Trudy J. Morgan-Cole's Blog, page 43

A Prayer

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Dear God

On the stormiest nights

when I am safe and warm inside

my biggest worries whether school will be cancelled

and how much shovelling we’ll have to do tomorrow

remind me there is always someone

out walking

through the storm.

Great Values

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You keep donating black beans

to the food bank.

I can hear you saying

they are full of protein

and you have many tasty recipes for black beans.

The thing is

(I would try to explain, but won’t)

black beans are not really part of our food culture here

most people here don’t know how to cook them

even those who have kitchens and cooking utensils

and working stoves and recipes

and time to cook

probably don’t know any recipes for black beans

or anything that goes well with them

because we just don’t eat black beans around here much.

There are so many cans of them.

Possibly they were on sale somewhere.

There are several different brands

so maybe there are often on sale.

I wish you would buy things that are useful

as well as nutritious

things people like and will actually eat

cans of baked beans, for example

these are beans we all know and love

and they can be heated and eaten easily.

But you keep buying black beans

almost as if you are buying

what you like instead of what other people like

what you think people should eat instead of what they do eat

because after all

you

know

best.

On the Tenth Day of Christmas …

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Empty Space

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Empty room

nothing in it yet but a thrift store couch.

Another metaphor for

new year,

new beginnings.

Not mine, this time:

I’m still in our comfortably-furnished house.

This is the season

of watching my baby birds fly the nest

helping them jam thrift-store couches into new nests

hoping

for the best

in this nest.

New Year’s Day

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Fresh, new-fallen snow

on New Year’s Day

is such an obvious metaphor you almost hate to use it.

But the snow falls

without regard for the writer’s desire for originality

and the new year comes anyway

promising its illusory freshness

welcoming us

into its possibilities.

Reflections on Success

It’s the end of another year. Maybe — depending on whom you ask — it’s the end of a decade. It’s certainly a moment to look backward in reflection and forward in anticipation.

Ten years ago, in December 2009, I posted the following video blog, reflecting about the fairly successful writing year I’d had in 2009. It’s about how, as writers, we are constantly moving the goalposts, creating new definitions of success so that we never feel like we’ve really achieved our goals.

As I re-watch this now, I think two things. I think:

“That really is the problem, isn’t it? It’s so hard to just enjoy the successes you’ve achieved without constantly beating yourself up over what you didn’t accomplish, or still could.”
“Where is that red sweater now? I really liked that for wearing at Christmas time. Did I give it away?”

But some things have changed for me in 10 years, besides losing or possibly giving away a perfectly good Christmas sweater. Personal things have changed, of course — our two kids have grown up, my mom has passed away, our dog died and we got a new dog. I tried quitting my day job for a semester to focus on writing, and loved the time off but realized that financially, I’m not ready to do that on a long-term basis yet (the aforementioned two kids still being in college has something to do with that) and I’m lucky to have a day job to go back to that I love (still the same one I had in 2009).

One of the biggest changes, though, has been in my approach to writing and to success. And I think it all began with a blog post I wrote about a duck. That was back in 2012, and I was thinking a lot about what constitutes “success” for me as a writer. Is it enough to be a medium-sized duck paddling about in a small puddle (my puddle being the local literary scene) or did I want to strive for the Big Pond (national and international fame and success!) and risk getting hit by a car crossing the road on the way there?

I maybe straining the duck analogy here, but such were my thoughts in 2012.

In 2015, I turned 50. And I thought a lot, that year, about what it means to be a 50-year-old writer, about being more than half a lifetime past the age at which anyone could be pleasantly surprised by my early success, about how I wanted to spend my time and energies in the remaining years of my writing life (which I hope will continue into, like, at least my 70s, but you never know, do you?).

I made a very conscious decision back in 2015, which I didn’t talk a whole lot about at the time but which grew out of that “never satisfied” video from 2009 and the duck blog post from 2012 and many other similar thoughts. It was this: I wanted to focus on being the best duck I could be in my little pond. By 2015 I had three books of local historical fiction published with regional press Breakwater Books. My career writing inspirational fiction with a Christian press was behind me (because of changes at that press: they were no longer publishing the kinds of things I wrote, and anyway I had written most of those stories that I had good ideas for, so I was OK with moving on). I had put a lot of time and energy into querying agents, etc., and trying to get a wider, more mainstream market for my books, but nothing clicked. There was no magic moment where I could say “And that, kids, was when I found success, which just proves you should never give up!!” 

