The Booktrap
  • Home
    • The Booktrap Gift Shop
    • Forum
  • Authors
    • Ken Alexopoulos
    • K. A. Angliss
    • R. J. Askew
    • Joe P. Attanasio
    • Jennifer Beilis
    • Sarah Jane Butfield
    • J. Cassidy
    • Chris-Jean Clarke
    • Lucinda E Clarke
    • Keith Dixon
    • Jacky Donovan
    • Thomas Duder
    • P.J. Fiala
    • W.D. Frank
    • Tom Greenwood
    • Jaq D. Hawkins
    • Jesamine James
    • S. A. Ledlie
    • Margaret Eleanor Leigh
    • Catherine Lockwood
    • Lela Markham
    • Khalid Muhammad
    • Mysti Parker
    • Alan Place
    • Paula K. Randall
    • Anthony Saunders
    • Paula Louise Shene
    • Thom Stark
    • O.N. Stefan
    • DB Stephens
    • Teddie Tzokas
    • Lynn Whyte-Heath
    • Simon Willis
  • Blogs
    • Paula's This and That Blog
    • Right Process
    • Book of the Week
  • Author Interviews
  • Readers' Resource
  • Review Our Books
  • Book Directory
    • Biographies
    • Children's
    • Crime
    • General Fiction
    • Historical Fiction
    • Horror
    • Humour
    • Non-Fiction
    • Poetry
    • Romance
    • Science Fiction & Fantasy
    • Thriller
    • Travel
    • True Life
    • Woman's Fiction
    • Young Adult
  • Authors
  • Collins Emeghara
  • Every Child Lifeline

A Lot of Church With A Little Bit of Pot

9/29/2014

1 Comment

 
Picture
Dear M (I like that.  I feel like 007 communicating with HQ),

      Before I get on with my descent into the seedy underworld of illicit drugs, which I know you are all just dying to read about, I thought I would answer your question about my Catholic upbringing. I can’t stand it when a question is posed and then never answered. I suppose there is some sort of neurotic disorder associated with this, but I don’t have my wife’s compulsion to search the internet and find out. We can call it ‘Obsessing over Questions left Unanswered Disorder’, so when I blame OQUD for my sudden shift to a tangent that has this blog on its head, you can only blame yourself. I’m simply going back a few posts to answer a question that is still bugging the hell out of me.


      It’s probably a bit of a hyperbole to call what I experienced as a ‘strict Catholic upbringing’, (I’m a writer; that’s what we are good at) but Catholicism was certainly a part of my early memories.  My mother went to mass every Sunday and made her children do the same. My father must have not needed as much redemption, because he only went to church on Easter and Christmas.  Judging by the huge swell of bodies during the Easter and Christmas masses, I would imagine that a good many American Catholics only need God twice a year too. My brother, my older sister and I all went to a Sunday school program called ‘Catechism’, but by the time my younger sister, “the accident”, was born, my mom had become a twice a year Catholic and Catechism was just an unpleasant memory. My father was a strict disciplinarian, but it had little to do with Catholicism. My parents didn’t invite a priest over to cast the demon of rebellion out me, nor have I had the back of my hands beaten with a ruler by a nun. And, believe it or not, I have never been molested by a priest. My experience with the Catholic Church was tolerable compared to most stories you hear.

      Besides boring the hell out of me in Catechism, I remember becoming almost comatose with monotony during the mass each week. We went to a very old Church that had a Gothic feel. Thick stained glass windows allowed little daylight to make its way into the long rows of wooden pews. Candles made the pulpit glow and incense filled the air. The monotone chanting; altar boys walking around in dresses swinging incense burners at the end of a rope; a bald priest speaking in Latin; pipe organ music so loud it shakes the pews – it was all designed to instill a sense of awe and respect in the parishioner, but for me it made time stand still. I couldn’t wait for it to end.  It seemed like my mom couldn’t wait either. She would grab us just after the priest left the pulpit and we would high-tail it for the door to be the first out of the parking lot. She never stopped to say ‘hi’ or ‘good-day’ to anyone.  You would think that she would want more for the dollar she put in the offering plate each week, but I guess she wasn’t there to socialize.


