrator of the attack, and his own possible involvement in the tragedy. When his path crosses with Edie, he must choose whether to tell anyone about his past.
As the 20-year anniversary of the bombing approaches, fracking-induced earthquakes shake the ground of Oklahoma City, mirroring the unsettled lives of its residents. In their quest for answers, Edie, Keith, and August seek to understand how the shadows of the past continue to darken the present, as the ground beneath them threatens to give way once again.
In Low April Sun, acclaimed author Constance E. Squires has written the first novel to explore the enduring impact of the Oklahoma City bombing. While masterfully weaving a spellbinding mystery, Squires ultimately offers us a moving meditation on grief and forgiveness.