I’ve heard a lot of writers say things like that, but only when their story ends with a major bestseller and usually a movie deal as well. And what I realize the year I turned 50 was: not every writer’s story is going to end that way. Most of us — including me — are going to have middling levels of success, and are either going to learn to be content with that, or beat ourselves out trying for something bigger.

At 50, I decided I was going to be in the “content” category. Of all the decisions I made in the decade of the 20-teens, this is the one that’s been the biggest game-changer and brought me the most happiness.

[image error]Who I am? I’m a writer who writes historical fiction based in, published in, and mostly read in Newfoundland and Labrador. My fifth novel with Breakwater Books, A Roll of the Bones, came out this fall. It’s the first in a planned trilogy, which is something new and exciting for me, and already in the two months it’s been on bookshelves, people have been telling me they’re reading and loving it.

I’m still exploring other types of writing, other pathways, as well. Twice this decade, when I’ve had a story to tell that didn’t fit into the “NL historical fiction” category, I’ve self-published a book: What You Want in 2015 and Prone to Wander in 2019. I love both those novels and I’ve learned a lot from self-publishing them, and I haven’t ruled out the possibility of self-publishing again when I have another story that seems like it would fit that niche.

I set a goal for myself in 2019 to learn to write plays, because I’ve always loved the theatre and never written for it. I took a wonderful class from Robert Chafe (Newfoundland’s greatest living playwright and a brilliant teacher) and wrote a very short play that, combined with pieces by two of my friends, found a home in the St. John’s Short Play Festival this year. And yes, I’m writing more plays in 2020!

So I am happy, and busy, and stretching my limits and trying new things. What I’m not doing is querying agents anymore, or trying to figure out how to “make it big.” As far as is humanly possible, I’ve stopped agonizing over why someone else’s book is selling better than mine, or why they got nominated for an award I didn’t. While that spark of discontent is deep in the writer’s nature and I’ll probably never entirely stamp it out, I feel very differently about these things than I did when I made that video in 2009. I believe I’ve defined what I want “success” to look like within my own writing career, and that’s the definition I’m striving to reach. It may not involve Giller Prizes and international best-seller lists. It involves visiting a lot of local book clubs and hearing readers say, “I loved this book!” a lot. Most important, it’s my own definition of success and it’s working for me.

As you embark into the 2020s, I hope you are crafting your own definitions of success and moving, even with baby steps, towards them.

Come From Away. Then … Go Back Home?

For a few gloriously warm and mostly-sunny days — the summer days we’ve all been waiting for — near the end of July 2019, a gentleman from Texas who shares my last name (but is no relation, as far as we know) briefly became Newfoundland’s most celebrated tourist.

Preston Morgan became a fan of Newfoundland and Labrador — and a long-distance friend to many Newfoundlanders — by following and engaging with lots of Newfoundlanders on Twitter. When he, his wife, and their daughter finally made their dream visit to Newfoundland last week, they were greeted by reasonably good weather, stunning scenery, and friendly people — all the things a summer tourist should expect. Preston met in real-life some folks (like me) that he’d chatted with online. And the Morgans responded warmly, posting pictures of their travels on Twitter and enthusing about the beauty of everything they saw.

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This is me looking WEIRDLY INTENSE (no idea why) with Preston and Louise at the Victoria Park Lantern Fest. (Photo credit: Emma Cole)

In short, Preston and his family seem to have had a true “Come From Away” experience — the same kind of experience celebrated in the award-winning Broadway musical now playing on three continents. That musical is based on the experience of a group of travellers who, far from choosing to visit Newfoundland on a dream vacation, were stranded here for several days after US planes were grounded following the 9/11 attacks. As many of us remember, the citizens of Gander and other Newfoundland communities rose to the occasion with warmth and generosity, opening homes, hearts and wallets to help the stranded passengers.

It’s something we’ve always been known for and always been proud of: the kindness with which we welcome visitors. You see this attitude celebrated not only in Preston Morgan’s Twitter feed and on the stage of Come From Away: it’s present in one of the first local songs I can ever remember hearing as a child (“There’s No Price Tags on the Doors in Newfoundland”) and in some of my favourite This Hour Has 22 Minutes skits (like this one about sending in Canadian Forces to help Newfoundlanders after a storm, or another about a man trying to “survive” in the Newfoundland wilderness).

We’re not the only place famous for this, of course, but welcoming visitors and making them feel at home has always been a proud part of our culture. But does our welcome depend on the knowledge that the visitors will, eventually, go back home?

