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There Is Worth In Everyone
Dignity is a tender coming-of-age novel about a schoolboy whose unlikely friendship with a misunderstood binman named Bogie teaches him about dignity, friendship, and the hidden richness of ordinary lives. Where did the idea behind this novel come from?
There’s a song by the Scottish band Deacon Blue called Dignity. The story told in the song was the inspiration behind the book and the central character Bogie. I’ve always loved the premise of an underdog quietly striving to achieve a goal. That formed the basis for the narrative and provided the foundation to allow the story to unfold.
Bogie speaks very little, often communicating more through his actions than his words. What drew you to such an understated character?
The book is set in my hometown of Petone, New Zealand. When I was growing up there, we had a local binman who kept our streets clean and very much kept himself to himself. I didn’t know the man at all, but as I created Bogie, I couldn’t help but wonder what that binman from my 80s childhood was like. His presence was very much with me as I wrote, and he evolved as he landed on the page. Because he said so little, the character Bogie intrigued me. I placed myself in the boy’s shoes, trying to understand him more, yet from the outset, I knew he’d have a reticence to share anything about himself. It’s funny, but there’s a school of thought that authors should know everything about their characters before they set them on the page, and some writers adopt that by creating whole dossiers on the characters within their books. I’m completely the opposite; I want to discover my characters as I go along and see how they react to events as they happen. Sometimes they surprise me, and that’s the joy of writing: when the unexpected appears on the page, and I think, Woah, didn’t see that coming!
The narrator is also undergoing a coming-of-age journey. How did you balance his growth with Bogie’s story so that neither character overshadowed the other?
Dignity was always going to be about Bogie, but given his taciturnity, he was never going to tell the tale himself. The older narrator, looking back at his pre-teen years and his relationship with the older man, became the vehicle for telling Bogie’s story. In itself, though, I didn’t think there was enough to sustain a novel, so I introduced backstory for the boy, conscious that the pursuit of the boat was imperative to the outcome. If I’d placed more emphasis on the boy’s growth and his life, I believe I would have lost the foundation of the story, and a different book would emerge that placed Bogie into the background, the very place from where I wanted him elevated!
What do you hope readers notice differently about the overlooked people in their own communities after reading Dignity?
One of the great disparities in the developed world is the reward that comes to those who, I consider, do very little that is worthy. For reasons I will never fully understand, our capitalist model rewards certain industries and roles far more greatly than others. Yet some of our most honorable professions- teachers, carers, service workers, emergency services, the key workers that we couldn’t do without during the pandemic – are the least rewarded, and often some of those professions are looked down upon. If there’s one thing that I hope readers take away, it’s the understanding that there is worth in everyone, and no matter how overlooked, those people should be recognized as contributing something important to our society and be allowed to pursue their dreams.
Author Links: GoodReads | Threads | Bsky| Facebook | Website
At its heart, it is the story of a quiet man overcoming adversity and a young man finding his place in the world. With vivid characters and a sharply observed setting in 1980s New Zealand, DIGNITY reminds us that there is much to respect about those who choose to walk quietly among us.
The Disappearance of Synesthesia
The Disappearance of Synesthesia, by Steven Lesk, MD, is a comic mystery built around a wonderfully odd premise: a wealthy, highly intelligent ninety-year-old woman vanishes from her home, leaving behind blood, medication, and enough suspicious evidence to trigger a massive investigation. Sheriff Buck Cormorant initially assumes Synesthesia Kankoor has simply wandered off, but the case quickly attracts the FBI, the president, international detectives, the media, and her billionaire son, Artemis. The reader, meanwhile, learns very early that Synesthesia has arranged her own disappearance because she wants a life that belongs to her. That choice gives the novel an unusual shape. The mystery isn’t primarily about whether Synesthesia is alive. It’s about whether anyone will figure out what she has done, and how far the people helping her will go to preserve the illusion.
