Tobey Hiller - Charlie’s Exit

Selected Works

Poetry

Crow Mind (Finishing Line Press, 2020)

This book is a careful observation of crows who visit the poet's backyard. The poems step into the space between one species and another, between an inside and an outside, the domestic and the wild, the familiar and the strange.

Crossings

This beautiful chapbook (Oyez, 1980, handbound and printed in letterpress by Don Gray) is Hiller's first book of poems.

Aqueduct

This book (Clear Mt. Press, 1993) is a mosaic of fragments, lyrics and prose poems that add up to a long poem, a meditation on water, love and the continual motions of life. Joanna Axtmann's striking drawings, inspired by the piece, accompany the poems. It's a love poem to water and its ways.

Certain Weathers

In this collection (Oyez, 1987) Hiller writes of the daily and domestic relationships that make our lives both challenging and gorgeous. She writes of the pulse and magnetism of the natural world we inhabit and how our selves are inextricably bound to the weather of it, its past, its future, the communities of its being.

"...delicate strength as it weaves and cross-ticks, delicate beauty."
RICHARD SILBERG (editor of
"Poetry Flash").

Novel

Charlie’s Exit

(EdgeWork Books, 2002, ISBN 1-223-01-7)

This is a moving novel of psychological growth, an engrossing mystery, and a drama of discovery in which the characters speak in their own voices and the reader comes to understand the story from multiple perspectives. A mystery, a coming-of-age story, and a meditation on both marriage and journey all at once.As Charlie travels across a continent, sorting out the tangle of broken promises and violent surprises that have changed her life, a second story of risk and discovery weaves itself into the first through the diary of her great-great-grandmother, a pioneer who made her way across the same plains generations ago, facing her own adventures, losses and hard truths. Eventually Charlie, too, becomes a pioneer in a new way of life, as she uncovers and faces family secrets, absorbs some hard truths of her own and finds new beauties in the world.

"Hiller manages her conclusion with a skill that is admirable in a first novel. This is a book that will long stay in the reader's mind, a vivid and arresting experience." (The Compulsive Reader)

Psychology

Recreating Partnership: A Solution-Oriented, Collaborative Approach to Couples Therapy

“The authors of this beautifully written book give invaluable insights into what couples need to turn their relationship around during therapy... This is one of the clearest and most creative books I have ever read on couples therapy!”

--(Pepper Schwartz, Ph.D, Professor, Department of Sociology, University of Washington, author of Love Between Equals).

Charlie’s Exit

In The Compulsive Reader, Bob Williams, in a full review, compares Hiller's narrative style in Charlie's Exit to both James and Faulkner. He writes:
"...Hiller manages [her] conclusion by a skill that is admirable in a first novel. She shows in fact generous abundance in Charlie’s Exit, lively imagination and subtle finesse. . . Hiller’s brilliant presentation makes [the novel] full and the contest between the man and wife powerfully significant. This is a novel that will long stay in the reader’s mind, a vivid and arresting experience.”

--(Bob Williams, The Compulsive Reader)