icon caret-left icon caret-right instagram pinterest linkedin facebook twitter goodreads question-circle facebook circle twitter circle linkedin circle instagram circle goodreads circle pinterest circle

My Works

Kano Press Novels

Coming in 2024

Click Kano Press for updates

Cats on a Pole

"A battle of the sexes for the New Age. Funny and insightful, it glows with a violet-magenta aura."

—John Sayles, novelist, screenwriter, director

 

A wonderful story filled with imagination, humor, and great wisdom. Betsy Robinson is a brilliant writer whose creativity shines in this book. Cats on a Pole is a great read!

—Sandra Ingerman, author of Soul Retrieval and How to Heal Toxic Thoughts

 

A crazy-funny, edgy, sexy comedy of broken lives and leaky auras that has the makings of a terrific New Age movie.

—Robert Moss, bestselling author of Moscow Rules and Conscious Dreaming

 

Despite his psychic gifts, healing teacher Joshua Gardner never saw student Harmony Rogers coming. Cats on a Pole is the story of two psychically-gifted people who are isolated—like cats stuck up on a telephone pole. But their belief that they don't fit in actually makes them more like most people than either of them will acknowledge.

 

A passionate love affair without physical contact, a battle of wills without speech, a psychic duel between male and female equals who have, for the first time, met their match. Cats on a Pole is an intense, sexy, sometimes funny, metaphysical love story that "outs" the insecurities we all have, exposing our overwhelming commonality.

Cats on a Pole

The Spectators

COMING September 3, 2024 (SIGN UP FOR NEWSLETTER TO RECEIVE ANNOUNCEMENTS)

 

"A novel that in the last chapter reaches the only heaven to which I aspire: a life fully awake to this beautiful bleeding Earth."

—David James Duncan, author of Sun House and The Brothers K

 

 

This is what you get when you mix apathy, shamanism, Buddhism, esoteric Yogic traditions, quantum physics, the power of DNA ancestry, and cluelessness with a small band of older women negotiating chaos in New York City in the era just preceding Trump.

 

Part love letter to NYC's Upper West Side, part an ode to friendship between a writer and her creations (reluctant psychic protagonist Lily Hogue and her loner friends, with guest appearances of real and fictional historical events and people, from Bernie Madoff to Paul Simon to terrorists), The Spectators' cast of characters battles the problems of foreknowing disasters we cannot control and being part of an uncontrollable human herd.

The Spectators

The Last Will & Testament of Zelda McFigg

(paperback and all ebook formats)

Big Moose Prize-winning novel about a woman who feels invisible and will stop at nothing to be seen. A comedy.

Plan Z by Leslie Kove

(paperback and all ebook formats)

• A funny, sometimes sad, story of negotiating life without a clue.

• A Catcher in the Rye for the 1970s generation.

• An entertaining tale for anybody who has ever grown up.


Leslie Kove has struck out at life plans A through Y, and decides the only plan left is to tell her story — Plan Z.

She recounts her bumbling, at times hilarious, journey through the Vietnam era and New York City in the 70s and 80s.

To read an excerpt, click on title (above, and in Selected Works column at right).

Conversations with Mom

(paperback, Kindle, Nook editions)

A funny, enlightening little book for anybody who's had a mother ... or pain ... or shame ... or any combination. Click on the title to see more and excerpts.

Girl Stories & Game Plays

(paperback and all ebook formats)

24 stories and 3 one-act plays for everyone who enjoys a good laugh, a cathartic cry, and an entertaining tale.

Includes Darleen Dances and Jakey, Get Out of the Buggy (listed below; click on title to read).


Darleen Dances

(for ebook, click on title; also included in Girl Stories & Game Plays)

A funny play about finding God.

The opening monologue to Darleen Dances is published in Moving Parts: Monologues from Contemporary Plays, Viking Penguin, 1992.

For more information, click on the play title (above or in Selected Works at right).

An updated version of the play is in
Girl Stories & Game Plays.

Jakey, Get Out of the Buggy

(click on title to read, also available on Kindle and in Girl Stories & Game Plays)

The Practice: Dee and Bea's Quick & Easy Guide to Enlightenment

Meet Dee, an intellectual with a disreputable past and a passion for food, sex, and fashion, and Bea, the former star of antacid and hemorrhoid commercials who dislikes most everything except Dee. The two decide to become self-proclaimed best-selling spiritual experts after Dee has a dream that they are. The tale of their journey to enlightenment takes place over meals, and each chapter ends with a spiritual practice—written not only to entertain, but to offer a deeper, truer, and certainly a funnier kind of wisdom than the plethora of “how-to-be-spiritual” books.

Available FREE on Kindle Unlimited, and CHEAP on regular Kindle.

The Trouble with the Truth by Edna Robinson

Set in the 1930s, this poignant, funny, and utterly original novel tells the American story of one lost girl's struggle for truth, identity, and understanding amidst her family's nomadic, unconventional lifestyle.

 

What's the right way to behave, to think, to feel, if you're always the new girl? How do you navigate life when you're continually on the move? Do you lie? How do you even know if you're lying? What's the truth anyway?

 

It's 1928 and nine-year-old Lucresse Briard is trying to make sense of life and the jumbled, often challenging family it's handed her: a single art-dealer father who thinks nothing of moving from place to place; her brother, Ben, who succeeds in any situation and seems destined for stardom; and their houseman, Fred, who acts like an old woman. As Lucresse advances through childhood to adolescence, she goes from telling wild lies for attention to desperately seeking the truth of who she is as a sophistication-craving teenager in the 1930s.

 

Told from Lucresse's perspective as a grown woman, The Trouble with the Truth transcends its time in the late 1920s and '30s, and weaves the story we all live of struggling to learn who we are and the truth behind this human journey.

Learning to Thrive: Begin by Recognizing Your Trauma

If you don't recognize your trauma, you cannot begin to heal. This 9,000-word primer may help.
Available as Kindle Book and B&N Nook Book

Free PDF on book page

Marbles

(website story only; click on title to read)

This story changed my life. It's all true. My hope is that it will reach anybody who needs it.

Editing Services

Gentle help