Buck Cormorant is the engine of the book. He’s profane, stubborn, politically incorrect, frequently intoxicated, deeply suspicious of the FBI, and much more perceptive than the people around him tend to believe. His investigation unfolds amid mushroom trips, hallucinated conversations, arguments with federal agents, bizarre encounters with outside detectives, media speculation, forensic discussions, and increasingly elaborate theories. The comedy is broad and intentionally outrageous, but there’s a genuine detective story running underneath it. Details such as the blood pattern, the abandoned medications, the strange ransom demands, the supposed kidnapping video, and the death of Gregory Watson gradually stop looking like unrelated curiosities and begin pointing Buck toward a staged disappearance. That process gives the middle of the novel its momentum because Buck keeps returning to the evidence even when almost everyone else is ready to accept an easier explanation.
What makes the story more interesting than its comic surface suggests is its recurring question about who gets to decide what another person’s life should look like. Synesthesia doesn’t disappear because she’s helpless. She disappears because she’s fiercely independent and wants to spend what remains of her life as herself. That idea becomes increasingly important as the investigation grows into an enormous institutional spectacle involving money, politics, celebrity, law enforcement, and public opinion. The novel also enjoys poking at professional certainty. Experts repeatedly settle on explanations while Buck keeps worrying at the facts that don’t fit. His persistence finally leads him to George Castelanet and Barbados, where the supposed kidnapping collapses, and the real criminal element of the scheme comes into focus. The conclusion also gives Buck a satisfying moral decision: after finding Synesthesia alive, he agrees to tell the world she’s safe without revealing where she lives.
I’d recommend The Disappearance of Synesthesia most to readers who enjoy irreverent mysteries, eccentric detectives, dark comedy, and stories that are willing to wander into strange territory while still moving toward a solution. It’ll especially suit someone who likes satire mixed into a crime plot and doesn’t mind profanity, sexual humor, drug humor, or deliberately abrasive characters. Buck’s voice is so dominant that a reader’s enjoyment will probably depend on whether his chaotic, offensive, funny, self-medicating personality clicks with them. For the right reader, though, that personality is exactly what gives the book its identity. Beneath all the absurdity, there’s a surprisingly warm conclusion about persistence, privacy, personal freedom, and keeping a promise even when powerful people would rather you break it. Buck’s persistence keeps the mystery moving, and the book ultimately ties its larger themes of privacy, freedom, money, and institutional pressure back to Synesthesia’s unusual disappearance.
Pages: 212 | ASIN : B0HDB3YZT7
ȚEPEȘ: VLAD III DRACULA
Sebastian Valerius’s Țepeș: Vlad III Dracula is a sprawling historical war novel that treats Vlad Dracula as a political creature before anything else: prince, hostage, strategist, son, lover, prisoner, ruler, and finally legend. The book moves through the brutal machinery of fifteenth-century Eastern Europe, where Wallachia is squeezed between Ottoman expansion and Hungarian ambition, and where nearly every alliance carries the possibility of betrayal. Valerius calls the novel political and historical fiction with Gothic horror elements, and that combination fits it well. The Gothic quality comes less from the supernatural than from the atmosphere of dread surrounding power itself. Courts become cages, diplomacy becomes coercion, and the landscape of Wallachia gradually turns into an extension of Vlad’s mind: defensive, scarred, watchful, and terrifying.
The book’s strongest achievement is the way it builds Vlad. His childhood as an Ottoman hostage gives him language, discipline, military knowledge, and an intimate understanding of the empire he’ll eventually fight. His relationships with Murad, Mehmed, Radu, Hunyadi, Zeynep, Anastasia, Matthias Corvinus, Stephen of Moldavia, Dragan, and Mircea keep changing the meaning of loyalty around him. Some people teach him strategy, some offer tenderness, some use him, and some stay loyal long after loyalty makes practical sense. That accumulation matters. By the time Vlad turns terror into policy, the reader understands the chain of experiences that brought him there without being asked to mistake understanding for absolution. His conversations with priests and chroniclers sharpen this tension beautifully, especially when the novel asks whether a ruler can deliberately sacrifice his own soul for the survival of his country.
