This accessible guide to Solution Focused Brief Therapy (SFBT), an effective therapeutic approach which focuses on strengths and achievements, provides a practical introduction to what SFBT is and how to use it with clients. Barry Winbolt leads the reader through the principles, techniques and steps involved in the approach, including forming a productive working relationship with the client, using questions creatively, the effective use of language, and working collaboratively with the client in finding solutions. Case studies are included to demonstrate the ideas and techniques presented. This book will be invaluable to all those in the helping professions who are either already familiar with SFBT and want to improve their knowledge, or are looking for new and effective ways to communicate with and help the people they work with.
With his sister’s urging, elderly Jeremiah recounts the first of their many youthful adventures. Jeremiah and Susanne discover a lot of the Morris clan’s family history, and young Jeremiah is only beginning to figure things out. The whole mess starts when Jeremiah’s family visits the grandparents in Britain. It soon becomes freakishly apparent that most of Jeremiah’s ancestors dating back to 1745 currently reside in Nana and Papa’s attic—and they are full of useful information. It turns out his eighth great-uncle Edgar was wrongly hung for murder centuries ago. Inspired by Edgar’s parents, the Earl Mortimer and the Countess Leila, Jeremiah and Susanne decide to help his disgraced relative and solve a mystery from the 1700s to bring closure to Edgar and his beloved Jemima. Throughout his investigations, Jeremiah makes a shocking discovery: some of his ancestors really are killers. As he solves an old mystery, a new murder has to be stopped: Jeremiah’s own! With the help of other quick-thinking ancestors, he must avoid becoming another dead occupant of Papa’s attic. To stay alive, Jeremiah will quickly learn what kindness and fair play can do against evil.
The Cowboy Arrangement Susanne Collins has her hands full raising her four orphaned nieces and nephews and managing the family farm. So when her cowboy neighbor proposes he plant her crops in exchange for keeping his wild horses in her corrals, Susanne hesitantly takes the deal. Soon her reluctance to accept help ebbs, and she wonders if Tanner Harding will he prove to be the strong, solid man she's been hoping for... Half-Native American Tanner has always been adrift in a white man's world. Yet the beautiful stand-in mother and her ready-made family give him a sense of belonging for the very first time. But can he convince Susanne to take a chance and welcome him not just into her home but also into her heart? Montana Cowboys: These brothers live and love by the code of the West
Both anthologies are about New Orleans: the past and the present. This author has grown up in this city, and there is certain timelessness about it - the past definitely influences the present. All the plays are permeated with the sensuousness, decadence and bewilderment of brave and driven people living in chaos, confusion, extreme pleasure and delight. I hope you get a taste of this rich jambalaya of life as you experience these plays. Volume One contains modern plays set in pre-Katrina New Orleans, the City that Care Forgot. After I founded Southern Repertory Theatre in New Orleans, we initiated a new play festival to develop new voices and a friend challenged me to write. My play, Wishing Aces, won me a Senior Fulbright Research Specialist grant to Paris. From then on, I stopped writing textbooks and wrote plays primarily about New Orleans. When shaping a play, I take a question that disturbs me that I can't figure out, such as: why can't this professor and this student communicate in a profound way? Why can't this mother set boundaries for her out-of-control son? What would it take for that to happen? I then look at voice and structure, using the names of people from my life (I may change these later) to get the right phrasing and tone. I put these ghosts in my play, pick the most haunting place in New Orleans, and use cards to come up with an outline of scenes. Place inspires that sense of mystery that is so important to the theatre: an abandoned train station in the Louisiana swamps, a Baroness Pontalba apartment in the Quarter, a Garden District mansion. Place, weather, time, sounds inspire designers who are critical to creating the images the story requires. I try to fill my plays with details from New Orleans; the heat, the rain, the light through the oaks, the phantom gallery of a plantation house at dusk so that you too can experience what it's like to live here.
“Barbara Bradley Hagerty is a wise and engaging guide through the possibilities…of middle age.” —Daniel H. Pink, author of To Sell Is Human and Drive A dynamic and inspiring exploration of the new science that is redrawing the future for people in their forties, fifties, and sixties for the better—and for good. There’s no such thing as an inevitable midlife crisis, Barbara Bradley Hagerty writes in this provocative, hopeful book. It’s a myth, an illusion. New scientific research explodes the fable that midlife is a time when things start to go downhill for everybody. In fact, midlife can be a great new adventure, when you can embrace fresh possibilities, purposes, and pleasures. In Life Reimagined, Hagerty explains that midlife is about renewal: It’s the time to renegotiate your purpose, refocus your relationships, and transform the way you think about the world and yourself. Drawing from emerging information in neurology, psychology, biology, genetics, and sociology—as well as her own story of midlife transformation—Hagerty redraws the map for people in midlife and plots a new course forward in understanding our health, our relationships, even our futures.
When a young woman returns to North Carolina after a thirty-year absence, she finds that the once grand tobacco plantation she called home holds more secrets than she ever imagined. Though Peak Plantation has been in her family for generations, Leslie Nichols can’t wait to rid herself of the farm left to her by her estranged grandmother Maggie—and with it the disturbing memories of her mother’s death, her father’s disgrace, and her unhappy childhood. But Leslie isn’t the only one with a claim to Peak. Jay Davenport, Peak’s reclusive caretaker, has his own reasons for holding onto the land bequeathed to him by Leslie’s grandmother. Before she died, Maggie hinted at a terrible secret surrounding Adele Laveau, a lady’s maid who came to Peak during the 1930s and died under mysterious circumstances. Jay is haunted by Maggie’s story, yet the truth eludes him—until Leslie uncovers a cryptically marked grave on the property. As they delve into the mystery of Adele’s death, Leslie and Jay discover shocking secrets that extend deep into the roots of Leslie’s family tree—secrets that have the power to alter her life forever.