Sometimes it seems like it. Even white, English-speaking “mainlanders” from the rest of Canada or the U.S. — people externally indistinguishable from the average Newfoundlander except by accent — often report feeling that they never quite “fit in,” even after years of living here. “Come From Away” is a great title for a musical about how welcoming we are, but still being called a “CFA” after you’ve bought a home, lived and worked here for several years, can start to feel a little unwelcoming. I’ve spoken to many people who shared that feeling.

And what if the newcomer isn’t white, or doesn’t speak English as a first language? While many still find Newfoundland and Labrador a warm and welcoming place, others can testify to a darker side of our tight-knit community.

A friend and fellow-writer, Prajwala Dixit, has written frequently in the local press over the last year about diversity and the immigrant experience in Newfoundland. And while she has found a warm welcome in many corners of our community, she rarely has a piece published online without receiving numerous comments that are all variations on, “Why don’t you go back where you came from??”

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A brown-skinned immigrant who dares to question any aspect of our warm and insular little community, who has the audacity to suggest that maybe there are things we can do better, will quickly be met with “If you don’t like it here, you can leave!” Ask Prajwala. Ask community activist and recent political candidate Hasan Hai.

The more a newcomer is willing to put themselves “out there” in the public eye, the more Newfoundlanders are willing to show the ugly side of our strong sense of local identity — the side that will never be celebrated in a Broadway musical.

A brief glance (if you’re feeling tough enough to handle it) through the comments section of any local news site or Facebook page will reveal them: the bigots; the isolationists; the outright white supremacists. The cost of having a close-knit community that has grown strong through independence and hardship is that some of us want to preserve that “apart-ness” at all costs.

Sometimes, the cost is bigotry.

I’ve checked out those spaces. I’ve read those comments. They’re ugly, but we can’t turn away and pretend they don’t exist.

Yes, we welcome visitors. We open our un-price-tagged doors; we invite them in for cups of tea; we let them kiss the cod and become honorary Newfoundlanders. Many of us are willing to swing the doors wider: to let newcomers (of any skin colour; of any language; of any religion) move in next door, work at the desk next to us, contribute to our community.

But not everyone is willing to keep those doors open. Lots of us are glad to see the tourists (and their money!) come into town, but only if they leave again when vacation is over. Some are willing to welcome newcomers, but only if they look, speak, and worship like we do.

And in a province where our dwindling and aging population is one of the biggest barriers to our economic growth, those attitudes are not only bigoted, narrow-minded and offensive. They’re also … just plain stupid.

 

The Answer is Not “Buy More Stuff”

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Instagram likes to sell me stuff. Occasionally it even works: I’ve clicked on a company’s pic and ended up buying a product from them (only once, but still). And knowing my generally leftie, aging-hippie-mom profile, it’s not surprising that the image on the left, above, keeps cropping up in my Insta feed.

It’s from a company that sells reusable products intended to cut down on the use of disposable plastics. I’m not going to name and shame the company here because they seem to be a small business genuinely trying to do their best to make a buck. But I will use their ad as an example of capitalism’s misguided attempt to solve big problems by selling us products that fit our image of who we’d like to be, rather than actually addressing the problem.

The company that produced this ad targeted it at the right person. I do care about the overuse of disposable plastics, and I think reducing our dependence on those products is a key step to a more livable planet. And I think consumer choice is important here, because businesses big and small — like fast-food chains and coffee shops that automatically hand over plastic cutlery packaged in plastic sleeves — won’t make changes unless they see a customer demand for those changes.

And yes, I am the crotchety old hippie mom who brings her travel mug to Starbucks, her reusable bags to the grocery store, even her stainless-steel straw for her cold drink in summer. So it’s understandable that somebody’s algorithm also thought I’d like a complete set of reusable stainless steel cutlery and a tidy cloth bag to put it in. Ready to slip into my backpack and pull out whenever I’m at a place that offers me plastic cutlery.

Except: here’s the thing. I already HAVE stainless steel cutlery. Pretty sure you do too. At home. In that drawer in the kitchen. Like the stuff pictured on the right, above.

What’s wrong with just slipping a knife, fork and spoon from my kitchen set into my bag and hitting the road?

Since metal cutlery is something virtually every home-owning or apartment-dwelling person in North America already has, how could there conceivably be a market for single sets? How could anyone who wants to reduce plastic use possibly be duped into buying this product?