Valerius writes at full pressure. The prose is physical, dark, and intensely sensory, filled with mud, iron, smoke, winter, blood, wolves, cages, maps, and the constant shadow of the stake. Battles aren’t treated as decorative action scenes. They’re problems of terrain, intelligence, supply, deception, morale, and timing. Some of the most gripping passages concern poisoned wells, destroyed granaries, blocked mountain passes, false retreats, disguises, cavalry traps, and the sheer logistical impossibility of feeding an enormous invading army. That attention to strategy gives the famous 1462 campaign a genuine narrative engine. The violence is just as deliberate. It grows increasingly difficult to witness because the novel makes Vlad’s methods progressively more extreme, culminating in acts that show how thoroughly the weapon he created has begun to consume the man who created it. Valerius keeps returning to the uncomfortable question beneath every victory: if fear saves the state but destroys the ruler’s humanity, what exactly has been saved?
That question gives Țepeș its emotional weight. Beneath the military campaigns and political maneuvering is a tragedy about a man who craves control because nearly every formative experience of his life taught him what it means to be powerless. Vlad can defeat armies, discipline a country, manipulate enemies, and turn his own reputation into a weapon, yet he can’t command loyalty from kings, reverse betrayal, recover lost years, or return to the person he might once have become. Zeynep is especially important in that respect. She represents a private life Vlad could imagine but never inhabit, which makes the vision surrounding his death unexpectedly moving. When the dying Vlad finally imagines peace, home, love, and children, the novel reveals how small and human his deepest desire has always been. The later epilogues then pull outward again, showing the man giving way to rumor, propaganda, an empty tomb, and finally the name by which history will remember him.
Țepeș is an ambitious, ferocious historical epic about the manufacture of a legend and the terrible usefulness of fear. Its Vlad is tactically brilliant, emotionally damaged, politically perceptive, capable of profound loyalty, and increasingly capable of horror. That combination makes him fascinating because his victories and his moral collapse are part of the same story. Valerius gives the reader war from the council chamber to the supply wagon, politics from the marriage bed to the dungeon, and a portrait of Dracula shaped as much by those who betrayed, loved, feared, and exploited him as by his own choices. By the final pages, the familiar historical figure feels less like a distant emblem and more like the result of a long, brutal process in which survival becomes ideology and reputation becomes immortality. Savage, intelligent, and darkly absorbing, Țepeș turns Vlad Dracula into a living argument about what power costs when survival becomes the only law.
Pages: 307
CONTROVERSIAL: And What Do You Think of Original Sin?
William G. Joseph’s Controversial: And What Do You Think of Original Sin? is a theological inquiry into one of Christianity’s most enduring doctrines, approached through the combined lenses of Scripture, history, science, psychology, and personal experience. The second edition expands the original discussion of original sin into a broader investigation of human evolution, spirituality, personhood, and immortality. Joseph’s central concern is the relationship between traditional Christian teaching and modern knowledge about the physical world. Rather than treating Genesis as a scientific or historical account, he reads its story of Adam and Eve as a myth in the constructive sense, a narrative created to express truths about sin, suffering, death, and humanity’s relationship with God. He makes his purpose clear from the beginning: the book seeks to clarify the questions surrounding original sin while recognizing that definitive answers may remain out of reach.
The first part of the book traces the development of original sin and considers how interpretations of Genesis became increasingly elaborate over centuries of Christian theology. Joseph pays particular attention to Augustine, Church tradition, changing methods of biblical interpretation, and the later influence of scientific discoveries. His recurring argument is that evolution supplies a more coherent account of humanity’s physical and psychological condition than the idea that human nature was fundamentally altered by one primordial act of disobedience. This position is captured in one of the book’s clearest statements: “Humanity is not a fallen species but an evolving species.” Joseph then draws psychology into the discussion, arguing that human selfishness, impulse, moral development, and capacity for relationships can be understood as features of an evolving species. This interdisciplinary approach gives the book much of its energy because theology is continually placed in conversation with discoveries about the world theology is attempting to explain.