      The only fond memory I have of it all was the rare occasion when my mother let me slip out in the middle of a service to use the restroom. I was born with an unusually small bladder, so I almost always had to pee. Mom knew this, but she would usually scold me for not emptying it before we sat down. I wonder if that is why I felt God's presence as I exited the side door of the church and climbed down the cracked cement steps to the dank, dirty public toilet beneath the parsonage across from the sanctuary; I felt as if the Divine had softened my mother's resolve. 

      I would sit down on the dirty porcelain throne (standing would go too fast) and watch the crickets scramble, while I pondered life and why the people in the building next to me had to listen to a man speaking in a language that no one understood so that they could find God.  I never heard the voice of God, no image of the Virgin Mary appeared on the wall, nor did I find the greater meaning of life, but I did feel at peace and a bit of harmony with the critters crawling on the floor all around me. Fear of my mother's wrath at staying on the toilet for the remainder of the mass would drive me back into the mundane, but I would find church a little more tolerable until I had to do it all again in a week.

      Now, fast-forward six or more years to a fourteen-year-old boy who has found his place among stoners. Actually, the first group of druggies to embrace me was jocks.  We had moved to the country and the closest neighbor with kids our age was also the largest farmer of the area. He had three boys that were all tall, strong, athletic and handsome – the type of boys that I could only dream of being. The oldest was my brother’s age and the biggest drug dealer in the area. The youngest became my best friend. We all had dirt bikes, which we would ride until the sun set every day during the summer (after getting stoned, of course). Life was great, that is until I got into high school and got busted for smoking pot behind the boy’s room window, but that will have to wait for another ‘letter’. I’ve used up more than my share of this blog already.

      So I’ll hand it off to you, my dear friend from another world. I am anxiously awaiting learning more about your life. Did your mother ever remarry? Did you ever see your father again? How many siblings do you have? Now you have a few OQUDs to blame. ;)


Your friend,

DB


Dear DB,

That really made me laugh, especially the bit about your father not requiring as much redemption as your mother, and American Catholics only needing God twice a year. I liked the stuff about Catechism classes, and the coma-inducing Latin pageant of  frock-wearing priests and altar boys too. I have a profound aversion to men in frocks, in fact. We have them in the Anglican tradition as well. It’s a seemingly irrational aversion, though, because I don’t have the same problem with men in kilts.

Most of the problems with institutional religion – the boredom, the irrelevance - can be traced  back to doctrine, in my view. And doctrine often as not comes down to that perpetual human desire to control both other human beings and the Transcendent. You might as well try and put clouds in a box.  I am not here, says the empty box. And then the atheist comes and points at the empty box and says, where is your God?

Back in the day when I studied church doctrine for more than a decade, (which I like to think earns me the right to talk about these matters), my bookshelves groaned beneath the weight of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, the Documents of Vatican II and the Code of Canon Law. I do not think it coincidence that these are three of the most boring books in the history of publishing. So boring are they, in fact, they do not even make it onto Goodreads’ list of Most Boring Books Ever. (I’ve just checked.) At the time I did  not realize how short life is, otherwise I would have read the works on the Goodreads Boring List instead, a list which includes some unlikely and surprising candidates like Moby Dick and Anna Karenina.

I did see my father again, to answer one of your questions. We didn’t last long in England, Polly, my middle brother and I. (I have two brothers, the older one had long since fled the toxicity of the family home.) When next I saw Roderick, he’d married his new wife. They’d  had to wait two years for her to reach the legal age for marriage, and he’d been ‘defrocked’ in the meanwhile because of the whole dodgy business. An interesting word that: defrocked.

Perhaps that’s where my issue with men in frocks  stems from. The frocks represent the kind of holiness that you slip into on Sundays: the church’s equivalent to make-up: papering the cracks, concealing the wrinkles, the sags and the broken blood-vessels. But make-up doesn’t fool anyone for very long, least of all God.  