If you know of a legitimate reason why the single set of cutlery pictured above is somehow superior to just grabbing a knife, spoon and fork from the kitchen drawer, hit me up in the comments. Otherwise, I’m just going to say: this is peak capitalist craziness.

Our entire economic system is driven by the engine of making people wantthings they don’t actually need. I admit I was briefly seduced by the attractive design of the cutlery in the ad on the left. It’s so pretty! Using it would make me feel like I’m helping solve the plastic problem. Plus, if I used it at Starbucks, people might glance at it and say, “Oh, how cool!” They would know I am Environmentally Conscious and Concerned About the Right Things.

As opposed to pulling out my flatware from home, which, frankly, is going to make me look a little like a nutty old bag lady.

If your concern is truly what’s best for the environment, there is no conceivable metric by which buying a new product — one that had to be manufactured and then shipped to you — is better for our planet than using something you already have around the house.

What’s being sold in this ad (and countless others like it) is not a product that saves on disposable plastic: it’s an image. A picture of who you want to be. A visible cue to what kind of person you want others to see when they look at you. A smug sense that you have done something, however tiny, to Make the World a Better Place.

We are so hard-wired to the idea that the solution to any problem is to Buy More Stuff, that we don’t critically interrogate our purchases as often as we should. T-shirt that promotes feminist ideals, made by women in a Bangladeshi sweatshop under unsafe conditions? I’ve bought it; I’ve worn it. Sipping non-fair-trade coffee from a mug that promotes a socially-conscious anti-poverty message? Guilty as charged.

I’m as susceptible to that desire to look good, to package my social concerns in a pretty bundle and slip them into a drawstring cotton bag, as the next aging hippie mom. I’ve definitely fallen prey to that urge a few times.

But not this time. This time I’m putting a set of my kitchen flatware in my backpack and going off to get my morning coffee and bagel, looking like the crotchety old future bag lady I am.

I encourage you to do the same.

New Kids on the Block (if your block includes a public school)

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Recently the Ontario Education Minister decided that larger class sizes in public schools were actually good for kids because they build resilience. While the Doug Ford government in Ontario may be a special kind of stupid, governments in other places, while not stating it as blatantly, have shown a callous disregard for what teachers, parents and students have to say about what’s needed in public school classrooms.

If, like me, you haven’t been in school yourself in nearly 40 years, and if you haven’t had your own kids in public school, you may think, “What are teachers whining about? Back in the day, Miss Belchington had 30 kids in my Grade Nine class and she kept us all in line with a stern glare. And we turned out just fine!”

Here’s the news: public schools have changed since you were in Miss Belchington’s class. A lot.

I finished high school 37 years ago, and I’ve been teaching for 23 of the years since then, but most of my teaching has not been in the public school system. For the last 13 years I’ve been teaching in an adult-education program where we serve young adults, many of whom have dropped out of the public system or failed to find success there. My knowledge of today’s public school classrooms comes from talking to my own students about their school experiences, and from observing the classrooms of my own two children, who both graduated recently from a public school in the centre of our small Canadian city. It also comes from talking to friends who are teaching in the public system.

Putting all these pieces together, I’ve learned a few things.

The main thing I’ve learned is that there are a lot of kids in class today that weren’t there 30 years ago. They’re all good kids. And the reasons why they’re in school are all good reasons.

But the presence of those kids means that the dynamic of the classroom has changed.

To illustrate what I mean, let me take you into a fictional ninth-grade classroom, somewhere in North America, and introduce you to three theoretical students. None of them were in the classroom when I was in Grade 9, exactly forty years ago in 1979. And the presence of these new kids on the block changes things.

1. Emily is severely hearing-impaired. She uses assistive technology to understand what the teacher is saying, and requires accommodations, including a separate room and extra time for testing, to complete her classwork. Intellectually, she has above-average ability, but apart from the things she just can’t hear, she has some gaps in her education due to material she missed earlier in her education.

In 1979, Emily wouldn’t have been in Grade 10 with me. She would have attended an institution across town called the School for the Deaf. Like a lot of specialized schools, the Newfoundland School for the Deaf no longer exists; it closed in 2010. The movement in schools over the last 20 years has been towards inclusion — bringing students like Emily into the regular classroom rather than segregating them in separate classrooms and buildings.

Inclusion is absolutely a good thing. People with disabilities need to be able to participate more fully in society, including in school. But when hearing-impaired Emily, and Shaina with her wheelchair, and non-verbal autistic Josh, are all in the classroom (sometimes with student assistants) along with 27 other students, more is required of everyone — the teacher, the disabled students, and the rest of the students. Inclusion without adequate support doesn’t help kids with disabilities; in some cases, it further marginalizes them as teachers and fellow students see them as a problem or a distraction.