The second part carries that reasoning into more speculative territory by asking whether the complete human person, including what Christianity calls the soul or spirit, might itself be the product of evolution. Joseph presents these ideas deliberately as hypotheses. He explores consciousness, free choice, grace, spiritual energy, and the possibility that increasingly complex physical life can produce genuinely trans-physical characteristics such as love, moral judgment, and altruism. His concept of personhood is especially important to this section. Earlier in the book he writes, “Relationships are the essence of personhood,” and the later chapters develop that insight into a view of human beings as physical, psychological, social, and spiritual persons whose identities emerge through freedom and relationship. The discussion of immortality therefore grows naturally from the book’s larger argument: Joseph asks whether the personal and relational dimension that emerges through evolution might have a destiny beyond the death of the body.
Controversial is an ambitious work of theological reflection shaped by Joseph’s desire to make Christian thought responsive to contemporary knowledge. Its style is conversational and frequently personal, with scientific examples, historical episodes, theological sources, humor, and autobiographical recollections used to make difficult subjects accessible. Joseph is most persuasive when he shows how doctrines develop within particular historical circumstances and asks how those doctrines should be reconsidered when human understanding changes. His later hypotheses about spirit and immortality require more speculation, but he openly identifies their provisional character, which fits the intellectual method he advocates throughout the book. The result is a sustained argument for a Christianity that understands creation as an evolutionary process and human beings as participants in that continuing creation. The closing “Hymn to Creator” gives that argument a devotional conclusion, bringing the book’s scientific and theological themes together in an expression of gratitude for a universe in which consciousness, freedom, love, and relationship have emerged.
Pages: 129 | ASIN : B0FZ2V2N1Z
Dignity
Craig Brown’s Dignity is a warm, quietly observant coming-of-age novel set in 1980s Petone, New Zealand, built around an unlikely friendship between a schoolboy narrator and Malcolm Beaumont, better known around town as Bogie. Bogie is a council binman, bottle collector, pub regular, former sailor, and a man most people notice only enough to dismiss. The narrator does something different. He sits beside him at lunch, asks questions, watches his habits, and gradually discovers a life far richer than Bogie’s shabby clothes and near-silence suggest. At the center of that life is a dream: Bogie has been collecting refundable bottles for years so he can buy a boat. That simple goal gives the novel its structure, but the real story is about the relationships that form around it and the way a boy’s understanding of other people slowly becomes more generous and complicated.
One of the book’s strengths is the way Brown lets Bogie reveal himself without turning him into a speechmaker. He’s famously economical with words, sometimes answering questions so literally that the narrator has to puzzle out what he means. Much of what we learn comes instead through Bogie’s routines: collecting discarded bottles for their few cents of value, carefully depositing his coins, restoring an old sailboat plank by plank, quietly absorbing insults, and refusing to perform his goodness for anyone. His patience becomes especially meaningful after his boatshed is set on fire and the vessel he has spent so long restoring is damaged. Rather than letting anger define what happens next, Bogie repairs the boat again. Eventually he replaces its old name, BIT BY BIT, with a single word painted in gold: Dignity. The choice captures what the novel has been showing all along. Dignity here isn’t status, polish, or respectability. It’s the ability to know your own worth without demanding that everyone else recognize it first.
