Local author Nancy Lane will discuss her short story collection Pretty Chrystanthemus and Other Stories. This collection of sixteen short stories reminds readers how family is at the core of human experience and how relationships, especially those between parent and child, rely on the power of love to overcome challenges. Five stories feature historical content, highlighting social issues relevant today. For example, “The Fourth Friday in November,” set in the 1960s, explores the need for hope on the personal, familial, and national level. The title story, “Pretty Chrysanthemum,” challenges an immigrant to make a heartbreaking decision to leave his American-born son to search in China for his deported wife. Eleven contemporary stories also pose challenging situations, including a father and daughter on the run with an AMBER alert issued about them and a woman’s adult son missing after crashing his car in the desert. Throughout these stories, unshakable human decency prevails. Nancy Lane graduated from UCLA with a major in Mathematics and a minor in English and continued studies in the UCLA Graduate School of Education. After years of industry-related writing, Nancy decided to pursue creative writing and zeroed in on the short story form as the most immediate and exciting way to build worlds, create engaging characters, and promote positive themes. Her short stories have appeared in numerous online publications, including Scarlet Leaf Review and Fiction on the Web and in the print anthology, The Best of Fiction on the Web. Nancy is a member of Willamette Writers and Oregon Writers Colony and enjoys networking within the robust presence of writers in Portland, her previous location of twenty-two years, and in the Rogue Valley, where she and her husband live.