The Distance Between Stars: fiction
After a devastating alien invasion, aspiring journalist Niquish Fromer wrangles a spot on the last fleet to leave Earth. She interviews her shipmates to save their stories for posterity…if anyone survives.
Told in monologues as the first documentary from space, The Distance Between Stars considers what we hold onto when everything crumbles, and how to let go.
Read the Prologue:
By the time the colonists left the solar system, the fleet broadcast television shows and poems and even children’s books about our near-extinction. Creativity is funny that way: it can’t sit still, even on an interstellar ship racing toward uncertain stars.
After Earth, a lot of people wrote histories of the fall. The Und landings and the alien wars. The burning cities and refugee camps. And the UN fleet, 81 colony ships launched toward Alpha Centauri while the ashes settled below.
But in the beginning, as the survivors crowded onto the ships, it was just one journalism student with a busted iPhone and a broken heart, talking to the heroes and victims of the fall.
In the first documentary from space, narrator Niquish Fromer interviews her shipmates to save their stories for posterity…if anyone survives.
Buy The Distance Between Stars now in paperback or Kindle Unlimited.
You can also hear it late 2024 in podcast form, as 9 voice actors bring the documentary to life.
Noctis Terrores: poetry
Bốn mươi lăm
Twist the hand throttle,
and Hoi An blurs.
Redlights like paper lanterns
through rain-streaked glasses.
A pair of snowy egrets glides
over a rice field, then two girls flutter
in ao dai, the long white dress.
I finally found the world.
Rain stings my face.
Noctis Terrores–Latin for night terrors–is the first collection from a working poet who has taught for Duke University, the University of Tennessee, and Florida Gulf Coast University.
Blending persona and prose poems, nature and surrealism, gratitude and healthy dose of regret, Cavitt reports back from a world where, as he writes in Petroglyphs, “there is not enough time to love this Earth.”
Noctis Terrores carries us around the world, from Cavitt’s childhood Appalachians to the streets of Vietnam, the canyon Southwest, and the cultural and ecological oddities of his adopted Florida home.
Leaving Da Lat
Pine trees. A granite cliff. The taxi stinks
of smoke both old and new. Banana leaves
fan the sunlight, then shadows smooth red dirt.
I almost know what to do with my life.
That boxing ring in Saigon, motorbike
rides in the rain. There’s enough turquoise sky.
Dying, Jim comes to me in a dream.
Books spill from infinite library shelves.
There’s so much to learn! he says.
I remember who I used to be.
Noctis Terrores will be available August 2024 in paperback and ebook. You can also hear Stephen perform each poem and discuss its techniques in The Poetry Professor podcast, available late 2024.