And that’s my religious rant for the day. I could rant on about religion ad infinitum, and will quite possibly keep trying to deflect the conversation in that direction. I see it as my life calling: ranting on about religion and losing friends and alienating people in the process.

M.


My dearest Margaret,

I love that you found humor (humour for you British types) in my description of my view of the
Catholic Church, but I am sorely disappointed
that we didn't hear much about your experience with the church, or with life, for that matter. I want to see the world you grew-up in and feel how it affected you. I want all of the dirt and ice cream that make you the person you are today. I imagine our readers would like the same. Don't hold back and I promise to do the same. (If you haven't figured it out yet, I will even if you don't)

Waiting to feel some dirt,
DB



1 Comment

Voices from the Grave

9/22/2014

1 Comment

 
Picture
Good morning Mr. America,

Lately, it seems my every second sentence begins with the word “I”.  That’s the trouble with all this promote-your-books-till-you-drop stuff: it breeds enervating attacks of the screaming me-me’s. So now, since I am about as sick and tired of writing the word “I” as it’s possible to be, I’m going to change tack and talk about someone else.

 Polly.  My extraordinary mother. Although I didn’t realize she was extraordinary until she’d gone. She was a writer, was Polly, a proper writer, with proper published books. You won’t have heard of any of them, mind, they didn’t exactly make her famous.To give you an idea what they were like, here’s a picture of the cover of her first one
:  
 

Yes, I know, not exactly best-selling material, not even in 1952 when it was published. For a preview of the innocent thrills awaiting inside, (I am sure you can’t wait to find out), the blurb begins: “When three of the girls of St. Jessica’s discover an old derelict garden, far up on the hillside behind the school, Caroline, the new Junior Captain, sets her heart on keeping it a secret...”  


It doesn’t get more innocently thrilling than that, does it? Perhaps I should republish it as a Kindle book. You never know, it might just take off and spark a renaissance. I’ll let you know if I do, so you can buy it, and tell all your friends to buy it...

 
I digress. More books followed, but then Polly met Roderick. While meeting Roderick may have been good for expanding the world’s population of unsuccessful writers,  it wasn’t too good for her own writing. She wrote just two more books after that. One of these was the biography of a bishop. He was an interesting bishop as bishops go, but a biography of a bishop was even less likely to make Polly famous than the tale of Caroline’s desire to keep the secret garden secret.


It wasn’t her modest success as a writer that defined Polly, at least not in my eyes. It was her spirit of endurance, and the unwavering optimism with which she met and surmounted the many challenges life threw at her. There was the Liverpool blitz of World War II to endure, for example, and that was speedily followed by tuberculosis. After nine months in a sanitorium, Polly emerged with just one lung. It was a handicap that never stopped her doing anything, though, and she did plenty. By the time of her death she had become one caravan shy of a gypsy, for we calculated she moved house or town, country or continent, more than 90 times in her lifetime – that’s more than one move a year.  

And then she was no stranger to poverty, sometimes going hungry, so the rest of us could eat, especially during the period Roderick was training to be the worst vicar in the history of vicardom. She was no stranger to heartache either, not least the heartache of being traded in for a younger, sexier model after eighteen years of marriage. 

If  I had to sum Polly up in one sentence, it would be this: She knew how to live and she knew how to love.

Next time I’ll go back to what happened after Roderick ran off with the Sunday School teacher, and Polly bundled my middle brother and I onto a boat heading for England. We didn’t linger there, though. We had that average of one move a year to maintain, after all.


I look forward to hearing from you.

 

Till next time,

Your friend,

Margaret.


 
Hello Margie,

It was a pleasure to read about your mother and how she inspired you to write. She sounds like quite a woman. I would like to share the same sort of inspiring stories about my own mother, but it is not to be. She was a woman who loved her children, was a faithful partner to a difficult man, and she was a hard worker, but she did not inspire her children to greater things. I feel bad about publicly exposing my parents' failures, especially since my Aunt, her sister, is one of our readers, but I won't pretend that my childhood was peachy-keen and all my and my siblings psychosis are
all of our own doing. The fact is, the four of us are all terribly insecure and we know where the fault lies.

