Blog Archives
Resilience of a Nation
In Sheltered, you share experiences following the sudden death of your husband and a trip to Israel that turned into a dangerous and transformative journey. What inspired you to share your story with readers?
I was so grief-stricken when I left for Israel and didn’t believe it was possible to recover from so much loss. The loss of my husband, my home, my community, my caretaker, my friends, and our church, which had welcomed John and me with love and joy. The resilience of a nation healing from the October 7, 2023 nightmare, together with the love of family and strangers I encountered, demonstrated that healing is possible. I want readers to know that if healing can begin in a war zone, healing is possible anytime, anywhere.
Some of the memoir’s most moving moments are its quietest, particularly the scenes surrounding John’s final days. How difficult were those chapters to write?
As a writer, the only way I could process John’s passing and all the subsequent losses was to write about them. I wrote about John’s death in a gentle, perhaps detached way that conveys the deep shock I was in. In The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion writes about her husband’s death using a similar detached style that conveyed her shock and inability to absorb her new reality. The voice and tone Didion employed in The Year of Magical Thinking resonated strongly with me. Someone in grief needs to feel less alone, and Didion’s book accomplished that for me. I hope Sheltered will do the same.
How did you decide when to include historical and political context without losing sight of the personal story?
My superb editor, Melanie Martin, was indispensable in determining how much background was needed and where it would be most effective.
What do you hope someone who is grieving will find in your memoir?
Recovery and purpose. Recovery came gently in whispered moments of grace. The message to find purpose was repeated and reinforced so many times that even my thick-headed noggin finally got the message!
Author Links: GoodReads | Facebook | Website | Amazon
Five months after losing her husband to a sudden heart attack, Elisa Hertzan Schetrompf boarded a plane on an unexpected healing journey. She was a widow still numb with her loss, in danger of losing her eyesight, and utterly unsure of what came next, definitely not expecting to find herself stranded in the middle of war.
In this raw, vivid memoir, you will find:An unflinching portrait of grief: The isolation, the shock, and the slow, nonlinear work of healing
A firsthand account of modern war: Sirens at 3 am, the Iron Dome overhead, and the remarkable calm of a people who have learned to live inside uncertainty
The healing power of unexpected community: Strangers turned friends and distant relatives demonstrating what family really means
If you have lost someone and are wondering whether you will ever feel hopeful and happy again, Sheltered is an achingly honest account of what healing actually looks like, where grief and joy work together, and resilience and grace show up when you least expect them.
Greenhorn: Episodes in an Immigrant’s Life
Alex Krieger’s Greenhorn: Episodes in an Immigrant’s Life is an expansive memoir about migration, belonging, professional purpose, and civic responsibility. It begins with Krieger’s arrival in New York Harbor in 1960, after a childhood journey through Lithuania, Poland, Italy, and Israel, and follows his development from a nine-year-old immigrant who spoke no English into an architect, urban planner, educator, and public servant. The family story carries the lasting weight of the Holocaust: Krieger’s parents and grandmother survived camps, forced labor, separation, and devastating loss before rebuilding their lives. His account treats immigration as both a personal experience and a defining element of American history, grounded in the hopes of people seeking “a decent life, personal freedoms, and associated happiness.”
The book’s episodic structure suits the breadth of Krieger’s life. Chapters on Chicago’s Albany Park neighborhood, Lane Tech, Cornell, Harvard, architectural practice, historic maps, the New England Holocaust Memorial, public commissions, and Shanghai’s Bund show how education and design became his means of entering American life and contributing to it. Krieger writes with an urbanist’s attentiveness to place, explaining how neighborhoods, schools, buildings, memorials, and public spaces influence identity. Historical context is woven throughout the narrative, connecting individual memories to immigration policy, racial inequality, antisemitism, war, political change, and patterns of urban growth. These passages give the memoir the scope of a civic autobiography, in which a life is understood through the institutions and cities that helped shape it.
Krieger’s voice is informed, candid, and frequently humorous. He’s willing to examine family mysteries, early social awkwardness, professional ambition, and the personal costs of maintaining simultaneous careers in teaching and practice. His admiration for mentors, colleagues, students, and family members gives the book an unusually generous tone, while his discussions of architectural education and public service reveal a sustained belief that expertise carries obligations beyond professional advancement. That conviction becomes clearest in his invocation of Tikkun Olam, the responsibility to help repair the world, and in his reflection that architecture’s lasting satisfaction comes from improving something “for someone, for a family, a group, or for an entire community.”
The later chapters bring the memoir toward a thoughtful reckoning with age, gratitude, and the meaning of accomplishment. Krieger’s transition from urban “greenhorn” to devoted gardener reflects a broader shift from constant productivity toward family, reflection, and attentiveness to everyday life. Yet the book’s outlook remains public-facing. Its epilogue turns personal gratitude into an argument for renewing American ideals and recognizing immigrants as active participants in addressing social and environmental challenges. Greenhorn ultimately presents a life built through adaptation, teaching, design, and service. It’s a substantial, humane record of how one immigrant’s desire to belong matured into a lifelong commitment to improving the places and communities around him.
Pages: 244 | ASIN : B0H8RWRZDP
OFF THE GRID
Gene Piotrowsky’s Off the Grid is a historical espionage novel set primarily in the Florida Keys during the tense period before the United States entered World War II. Its central character, Frank Smith, is a World War I veteran, journalist, skilled sailor, and boat builder who leaves New York hoping to begin a quiet life aboard his cutter, the Frieda-Ann. That plan takes a sharp turn when his former commanding officer recruits him as an unofficial intelligence agent, telling him, “I would like you to be my off-the-record agent.” From there, Frank’s journey becomes a mixture of maritime adventure, undercover investigation, and wartime suspense.