2. Abdel and his family came from Syria as refugees in 2016. English is his second language, and he’s learning fast, but he requires an ESL teacher although he is in the regular classroom for part of the day. Abdel also has PTSD because of the loss of his home in the Syrian war and his experiences in a refugee camp, but nobody has diagnosed this because of the language barrier.

In 1979, Abdel wouldn’t have been in my Grade 9 classroom — he would have been back in Syria. When I was growing up in Newfoundland we had virtually no immigrant population. Even in other places, where there was already a diverse population 30 years ago, immigration is on the rise.

3. Robby is bored with school. He loves working with his hands and is great at anything mechanical, but he hates book work. He has some learning disabilities — dysgraphia and dyscalculia — though neither is severe enough that he’s ever been identified for any accommodations. Robby just knows that he hates school. But he loves helping his uncle, who owns a garage, tear down and rebuild engines.

In 1979, Robby started the school year in my Grade 9 class, but he dropped out in November. His uncle had a job opening at the garage, and Robby went to work. Today he owns the garage and is making a good living as a respected member of the local business community.

2019 Robby doesn’t have the options that 1979 Robby had. He can be a mechanic, sure — if he graduates from high school and does a course at a vocational school. Society has changed: there are far fewer jobs available for people without formal education, and we require almost everyone to have a high-school diploma for entry level jobs. Robby’s dream job of fixing cars has changed too: so much of the work now involves computers that he needs a different skill set.

Because society and the labour market have changed, we’re keeping a lot of young people in school who used to leave before completing high school. That includes Robby, who’s bored in a desk, and Janelle, whose anxiety makes it hard for her to get through the classroom door each morning, and Jessica, who’s unexpectedly pregnant at 15.

Keeping more kids in school is not just a good thing — it’s a great thing! But accommodating kids who find traditional learning a challenge, and kids with mental health issues, and young single moms, and all kinds of other students who once would have dropped out, also creates new challenges for that classroom teacher with her 30 students.

Inclusion is good. Immigration is good. Preventing drop-out is good. But none of these things can be successfully achieved without cost.

The cost can’t be teacher burnout and lower quality of education for kids. That doesn’t work. The cost has to be a greater investment in public education, smaller class sizes, and more resources to meet the varying needs of the classroom of 2019 — along with all the new kids on the block.

Prone to Wander (or, my vanity project that you might also enjoy)

[image error]Last year, one of my favourite musicians went on a tour he titled the “Ridiculously Self-Indulgent, Ill-Advised Vanity Tour” — the idea being that on this tour he was basically just going to play the stuff he wanted to play, not the big hits but the stuff only hardcore fans would know and care about (no I didn’t get tickets to it and yes I’m still bitter, thanks for asking). This year, with many major writing projects on the go, I’ve decided to release what might be my own Ridiculously Self-Indulgent, Ill-Advised Vanity Book.” It’s not my usual field of historical fiction (don’t worry, there’s more of that coming soon) — but it’s a book I’ve always wanted to write and, after writing, always wanted to share with readers.

But for a long time, I didn’t. Share it, that is.

I’ll tell you a bit about it and then you can decide if you want to read it.

In the summer of 2004 I sat down to write a piece that had been in my head for a long time. It started with a well-known, maybe even hackneyed trope: a middle-aged man is driving on the highway when an out-of-control truck speeds toward him in his lane. As he’s about to get slammed by the tractor-trailer, the man’s whole life flashes before his eyes.

The flashbacks take him back to being a teenager in a very specific time and place: St. John’s, Newfoundland, attending the Seventh-day Adventist church and school there in the early 1980s. Why yes: the very same time, place, and circumstance in which I grew up.

I could never write a memoir; writing the novel that became Prone to Wander is as close as I will ever come. The characters and many of their experiences are pure fiction, but the setting in which they live is absolutely real, and numerous details, experiences, quirks and incidents are lifted straight from real life, though often in a different context than how they happened. Novelists always borrow, and sometimes steal, from their own lives: in this case I ruthlessly looted and pillaged mine.

I have never written anything as quickly, and with as much passion, as I did the first draft of Prone to Wander, which was substantially finished by Christmas 2004. Partly this was because, unlike historical fiction, it required almost no research: I was following the dictum “write what you know” in the purest sense. I wrote about five young people — three women and two men — growing up in the same world I had, and about five lives that go in wildly different directions while the bonds of teenage friendship still hold them together.