My mother, God rest her soul, rarely offered up a word of praise. If she were still alive, I would most likely hear: "Oh, that's nice. Did you know that so-and-so's boy is a published author with a book on the New York Times' best seller list?" Or: "Well, if that was the best you could do, then that is fine." My father wasn't any better; he would analyze anything I did and then tell me how it could be improved. I've inherited his critical eye. If not for my wonderful wife, and her undying praise for our children, my kids would be just as messed-up as me. I love my parents, because that's what children do, and I certainly could have had worse (drunk, abusive and negligent parents abound), but I do secretly envy your mother's spirit and how she influenced you.


It's funny, looking back - I didn't discover my love for writing until my late forties, but I do remember wanting to write a novel when I was around eleven.
I put a bunch of loose line-paper pages in a folder and wrote one paragraph, which promptly went on top of the hallway dresser, never to be touched again. It was thrown-out by my mother weeks later. I'm sure she wrote it off as another one of my "hair-brained schemes".

So I guess I've now painted an even more complete picture of a boy who was ripe for the taking.
I wanted affirmation and to be a part of something more than anything. Drugs were my gateway to acceptance. Jocks had to have muscles and skills. Brainiacs had to have excellent grades. All a stoner needed was a joint, that he was willing to share, and he was in like Flynn.

After those fateful words from my brother,
"now you're cool!", I dove head first into a world that demanded more and more of my allegiance. Every faction has a set of rules, and the drug culture is no exception. The first rule is: "parents don't know shit - don't trust 'em". I had no problems with that. I had lost respect for their opinions long ago. The second rule was a bit foreign to me. "Never, ever - in a million years - tell the truth". Honesty is another one of those pesky character traits that gets me into trouble. But I was committed to the cause, and soon I had such a tangled web of lies spun that I didn't even recognize the truth anymore. It was the third rule that made me begin to question my lifestyle. "Everything you do is always better when you are stoned". But I would experience a lot of heartache and even some good times before I came to that realization. We have much to 'chat' about until then.

I fear I have gotten long-winded, so I will sign-off until next week.

Your American friend,
DB


Hi DB,

What struck me most about your (searingly-honest-as-ever) letter was the way your very vocation got thrown out with the rubbish at the age of eleven. That was something that should never, ever have happened. I was struck also, and not for the first time,  by the power of  the spoken word, and how its effects can linger, for good or for ill,  long after  the utterer has gone.

I was struck afresh too by my good fortune in having a Polly in my life to encourage me always. She didn’t even stop doing so when she died. She quite literally appeared to me in a dream a few days after she'd passed away, saying: “You must never ever stop writing.”  She would say that to you too, if she was still here to say it.  Of that I have no doubt. And speaking of writing, what are you working on at the moment? Have you started  a new book yet?

M.


M,

I shouldn't go on blogging without answering at least one of your questions. (I haven't forgotten your inquiry
concerning my Catholic upbringing) The answer is a short "No". I have completed a work that I am neglecting to rewrite, but my personal demons have prevented me from starting anything else. Sometimes I feel more like a mole digging in the dark than I do a writer. If not for this blog, I would only use my computer for surfing and Facebooking. I need to get off my arse and rewrite my latest, but every time I try, self-doubt and apathy get the best of me. Woe is me. Would you come to my pity party? I'll bake a cake. :)

DB


P.S. As far as my 'vocation' goes, writing is more of a hobby right now. If we had to depend on it for a living, we would be on the streets.


 


1 Comment

A letter to My New Pen-Pal

9/15/2014

0 Comments

 
My new friend Margaret,

First, and most importantly, do you have a nickname? I’ve been known as Donnie, Don, Donald, Blaine, Donald Blaine, DB and Radar (don’t ask). As we are attempting to become friends via a blog (maybe we will set a trend), I would like to address you as if I had known you all your life. We Americans are pushy that way – just ask Jes. Of course, the millions of our fans and readers will learn your secret pet-name, so you might want to send it to me in an email instead. I promise to only share it on Facebook and Twitter.