The first-person narrator gives the novel a second coming-of-age story alongside Bogie’s pursuit of the sea. He’s funny, insecure, observant, occasionally selfish, and believable as a boy who doesn’t yet have the language for everything he’s learning. His friendship and early romance with Katie Parata bring some of the book’s sweetest scenes, while his encounters with Willy Simmonds and Willy’s friends bring out fear, resentment, jealousy, and eventually a more difficult kind of empathy. These schoolyard relationships could easily have stayed fixed in simple categories, but Brown allows them to change. One of the most satisfying developments comes when hostility begins to loosen its grip and the boys are forced to see one another as more than enemies. Bogie’s influence is central to that change, though he rarely teaches through explicit advice. Near the end, the narrator reflects that it was through Bogie’s “silences and actions, through his patience and forgiveness” that the lessons came. That feels like a good description of the novel’s method too.
The setting gives Dignity much of its personality. Brown fills Petone with paper rounds, dairies, rugby fields, pubs, school socials, Guy Fawkes fireworks, battered bikes, returnable bottles, working-class homes, and the windy waterfront. The detail creates a community that feels inhabited. There’s also a strong awareness of class throughout the story. The narrator grows up among people who’ve learned to keep their ambitions modest, while Bogie occupies an even stranger social position, known by almost everyone but understood by very few. That makes his eventual decision especially powerful. When the narrator asks where he plans to go once the boat is ready, Bogie finally gives an answer expansive enough for the life he wants: “Wherever I want.” It’s a small line, but after watching him save, endure, repair, and wait, those words feel enormous. Freedom in Dignity isn’t abstract. It has been purchased bottle by bottle and earned through years of persistence.
What I liked most was the novel’s affection for people whose inner lives can be easy to overlook. Bogie becomes memorable because Brown doesn’t reduce him to a symbol of virtue. He drinks, smokes, holds grudges, dislikes certain people, enjoys his solitude, and can be frustratingly difficult to read. His dignity comes from being fully himself. The closing chapters give that idea a lovely payoff. Bogie sails away without fanfare, and years later a postcard arrives for the narrator from somewhere warm and distant. There’s no long explanation, just a photograph of Dignity on clear water and two words from Bogie: “ALL’S GOOD.” By then, that’s enough. Dignity is ultimately a novel about seeing people more closely, about the understated ways one person can shape another, and about a man who spends years building the means to choose his own horizon. The book earns its emotion patiently, which makes its final image of Bogie living on his own terms feel deeply satisfying.
Pages: 296 | ASIN : B0GX2WSJ59
The Invisible Soul Anthology: Healing With Words
The Invisible Soul Anthology, by George Beasley, is a deeply personal and inspirational Christian memoir built from nearly fifty stories, reflections, memories, and poems about trauma, faith, family, grief, mental health, and healing. Beasley describes the collection as a journey from hidden struggles toward emotional healing and redemption, and that idea gives the book its shape. Readers are led through memories as they surface, taking them from childhood abuse and group homes to marriage, fatherhood, ministry, therapy, loss, and the quieter moments that have helped him make sense of it all. As a faith-based memoir, the book feels personal in the way a long conversation with someone can be personal. Beasley isn’t standing at a distance from these experiences. He’s writing from inside them.
One of the most compelling parts of this trauma recovery memoir is the way ordinary places and objects become containers for much larger emotions. A sandbar becomes a place of belonging, a river becomes an image of grief and the undertow of despair, a childhood closet holds both terror and an imagined fire of hope, and a catfish pond becomes a mental refuge first learned in a group home and rediscovered decades later through therapy. These recurring images give the book its own language. Beasley also writes openly about suicidal thoughts, childhood trauma, triggers, therapy, and the difficult work of recognizing emotions he spent much of his life avoiding. That makes The Invisible Soul Anthology as much a mental health memoir as it is a Christian testimony. Faith and professional help aren’t treated as competing ideas here. They become parts of the same healing journey.
The heart of the collection, though, is connection. Beasley returns again and again to the people who helped him survive and grow: his wife Lisa, his daughters and grandchildren, his brothers, old friends, therapists, house parents, ministry partners, and even people encountered briefly along the way. Some of the strongest pieces look at relationships from the distance of many years and allow an old memory to take on a different meaning. In “Was It Love or Was It…,” for example, what he carried as childhood betrayal gradually becomes an understanding of his mother’s desperate attempt to protect him. That willingness to revisit the past is central to this Christian healing book. The prose is direct, emotionally exposed, and often devotional, with scripture and faith woven naturally into the author’s interpretation of what happened and why those experiences still matter.
