Tobey Hiller - Biography

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).

STORIES

FLIGHT ADVICE: A FABULARY

A collection of vivid tales touched with elements of the surreal and fabulist.

Biography

Tobey Hiller writes poetry, ficton and flash.

She is the author of four books of poetry, a novel, a collection of fabulist tales,* and numerous flash, fiction and poems published in many journals and magazines, online and internatioal, including Able Muse, Ambush, Askew, Brief, Caliban, Canary, Five Fingers Review, Mediterranean Poetry, Milkweed Chronicle, North Coast Literary Review, The Racket, HCE, Shotglass Journal, The Fabulist: Words & Art, Sin Fronteras/Writers Without Borders, Sisyphus, Spillway, Unlikely Stories Mark V and others; as Broadsides by Oyez; and in anthologies such as RESURGENT: NEW WRITING BY WOMEN; THROUGH THE MILL, LEFT-HAND MAPS: SAN FRANCISCO BAY AREA POETS; LITERATURE AND ITS WRITERS (Bedford Books); FIRE AND RAIN: ECOPOETRY OF CALIFORNIA; THE WILD and TRANSFORMATIONS (MPC Anthologies); and most recently, ARRIVING AT A SHORELINE and BEACON RADIANT (great weather for MEDIA, 2022 & 2024).

She writes about our intimacies, often neglected, with the natural world and its other creatures, the puzzle of time and its imperatives, and the urgent challenges of the current threats to our ecosystems. These include the relationships -- the personal human ecosystems -- of our worlds. She sees community, urban life and history as elements of the complex environment we must understand and navigate. She is fascinated with transformation and our animal kinships.

She has been a dancer, a teacher, a Psychodramatist and therapist, and is a wife, mother and grandmother. She began writing as a child, and her interest in words and how they breathe co-evolved with her love of dance. She is a Nidan in Aikido and an enthusiastic wanderer. Besides words, she particularly likes stone, wood and oil paint as materials. She was born in the East (a region of winter snow, tight social rules and spring wild strawberries in her memory) but migrated west at 19 and has lived on the left edge all her adult life.

A sample of her poetry:

small boat

o small boat, she said. small boat.
was it prayer? incantation?
boats must be built near water. if you build them
in the mountains, you must find a river.
if you build one in the desert you must harness cloud.
some boats are made of mud. no float
will come of that. some boats are made of muscle
and their timber will last for years,
until time carves itself toward bone. some boats
are made of wish but spit and promise
can't survive the rapids. all boats
are too small for all the cargo, and it's not long
before the bailing starts. some boats
can recognize the shore, but then, oh then
you'll need a horse.

pub. May 2019 in Musepie Press ("Shot Glass" section)

A sample of her Flash may be found here:https://www.unlikelystories.org/search/google/The%20Wrong%20Mice%3A%20Tobey%20Hiller

Awards: Her story The Seventh Blue was a finalist for the 2009 REYNOLDS PRICE SHORT FICTION AWARD and appears in her latest story collection. Her story Splinter, which was short-listed for 2 prizes, won FIRST PLACE in CRAFT MAGAZINE'S 2020 ELEMENTS CONTEST. Her story Blue, Wide and Very Cold was a finalist in the 2019 BOSQUE MAGAZINE FICTION CONTEST and in CRAFT MAGAZINE'S 2020 FICTION CONTEST. Her collection of fabulist tales Particle to Wave: A Fabulary was one of 5 finalists for OMNIDAWN'S 2019 FABULIST FICTION CONTEST. This collection, now called Flight Advice: a fabulary, was published in December 2021 by UNLIKELY BOOKS (New Orleans). In the 2022 KEATS SOULMAKING CONTEST, her poems won a FIRST PRIZE and two HONORABLE MENTIONS, her Flash piece The Wrong Mice won SECOND PRIZE in Flash, and two of her other pieces of short fiction won HONORABLE MENTIONS. Her new poetry collection in ms. tbefore anything is dust was recenetly named one of three finalists in the 2024 Catamaran Literary Reader Poetry Prize.

Her nonfiction writings include an Afterword for the Signet Classic Edition of the CALL OF THE WILD & SELECTED STORIES, by Jack London (2009) and various writings in the fields of literature and psychology. She is also the author of a book about couples therapy, RECREATING PARTNERSHIP, co-written with her husband, Phillip Ziegler (W.W. Norton, 2001). This book garnered excellent reviews in the arena of couples counseling and has been translated into German.*

* See the WORKS section for more information.