Views from an Empty Nest

Southern writer Madelyn Young thinks that when a woman enters her seventies, it is time to stop talking about what she is going to do and get on with it. In her collection of award-winning thirty-one stories and essays, Young shares tales of family loyalty and love, discord, and intrigue as she poignantly reflects on a life well-lived.

In creating her stories, Young takes real-life experiences and transforms them into compelling accounts that sometimes take surprising twists in the end. In "Nature's Gift," Young highlights the rediscovery of the ivory-billed woodpecker in eastern Arkansas in 2004; in "Lost and Found," she contemplates what it would be like to pick up litter on the roadside and then stumble across something unusual. "Good Intentions" details a moving moment when she was a student teacher and brought home a bedraggled girl who needed just one thing-love. Following each anecdote and story, Young includes interesting notes detailing what inspired the writing and the awards each piece has won to date.

From her first tale to the last, Young entertains adults of all ages with the hope that her stories will encourage other writers to always look inside when gleaning story ideas.