What stayed with me most is the book’s conviction that words can become part of the healing process. Beasley repeatedly shows writing as a way of bringing buried memories into the light, giving language to pain, and leaving something useful for the people who come afterward. Late in the collection, he writes about opening himself to emotions while spending time with his grandchildren and discovering that something as simple as giving them his time can become an expression of love and a repair of what was missing in his own childhood. That captures The Invisible Soul Anthology well. It’s a Christian memoir about healing, but it’s also an anthology about being seen, listening closely, loving people while there’s still time, and finding meaning in memories that once seemed too painful to revisit. Readers drawn to inspirational Christian books, spiritual memoirs, and trauma recovery stories will find plenty here to sit with long after the final page.
Pages: 275 | ASIN : B0HD3W8G2V
Our Families and Communities
How to Show Up for the Dying & Their Loved Ones offers practical, compassionate guidance from diagnosis through death and into the long landscape of grief. Was there a particular death or caregiving experience that first made you think, “People need to be taught how to do this”?
Absolutely! For sure, the foundation of how I show up, I learned in my big family and through my work as a midwife, but there was still a lot I needed to learn.
When I first moved to Paonia, a small rural town in Western Colorado, I met three families, each with a young parent dying of cancer. Without giving it much thought, I dove into caring for all three of them, and the nine children between them. Caring for them was excruciating, and also beautiful. The way our community came together reminded me of what we all long for when we say “It takes a village.” Our little town supported them as I imagine a tribal community would. Most of us, myself included, had never been so intimately involved with the dying process. With the support of one of our local death doulas, Carrie Lerner, we were taught about this sacred and ancient rite of passage. As a birth midwife with decades of experience caring for families at the veil, I stepped in and took on a leadership role with all of them. This included: caring for their children, taking the dying partners to appointments, feeding their families, cleaning their houses, and taking care of their partners. When the time came, I participated in cleaning their bodies after death, transporting their bodies in my minivan to their resting places, and facilitating their burial and cremation ceremonies.
These three parents, Freeda, Javier, and Jordan, died 6 months to the day of each other. Two days after Jordan died, I thought to myself, “I’ve just received a download, and I need to share what I’ve learned with others!” Having never written anything substantial before, I began the long and oftentimes unbearable process of writing this book.
As a midwife, who traditionally would have been at the bedsides of the birthing and the dying, I was surprised by how little I knew about the dying process. This led me to assume that most other people in the Western world also know very little about it, and could benefit greatly from what I had learned.
Your framework includes self-care, sacrifice, staying close, bravery, and sitting in the fire. How did those five principles emerge?
Ahh, what’s up with the five principles you ask? Jake Woods, Freeda’s husband, is to thank for this book. He said, “Moriah, there’s something different about the way you show up, and you need to share your ways.” So I got to thinking about what it is that I bring to caring for others, and out of that inner exploration emerged these five principles. Caring for the dying and their loved ones is hard, but it’s not rocket science.
These principles are to be used like road signs to help folks remain on course with their intention to show up. They’re anchors to help us stay grounded so that we don’t unintentionally drift away when people need us most. If at any point during the process of leaning in to offer support, someone feels unsure about what to do or say, I encourage revisiting these five principles. While I wrote the principles and they emerged from somewhere in me, I’m still very much a student of them. I haven’t mastered any of the ideas or tools in this book. What I’ve found is that when I get stuck, if I sit and reflect on these principles, my next best step always emerges. I hope that is the case for others too.
Caregivers often become almost invisible because attention naturally centers on the ill person. What do caregivers most need from their communities?