So, last week, I foolishly promised to share how my dysfunctional family life lead to rebellion against my father. Before I tell you how I abandoned my strict Catholic upbringing for a life of drug abuse and rock n’ roll, I think it important to reveal another part of my personality, which contributed to my downward spiral.

I was born with a strong sense of equality and fairness. An example of this character flaw comes flooding back to my mind every time I hear the word ‘racism’. I grew up in the late sixties and early seventies. America was just coming out of a very race-charged period and most people had some racial biases, whether they wanted to admit it or not. My father was no exception. He used the ‘N-word’ as if that was the accepted term for black people. I don’t want you, or the two people who might read this, to think that my father was a tyrant or horrible man. He was no different than most white men of his day in this regard. He later stopped using that word and even had black friends. It was as much about the time and our country learning to accept men as men, as it was anything else. We have come a long way.

Anyway, I had just started the third grade in a new school and I made a good friend, who happened to be black. We got along better than anyone I can remember at that time in my life and I wanted my family to meet him – big mistake. I invited him home after school one day. Everything went fine… until he left to go home.

As soon as he walked out, my dad became apoplectic. He looked at me as if I had betrayed him beyond hope. He couldn’t believe that I would invite “one of them” into his house. He warned me that “they” would rob us blind and made me feel like I had opened up our family to thievery and deceit just by bringing a “little nigger boy” into the house.

That was the beginning of the end of the respect I had for my father’s authority. I planned to continue my friendship with the black kid behind my father’s back, but racism from my friend’s father took that option away. My new buddy told me the next day that his father blew-up when he found out that he had spent the afternoon at a white-boy’s house and told him that we could no longer hang out – even at school. I guess he wasn’t as willing to rebel as I was.

This did contribute to my demise as a loving son, but it was not the point I was trying to make. Please be patient – I’m a writer; I like to set a stage.

Well, the natural civility that I was born with didn’t serve me well when it came to the teen years. Young men love to compete in everything they do. I too am very competitive, and I also enjoy sports, the problem is, teenage boys don’t just want to win, they want to destroy and humiliate. I despise this side of my gender. Most women (or girls) will claim to hate it when males act this way, but the strutting rooster usually gets the hen. It didn’t help things that I was born slight in stature and was late to develop physically.

Do you get the picture now? I entered into the formative teen years as a boy who had given up gaining approval from a father he had lost respect for. Hormones were raging, yet the opposite sex wouldn’t give me the time of day because I wouldn’t act like a caveman and I still looked like a child. Is it any wonder that, when my older brother asked me if I would like to smoke some pot, and then told me that I was “cool” because I did, that I jumped with both feet into a world that accepted me as I was, just because I liked to get high? I’m sure I’m not the only one who fell into that trap.

More next week about the high-times of my teen years; I can’t wait to hear about how you coped with losing your father to divorce.

Your American pen-pal,

DB Stephens




Well hello there American pen-pal,

Thinking about former nicknames brought back a flood of memories, and not all of them flattering. At primary school they called me ‘Tortoise’ because of the way I walked around reading a book and bumping into things. Apparently this made me look  like one.

Then in high school a friend nicknamed me Maggot. I hoped and prayed that one wouldn’t stick, but of course it did and it took years to shake off. My first real boyfriend used to call me by my surname. “Oy Whibley, do you want to go out Saturday night?” Very romantic.

 Nowadays people call me Marg. So you can call me whatever you like, so long as it’s not Maggot. You can even call me Al. I always did see angels in the architecture.

Which brings me to the point in your letter I’d like to respond to, a whole universe that you skipped over in a single sentence: the bit about the strict Catholic upbringing. I wasn’t expecting a strict Catholic upbringing to come out of the closet. I am not sure why. Maybe I just don’t think of Americans as Catholics. 