So I finished the book in about … four months, maybe? And then I spent a year or two editing, revising, getting people to read it and give me opinions, honing, improving it … and then: nothing. I put it in a metaphorical drawer and didn’t send it to a publisher or anything. Although several of the early readers had really loved the book and connected with it strongly, I didn’t put it out into the world.

Why?

Partly because it didn’t fit with anything else I was doing at the time. In the early 2000s I was developing a career as a historical novelist along two different lines: I was writing fiction about women of the Bible for a Christian press and then, by 2009, I was writing historical fiction rooted here Newfoundland for a local publisher. Prone to Wander didn’t fit anywhere in that universe. Although personal faith and people’s relationship to a church were major themes, it certainly wasn’t a book that would be picked up by my Christian publisher — there was some swearing in it, and some “adult situations,” and it wasn’t going to ever sit on a shelf in a Christian bookstore. And while the Newfoundland setting might have endeared it to some local readers, it wasn’t the historical fiction I was becoming known for. 

The other part was: maybe it was a little too personal. Because even though none of the five characters (even Katie, the one who’s writing a book about the other four) is me — also, all of them are me. And again, that’s true of everything I write, everything most writers write — but it’s much more true when you’re also writing about your own world, your own time, your own place.

A couple of times I tried to use Prone to Wander as a query that might hook an agent, but nothing happened with that, and I wondered if maybe this project was just so personal to me that it was the book I had to write but that no-one else would ever read.

Now, nearly 15 years after I started writing it, I’m putting Prone to Wander out there in the world via self-publishing. Why, and why now?

Well, I still think it’s a good book, and I guess I keep coming back to those few early readers who loved it and found it resonated with them. I wrote about growing up Adventist in Newfoundland in the 80s, but I heard from people who grew up in independent fundamentalist churches in the US, and Roman Catholic in Latin America, and all kinds of other backgrounds, and something in the story touched a chord for each of those readers. Something about being raised in a strong faith and then exploring the world outside of it, which happens in a different way for Jeff, Katie, Julie, Liz and Dave, my five characters. People on all sorts of faith and non-faith journeys have found something in at least some of these characters that they can connect with.

Also, there’s something in this book that I don’t often get to do, which is to write about religion and faith in the way I want to write about it, the way I and people I know actually experience it.

It seems there are two major ways to write about faith in fiction. One is the way you write for Christian publishers, in which faith, while it may have some ups and downs, is always a positive good that will ultimately solve all your problems if you just accept God’s leading. The other way is the way it’s often portrayed in literary (and some commercial) mainstream fiction: faith is a restrictive, backward superstition held only by stupid people, and you’re lucky if you can break away from its abusive clutches and make a decent, God-free life for yourself.

Not every writer falls into one of those two categories, obviously. I love the ones who don’t. My greatest hero in this area is the late Chaim Potok. He wrote about the incredibly specific, narrow world of Hasidic Judaism, mostly in Brooklyn, New York — and yet his stories were completely universal. He wrote with an empathetic understanding that the same religion that was a source of strength and comfort for some of his characters could be a confining cage for others — and that these characters could love each other, and wrestle with their different perceptions of the faith.

I always wanted to write about Seventh-day Adventism the way Chaim Potok wrote about Hasidic Judaism. A story that would be both a love song to my community and a criticism of it. A story that would show how faith can be the lifeline one of my characters clings to even while the structures of that same religious organization are allowing her to suffer abuse. A story that would show how a young woman can be invited and inspired into ministry and then have that door slammed in her face by the church hierarchy. A story that … well, you get the idea. There are five characters and I don’t want to tell you all their stories. But if any of this connects with you at all, or even makes you curious … 

Well, you might want to pick up a copy of my ridiculously self-indulgent, ill-advised vanity book. Because maybe it’s not just for me, after all.

Right now it’s available via Amazon: there may be other channels eventually, and I know Amazon’s problematic, but it is the easiest way for a an indie writer to get a story into reader’s hands. You can order the paperback here or the e-book here.

If you read it, and it does anything for you at all, please leave me a review on Goodreads or Amazon or … I don’t know, write it on a piece of paper, put it in a bottle, and toss it in the sea. I’m trusting this book to find its way to the people who want and need to read it. That won’t be everyone … but if it’s you, now you know how to find it.