That’s a really great observation and question. Sad but true in many situations. The absolute best way to care for someone who is dying or facing a terminal illness is to care for their caregivers. Those who are sick can’t fully lean into their caregivers unless their caregivers are well supported. If their caregivers are not well supported, they themselves will try to support them, or lessen the burden of what they have to carry. I see this as an example of what is broken within our “human ecology.” For example, when a primary caregiving parent is under-supported, their child or children will actually try to care for them. Even though this isn’t fair to the child, the support has to come from somewhere for the child to be stable. Similarly, if after a birth everyone’s attention goes to the baby, the mother will struggle if her needs are unseen. The same is true with the dying.
In nature, the actions and reactions that take place in an ecosystem are like a spiderweb. When one strand is broken, the web starts to unravel. One strand does not equal a web. One strand equals: At Risk of Breaking.
Primary caregivers are one strand within the web of life that surrounds them. They need to be held up and supported by many competent layers of support, so that the person facing death can actually lean into them. This is essentially what the whole book is about: Finding our place in the web of our families and communities. It’s not just the primary caregivers who need support. Those who are supporting the primary caregivers need support, and those who are supporting those who are supporting the primary caregivers also need support, and so on…
The book opens with the broader Standing at the Veil initiative. What do you hope that movement becomes?
Thank you for asking. I believe the book has value for readers on its own, and it’s also a doorway into the Standing at the Veil global support initiative. Two and a half years after completing the first draft of this book, my only brother was diagnosed with cancer. There are no words to describe the pain I felt at my inability to help him and his family more, given that we live thousands of miles apart. And in this way, our family isn’t unique. So many of us in the Western world live far away from those we love and have deep ties with, and at the same time we’re surrounded by people who’ve also chosen to live geographically distant from their loved ones.
While my brother was in the hospital, I spoke with his partner about her needs. She said she longed for people she could rely on and lean into within walking distance from their home. Her needs included: food prep, house cleaning, help with errands, help with projects around the house, and childcare so that she could attend to my brother’s needs and her work. And then, of course, there were her needs for self-care and emotional and spiritual support. She said she desperately wanted someone to physically hold her and a shoulder she could cry on.
Instead of allowing myself to become immobilized by my inability to help them, I channeled my energy into the Standing at the Veil project I’d been gestating. My dream is to empower and train people to feel more confident, comfortable, and capable of showing up for their friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, and those in their local communities.
With trainings for lay people and professionals, along with workbooks, social forums, a global interactive map, and limitless local, national, and international resource links, I believe Standing at the Veil has the potential to transform our current death and dying landscape.
Just as viruses and bacteria constantly evolve in order to adapt, survive, and thrive, I believe this vision of a global support network will reawaken dormant seeds of ancient wisdom and reshape how we show up for each other during the dying process. And on a much bigger level, support the transformation, evolution, and adaptation of our species as we re-learn how to cohabitate with each other and all of nature on this beautiful planet we all call home.
Author Links: GoodReads | Facebook | Standing at the Veil | Website | Amazon
Blending tips and tools, personal stories, essential guidance, and reflective exercises, she invites readers to relearn what our ancestors have always known: how to hold each other while Standing at the Veil. From navigating medical decisions, and helping facilitate hard conversations, to caring for the body and supporting grief “from release to forever after,” this book illuminates a path toward rebuilding a healthy human ecosystem—and opens a doorway to the wider Standing at the Veil global support initiative.
Unfathomable
The Frequency follows a pawnshop owner who accepts a collection of Inuit maps and writings in exchange for a favor, sending him on a journey he never expected. Bronx is a distinctive protagonist. Which came first for you: the former hockey player, the Marine, the pawnshop owner, or simply the personality?