So tell me more about that. I am fascinated by religion,  always have been, always will be. I am the person most likely to offend at a dinner party by ignoring the unwritten rule that people should never, ever talk about religion or politics in polite society. This thing about religion even got me fired from a job once. No kidding,  not an exaggeration. I wouldn’t shut up about it and everyone, including the boss, got so heartily sick and tired of me going on and on and on they found  an excuse to give me the heave-ho.

I am a lot more restrained these days, you will be relieved to hear, but even so, religion is in my veins, along with writing.  On my mother’s side of the family there were all these fiery Welsh preachers and evangelists. I am talking the Victorian era here, a time when travelling evangelists went round with great tents and set them up and preached to the masses. The masses didn’t have anything better to do on Sundays in those days, so they’d oblige by at least turning up. And then of course my father was a vicar, which meant every Sunday we were in church at least twice, plus several times during the week.

All this rubbed off on me. I don’t remember a time in early childhood when I wasn’t religious.  But then came the rupture of my parents’ divorce and I must have blamed God for that, because I didn’t speak to him for twelve years.

Instead, a bit like you, I turned to drugs and drink and got through more boyfriends than I had time to eat hot dinners. Then the party came screeching to a halt. I’d managed to get myself pregnant. Well, I didn’t get myself pregnant, of course, but nevertheless I was pregnant in the worst possible way:  alone, unmarried, and who is yonder man, heading for yonder hills as fast as his legs can carry him?

I’ve jumped ahead of myself now, left out lots and lots of things.  But that doesn’t matter. Next time I’ll go back and fill in some of the detail skipped.

I really enjoyed your letter, by the way. There was some powerful stuff in there.

Your pal from across the Atlantic
,


Al.





0 Comments

Please Welcome Margaret Eleanor Leigh!

9/9/2014

1 Comment

 
       With the hopes of getting this blog back to a regularity, I've asked another fine writer to fill in for Jes, who is now coping with full-blown cat infestation. The felines have her entire family in chains and are demanding a ransom. The problem is, they are demanding American cheese-spred to go over their kibble, but England is too snooty to import it. I'm trying to gather enough of the disgusting yellow goo on my own to free Jes and her kin; until I do, Margaret Eleanor Leigh will fill her shoes.

Picture
Click to visit Margaret's page
      
Margaret:

Greetings DB,



When  you asked me if I’d fill in this blog spot for a while, the outcome struck me as about as predictable as a blind date with a stranger, which makes for an intriguing challenge. I know nothing whatsoever about you. I have seen your profile photograph on Facebook, of course, the one that makes me think of a gangster from Chicago. It is the effect of the shades, I think. I am sure you aren’t a gangster, though, and you probably don’t even know any gangsters.

By the same token you know little or nothing about me. So we have a completely blank canvas. I don’t really want to fill it with debate about the advantages of our respective nations, which I gather was the founding premise of this blog. The main reason being I live in the former coal-mining valleys of South Wales - think How Green Was My Valley by Richard Llewellyn and then subtract all hint of glamour. I’ve been living here for three years now and haven’t even unpacked my suitcases. I’m poised for flight, just waiting for the right current of air to carry me off to a place where the valleys aren’t so bloody green.  So no, I can’t compete with Pennsylvania and the Appalachian Trail and won’t even try.

Perhaps it would be a good idea to go back to the beginning, and swap life stories like folk do on blind dates?  If that sounds disturbing or creepy, which it very well might, we could treat it as a kind of extended AA meeting, or a series of therapy sessions instead. Or, more intellectually, as a kind of Platonic dialogue out of which Truth and Beauty may even emerge.  

I could kick off by writing a bit about being born in South Africa in the bad days, the apartheid days. Looking back, I sometimes think I came out of the womb horrified at what was going on all around me, growing ever more horrified no-one else seemed to think there was anything much to be horrified about.

My father was an Anglican vicar and we were poor as the proverbial church mice, what you’d call poor whites, which in the South African context meant that while we weren’t quite as poor as the desperately poor black majority, the gulf between us and the rest of the rich white minority was nevertheless enormous.

