Lanita McLeod’s forthcoming book, The Knick Knacks of Life, brings together poetry, short stories, and personal reflections inspired by love, family, grief, relationships, resilience, aging, and personal growth. Drawing inspiration from meaningful keepsakes collected by generations of women in her family, McLeod explores how ordinary memories can represent important chapters of a person’s life. The collection combines heartfelt observations, humor, imagination, romance, loss, and hard-earned wisdom, offering readers relatable reflections on the experiences that shape who they become.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Rocky Point, NC – Sep 14, 2026 - A teacup inherited from a grandmother. A small statue tied to a child’s first ballet lesson. A souvenir brought home from a long-ago trip. Such objects can appear ordinary to anyone else, yet to the person who keeps them, each one holds a chapter of a life.
That idea lies at the heart of Lanita McLeod’s forthcoming book, The Knick Knacks of Life, a wide-ranging collection of poems, personal reflections and short stories shaped by love, family, betrayal, grief, resilience, aging and the quiet work of becoming whole.
McLeod is announcing the book ahead of its official release, inviting readers to discover a collection that moves easily between tenderness and humor, romance and regret, imagination and lived experience. Some pieces look closely at modern relationships, including internet romance, long-distance love and deception. Others explore parenthood, mortality, self-respect, loss, personal change and the complicated emotions that come with growing older.
The book’s title grew from McLeod’s memories of the women in her family and the collections they proudly displayed. Her grandmother kept mismatched teacups and saucers, each connected to a particular place or occasion. Her mother’s glass case held an eclectic assortment of family keepsakes, gifts, dog-show memorabilia and objects gathered over the years.
For McLeod, those collections became a way of understanding memory itself. The events people carry, whether joyful, painful, strange or seemingly small, form a personal display case of their own.
“Every life gathers its own collection,” McLeod said. “Some memories make us laugh, while others still carry a little weight when we pick them up again. I wanted this book to make room for all of them, because even the difficult moments can show us how much we have survived and how far we have come.”
Rather than following one continuous storyline, The Knick Knacks of Life offers readers a series of emotional snapshots. The collection includes reflections on first love and heartbreak, tributes to children and loved ones, meditations on authenticity and self-worth, playful encounters with nature, and imaginative pieces filled with mystical creatures, fairy rings and moonlit landscapes.
That emotional variety gives the collection broad relevance. Readers who have experienced changing relationships, an empty nest, grief, reinvention or the realities of aging may recognize parts of themselves in McLeod’s observations. Those drawn to poetry and brief reflective writing will also find pieces that can be read individually, revisited slowly or shared with someone facing a similar moment.
Through that honest approach, The Knick Knacks of Life offers neither a polished portrait of a perfect existence nor a fixed set of answers. It presents something more familiar: a life assembled from moments of courage, longing, disappointment, laughter, imagination, recovery and love.
About Lanita McLeod
Lanita McLeod is a writer whose poetry, stories and personal reflections explore relationships, family, resilience, imagination and the emotional keepsakes people gather throughout their lives.
