Books

A Sky for Arcadia

Although I couldn’t find a publisher for this first novel, I finally published it myself through Xlibris. It was worth the time, money and effort, because the book was chosen as one of eight finalists in the Oklahoma Center for the Book Awards in 2002. It also sold reasonable well with little promotion.

This first novel is not so much about addiction as recovery. One reason I wrote it was that as much as I admire fine works like Lost Weekend and Days of Wine and Roses, they are much more about the drunkalog, as it is known, than recovery from addiction. There are tons of tabloid stories about going to rehab, but few tell you what it really is like to recover from addiction. The only people who even seem to be aware of the process or interested in it are those affiliated with Alcoholics Anonymous, Al-Anon, Narcotics Anonymous, Over Eaters, and any of the numerous other twelve-step programs. There are a few movies like When a Man Loves a Woman, which are focused mostly on what happens after one gets clean and sober, but not many, and most of these stories deal less with the process than the interpersonal fallout.

You meet Mary Ann when she first tries to get sober and follow her through a tortuous first year. She deals with the grief of the daughter she has lost before the book begins, as well as her charming son who is on a dangerous path. Her family, while a loving one, is not particularly helpful. They don’t know much about addiction and don’t really want to know. In addition, Mary Ann does a number of things she is told not to do, including getting involved with a man she hardly knows. Also, it is 1984, and the economic downturn threatens her livelihood as the owner of a small, independent bookstore. But she has new friends and some old acquaintances who see her though the ordeal. She emerges stronger, but with her own battle scars.

A Sky for Arcadia is available through Amazon or directly from Xlibris.

A Source of Silence

The first question people ask is, “How much of this is real? Is it autobiography?”

In my case, not much. Like most authors, my characters are an amalgam of people I have known. A part of the fun of writing is creating fictional people, but in the case of this book, I did draw not only on my own experience coming to maturity during the Second World War, but I read every issue of the local newspapers, The Daily Oklahoman and The Oklahoma City Times, between April and September 1945.

The only wars most people living today have experienced are what I would call “partial wars.” This is not to say that the dead are any less dead, nor their heroism any less important to our freedom. What it does mean is that most people have no idea what the experience of total war is like. In wars like our Revolution, the Civil War and the two World Wars, everyone was involved. Children were not sheltered from the horrors that were taking place. There was no such thing as deferment, although in earlier times, money or influence could relieve a young man of doing his military duty.

Regardless of television or even protest, the last three wars our country has fought have touched the general public only tangentially, if at all. No sacrifices were made. Nothing was required.

In the Second World War, everyone sacrificed and everyone was involved. Children were no exception, whether they carried guns, as in Germany, were sent to the country to avoid the bombs in Britain, or were asked to buy Defense Stamps and gather scrap metal and newspapers, as in the United States.

For the teenagers watching the war, the last months were traumatic. We lost the only president most of us had known, the war came to a particularly bloody climax, the truth of the death camps was revealed, and we dropped the bomb—twice.

My generation is called “The Silent Generation.” I don’t believe we were that silent. We simply weren’t listened to. We fought the bloodiest war, except for the two World Wars and the Civil War, and no one remembers. No, it wasn’t Viet Nam. It was Korea. M*A*S*H*? Remember? Of course you don’t, unless you are my age.

We were the Depression generation, too, the smallest generation in the twentieth century in comparison to the general population.

The title, The Source of Silence, is taken from the name given my generation by Time magazine.

The girl in the novel is twelve, a vulnerable age, experiencing the war that is going on worldwide and the war within her own home. The family battles become just as bloody and filled with loss as the larger scenes of the war. By the time the bombs drop on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, nothing is the same. September brings a sort of peace and the beginning of a fundamental rebuilding.

To be published in 2010.

Virgin Hall

This book came out of two sets of experiences. First, what it was like to come into adulthood in the 1950s. We were the last generation to reflect the mores, habits, attitudes, and cultural values that dominated American life for at least the last century, and perhaps from the founding of the Republic. All that changed in the 1960s. All of it.

The good went with the bad, and I was proud to be a part of the Civil Rights movement, proud to be active in politics, trying to elect progressive leaders, proud to follow John and Robert Kennedy into what we hoped would be a new era. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke to and for many of us. We had grown up in the days of lynchings, gentlemen’s agreements limiting what Jews could do, and suspicion of Roman Catholics that bordered on hatred. The only choice a woman had with an unwanted pregnancy was a coat hanger or a backroom, illegal abortion. No one mourned the passing of these societal defects.

But the exorcising of these ills took with it the appreciation for history, a profound knowledge of cultural heritage, civility, and taste. This was replaced by an arrogant disregard of authority, a leveling of learning that finally became dumb and dumber, greed, and finally the cultural, educational and financial disaster we experience today.

This is a book about what the 1950s was like, in all of the rigid hypocrisy and misplaced priorities of the time. But it also is the story of a kinder era, when the individual felt a duty to society at large, values that died with the three assassinations in the 60s.

I have condensed about ten of us who lived on the third floor of the freshman dormitory Virginia Hall, at Southern Methodist University in the early 1950s. Naturally the boys called it Virgin Hall. We were a diverse bunch and had a great time.

It is important to say this is not a roman a clef. None of these things happened to any of us. I have borrowed certain characteristics, points of background, and even one name from the women I knew. Other than that, it’s a cut and paste job. Purists of the time will recognize that I have taken liberties with the details of sorority rush and that Virginia Hall did not have suites like the other dorms. Other than that, I have stayed close to the truth of the time.

The book is divided into three parts. The first part introduces the reader not only to the characters, but to the times. Clothes, sorority rush, boys, and a good time were all priorities for “co-eds” of the day. Sheila, the heroine, a sheltered girl from Brooklyn, is lost at first in the flamboyant culture of the Southwest, where she chooses to go to college. She is helped through this by her three suitemates.

The second part of the novel is involved with the very real life situation Sheila faces. She is an incest victim and experiences a pregnancy from a rape, while the pace of campus life goes on. Once again, she is helped through her trauma by the other women and by the young man she considers her true love.

Part three takes place thirty years later, at an impromptu reunion of the four. All the women have undergone changes in the years and many of the questions unanswered in the first two parts come to light.

To be published in early 2010.