At the age of twelve, our world (fragile as it already was), was blown apart when my father, the vicar, embarked on a scandalous affair with a sixteen-year-old Sunday school teacher. One spectacularly messy divorce later, and my mother Polly was booking our sea passage to Southampton, England, with no clear idea what we would do once we got there.


I’ll leave my much younger self there - standing on the deck of the Edinburgh Castle as it pulled out of harbour. At the very end of the long concrete pier there was a black umbrella, under which stood my father, and my brother and I watched the umbrella grow smaller and smaller as the ship pulled slowly away. The rain in which this scene was soaked was of course prophetic, for we were heading for the land where it does little else.  

So what do you think?  Shall we blog along these lines?


Regards, Margaret.


DB:


Margaret,

I don’t think my wife would care for the ‘blind date’ analogy. Maybe we should think of this as a ‘pen-pal’ situation. I like that better myself. I was a bit of an awkward child (some say I’m an awkward adult too) and I didn’t have a lot of friends. I even went as far as concocting an idea that included a dozen helium balloons and a letter stating that ‘I was participating in a school experiment on trade winds: please write back and tell me where this landed’, in hopes of making a long-distance friend (an old farmer was kind enough to write me back – no, he didn’t want to be my pen-pal). I’ve always dreamed of having someone in another country in whom I could write to and swap stories, so you can be her.

I had to laugh when you said I looked like a gangster from Chicago. I was born and raised in rural Illinois, and when I tell people around here that I'm from Illinois, they say, “Oh, so you’re from Chicago”. The answer is an emphatic, “NO”. And I’m about as far from gangsta and the big city as you can get. If the world of your youth could be compared to ‘How Green is My Valley’, then mine would be similar to what you find in Steinbeck’s ‘The Grapes of Wrath’. Of course, we weren’t poor migrant workers, nor did we live in Oklahoma and move west because of drought, but we did live among the corn fields and eventually moved to California to seek a better life, so that counts, right?

My father was faithful to my mother and they remained married until he died of cancer in his early sixties. We were not close, however. In fact, I hated him through most of my childhood. He was heavy handed and seemed to look for any excuse to take his belt off and smack my ass with it. His father died early and there were several stepfathers - all who died untimely deaths. My grandmother had to put him in an orphanage a few times during his childhood, because he grew up during the great American depression, and she simply couldn't afford to take care of all her kids. His difficult up-bringing meant that I got a tough-as-nails father who didn't know how to show love to his children.

Growing-up in the sticks wasn't all bad. We had horses and I would gallop barebacked through fields, with my be-be gun in one hand and the reins in the other, as I screamed an Indian war-cry at the top of my lungs. Trees became soldiers, as I fought for the freedom of Native Americans everywhere. It wasn't that I was taking up the cause of the injustice done to the Indians, I was identifying with the underdog, which I have always felt myself to be.

My introverted and melancholy personality was fertile ground for a very active imagination. Daydreaming became a way of life and affected everything I did, including my school work (no dean's lists found here!) When I began writing books years ago, my brother asked me how I came up with the stories. I found the question rather absurd. I felt like asking a retort of "how do you not?" When I write, I simply activate my old friend, my imagination, and let it run wild.

Next week I'll tell you how I reacted to my father's overbearing ways when the teenage years were upon me. It won't be pretty, but I survived it, to the amazement of all involved.

Your American pen-pal,

DB Stephens


1 Comment
    Picture
    Margaret Eleanor Leigh
    Picture
    DB   Stephens

    Our Bloggers:
    

    Margaret Eleanor Leigh lives in the valleys of South Wales, where she watches the rain and dreams of France. She is the author of three crime novels, a travelogue, and a quartet of children's books.


    DB Stephens lives in Pennsylvania, USA.
    He is the author of Definable Moments and Solutions Inc. 


    Archives

    December 2014
    November 2014
    October 2014
    September 2014
    July 2014
    June 2014
    May 2014
    April 2014
    March 2014

    Categories

    All

    RSS Feed

Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.