Incandescence

<p><strong style=color: rgba(51 51 51 1)>Full-Color Edition.</strong></p><p><span style=background-color: rgba(0 0 0 0); color: rgba(51 51 51 1)>Clare's stories are well-written entertaining yet bittersweet and they contain universal themes that surely will resonate with readers. Cooley's tales reveal the dramatic story of a woman who overcame enormous obstacles through determination and creativity. The subject matter is timely and can help many. As a writer Clare has her own unique and articulate voice. This book will help others confront their own demons.</span></p><p><span style=background-color: rgba(0 0 0 0); color: rgba(51 51 51 1)>Claire Kirch-Publishing Industry Veteran</span></p><p><br></p><p><strong style=background-color: rgba(0 0 0 0); color: rgba(51 51 51 1)>Sixteen-year-old Clare Cooley is standing on an overpass thinking about jumping into the traffic below. At her young age she has yet to kiss a boy but she is pregnant after being raped and faces a choice-surrender to the darkness or rise above it.</strong></p><p> </p><p><span style=background-color: rgba(0 0 0 0); color: rgba(51 51 51 1)>Clare Cooley's powerful and provocative memoir chronicles her journey from growing up in a dangerously dysfunctional family to becoming a self-made successful prolific artist. No one in her chaotic family noticed when she stopped attending school regularly at seven years old and she did not return until she was asked to teach in her twenties.</span></p><p><span style=background-color: rgba(0 0 0 0); color: rgba(51 51 51 1)>Cooley's evocative stories follow her saga hitchhiking with truckers fasting alone for three days on a mountaintop being one of the first females to work with the longshoremen on Lake Superior innocently ending up in jail nearly perishing at sea and being deported from a country.</span></p><p><span style=background-color: rgba(0 0 0 0); color: rgba(51 51 51 1)>Cooley fearlessly reflects on moments of great adversity and expanding epiphany dealing with abuse addiction suicide teen motherhood misogyny raising her damaged drug addicted sister's children and confronting her father about his violent crimes. Cooley writes eloquently and authentically about growing up a sensitive free-spirited daughter of a brilliant but broken pedophile father and a gentle artist mother. Cooley charts her sojourn from her first home in a quonset hut in the Arizona desert to bouncing around the country with her family then leaving home at seventeen to travel the U.S. alone sometimes living in a tent a teepee a car and an abandoned building. Cooley reflects on the power of facing painful truths expressing them and healing. </span></p><p><span style=background-color: rgba(0 0 0 0); color: rgba(51 51 51 1)>A deeply vulnerable narrative that explores transcendence through artistic expression </span><em style=background-color: rgba(0 0 0 0); color: rgba(51 51 51 1)>Incandescence</em><span style=background-color: rgba(0 0 0 0); color: rgba(51 51 51 1)> is dark and luminous personal and universal. Cooley chronicles the dark times in her life and how her focus on creativity helped her transform it into art. Cooley developed an arts curriculum that she taught to all grade levels including universities and institutions and created a career as a creativity coach sharing what she learned about the capability of expression to transform adversity into advantage through art. </span></p><p><span style=background-color: rgba(0 0 0 0); color: rgba(51 51 51 1)>Cooley's authentic voice shines through with heart and whimsy in her insightful illuminations of decades of prolific creativity inner exploration and meditations on what makes people happy. As evidence of her rise above darkness Cooley's masterful art offers moments of serenity between chapters.</span></p><p><br></p><p><br></p>