When I first met Bronx, I met the retired minor league hockey player who had hung up his gear and opened the pawnshop in Warroad. Only later did I learn he’d been a Marine, trained for high-altitude missions only to land in the deserts of Iraq. But I only learned of it when he told me. As is the case with many of the characters with whom I work, I often learn more about them as a result of closely listening to what they have to say, and how they say it — and in many cases, why they say what they said and how they felt about it when saying it! Bronx was definitely one of those characters. There were times I was working with him that I felt more like his scribe, rather than his author. It was a partnership of sorts. For me, that’s when the magic happens. And to call Bronx distinctive is a kind choice of words. So, thank you. If asked, I’d say: “He’s complicated . . . and then some.” But he was great fun!
The inherited Inuit materials become the bridge between the modern conspiracy and a much older understanding of the Arctic. What inspired that element?
Ultimately, Bronx needed a roadmap. The Inuit materials provided it — literally. But I couldn’t just give him a map with a big X on it showing where to go. Bronx would need to work for it, just like those who had been watching for that same map for decades. For the idea to work, the map needed to be hidden — in this case, by a language few in the world still speak. And once translated, the truth was hidden under a second layer I hadn’t expected: the language of the writer of the letters themselves. Imagine it: in 1944, a fourteen-year-old Inuit boy sets off on a vision quest, hoping for a sign from the spirits. Four days into his journey, without food and very little water, he witnesses something truly unimaginable. Unfathomable. And almost impossible to describe. So, how would he describe something he could never conceive? He used the only language he knew, and from his perspective, his vision feels just like that — a supernatural event that left in its wake ashes in the shape of men, and a whale turned to stone. Given his background, it could be nothing else. But there is another, more dangerous truth awaiting discovery. Those who know of the map have a good idea what that secret is. What they don’t know is where to start looking. Bronx now has the map, but he needs to know the starting point. And when he does, he knows a truth worth killing.
The novel raises the question of who has the right to control transformative knowledge. Do you think the greatest danger surrounding revolutionary technology usually comes from the invention itself or from the scramble to control it?
Oh, for sure, the dangerous part comes from who controls the technology. For all of time, humans have been inventors. But we’ve also proven that just about every invention can be used for good or evil. Think on that for just a second; we are the only species on planet Earth that can ascribe such motives. Sure, other species do things to one another WE might call evil, but it’s not. It’s nature. And she can be one cruel Mother. Humans, on the other hand, have the ability to inherently know what is good and what is not. Yet many purposefully choose to do evil. I’ve always thought technical innovations are largely benign. Humans decide what is dangerous. And we are really good at doing so.
What is the next book that you are working on, and when will it be available?
In all, over the past 25 years, I have now authored sixteen novels. As of last month, that number was fifteen. But in the last three-plus weeks, book sixteen, THE HARVEST, came into focus and practically wrote itself. The first draft took barely two weeks to write. Start to finish. The flow state was incredible. That said, it was a first draft. It will be a few months still before the polishing is done, but I have fourteen others ready to go. My current plan is to release COVENANT next. Like THE FREQUENCY, this story is about a man who has spent his life working for a group called The International League of Exceptional Skeptics: TILES. Their mission is to disprove faith healers, channelers, mystics, and others who claim to have supernatural abilities. As the story starts, we get to watch our protagonist, Ransom Dunn, do just that. And he does so with spectacular flair. But shortly thereafter, Ramson is faced with something he never expected to meet: a healer he cannot disprove. And then what?
As far as a release date, I want to give Bronx his due. So, I am planning to keep Ransom on the shelf for a while, let THE FREQUENCY find its place, and then think about what comes next. The book is ready. But I don’t want to sharp-elbow Bronx out of the way too soon.
How’s that for a tease?
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His path leads north, where the world strips a man down to what remains when comfort is gone. Ice, wind, silence—unrelenting silence—and the growing sense that danger does not always come from what’s chasing him, but from the price the journey demands. Bronx begins choosing allies—people he never meant to need and cannot leave behind once he does. The shift is gradual, almost unnoticeable—then it breaks. And when the moment comes to choose what can be carried forward—and what must be left behind—he understands that some risks are not measured in survival, but in who you are willing to stand with when the cost is no longer yours alone.