Much of the book’s appeal comes from its unusual setting. Piotrowsky spends considerable time describing sailing routes, reefs, mangrove passages, isolated anchorages, local businesses, and communities still recovering from the devastating 1935 Labor Day hurricane. These details give the novel the feeling of a personal logbook and place the reader directly aboard the Frieda-Ann. Frank’s routines, from checking his rigging to preparing meals and communicating through Morse code, make his secret life feel practical and lived-in. The Florida Keys aren’t simply scenery here. Their remoteness and scattered population make them a believable hiding place for spies, submarines, and people trying to disappear.
Frank is an engaging lead because he approaches espionage as a problem solver rather than as a glamorous action hero. He gathers gossip, studies accents, builds relationships with veterans, and carefully develops explanations for his movements. His background as a writer helps him ask questions without immediately attracting suspicion, while his knowledge of German gives him access to conversations others can’t understand. The story also gives him a dry, occasionally self-aware sense of humor. After accepting the assignment and considering its danger, he concludes, “This was not going to be an easy task. Time for another large rum.” That line captures Frank nicely. He’s thoughtful and capable, but he’s also a man who regularly processes danger over coffee, dinner, or a strong drink.
The novel unfolds patiently, following Frank as small observations grow into evidence of a larger Nazi network. Conversations at marinas, churches, taverns, and beach gatherings gradually connect suspicious veterans, German-speaking laborers, hidden operatives, and submarine landings. As the plot intensifies, Frank moves from gathering intelligence to conducting dangerous underwater surveillance and staging elaborate operations against enemy agents. The procedural detail gives these missions a distinctive texture. Readers see Frank plan routes, test equipment, create alibis, consider possible failures, and think through the consequences. His friendships with Stu, Selma, Carl, and the struggling veterans also give the story a community at its center, so the threat feels personal rather than abstract.
Off the Grid is a broad, detail-rich adventure about an ordinary-looking man quietly fighting a hidden war. It combines regional history, sailing knowledge, military intrigue, and the story of the Florida Keys’ transformation during World War II. By the epilogue, Frank’s active mission has evolved into journalism and informal intelligence work, allowing him to remain useful while building a life within the community he helped protect. The book’s strongest identity comes from that combination of secrecy and daily life. Frank may be hunting enemy agents, but he’s also repairing his boat, sharing rum with veterans, listening to local gossip, and learning to call the Keys home.
Pages: 170
THE SILENT BULLY. A Journey from Abusive Brain Chatter to Self-Love: A Personal Transformation Self-Help Book
The Silent Bully is a memoir-infused self-help book about recognizing and changing the cruel inner dialogue that Jacquie Elliott calls “Abusive Brain Chatter.” Elliott draws from her experiences with depression, compulsive eating, unhealthy relationships, childhood expectations, sexuality, parenting, work, body image, and aging. Her central framework is easy to remember: become Aware of the abusive voice, Believe in a kinder inner source, and Challenge the core beliefs feeding the criticism. That structure gives the book a clear direction even as it moves through many areas of personal life.
The book’s most engaging quality is Elliott’s willingness to be open about her own history. She describes moments of shame, addiction, fear, family conflict, sexual trauma, and self-sabotage without presenting herself as someone who has reached a flawless state of healing. Her account of lying in bed, eating compulsively, and listening to an inner voice tell her she’d never change gives the concept immediate emotional weight. Later stories about training for a triathlon, building healthier relationships, setting boundaries, and creating a satisfying life show how her transformation happened gradually. The tone often feels like a candid coaching conversation with someone who’s been through the struggle herself.
This is also very much a working book rather than something meant to be read passively. The “Self-Love Work” sections ask readers to rate the severity of their self-talk, identify triggers, journal about fear and shame, examine inherited beliefs, clarify values, practice meditation, create affirmations, set manageable goals, and work through resentment and forgiveness. Elliott uses memorable terms such as “Tornado Head” for escalating thought spirals, along with practical tools like grounding exercises, breathing methods, visualization, SMART goals, gratitude practices, and progress tracking. Spirituality is woven deeply into the method, but she defines a Higher Power or Loving Source broadly, allowing readers to interpret it through religion, nature, inner wisdom, community, or another compassionate presence.
I’d recommend The Silent Bully most strongly to readers who recognize that their self-talk has become harsh, repetitive, and limiting, especially those who enjoy a blend of personal testimony, spiritual reflection, journaling, and hands-on exercises. It may also resonate with people recovering from emotional abuse, codependency, addiction, difficult family patterns, or long-held feelings of inadequacy. Readers who take their time with the prompts will probably get more from it than those who rush straight through. At its heart, the book is a warm, earnest invitation to stop treating self-criticism as truth and begin building an inner relationship based on patience, responsibility, and genuine care.
Pages: 318 | ASIN : B0FXHM1XP8
The Origins of Lawton Passage
Lawton Passage follows a man from his childhood in small-town Tennessee through the joys and hardships of adolescence, college, and adulthood, and through grief, and back to his hometown. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
In 1990 my Mom got it into her head to write her autobiography after spending a week with my Dad at a Lawrence Welk Resort out in San Diego. After many years of working through her stories, she had a partial draft readied, and declared to her four kids (with me being the youngest), “Each of you need to write your own stories.”
That’s when I began writing what I entitled “The Wavettes” which I shared with my siblings and my parents. The first one covered our strategies to get my parents to stop smoking. Another one was a collection of memories of all our pets that we lost to the highway. A third recounted my exploits in learning how to drive, and the fourth one talked about my early impressions about religion. My dad wouldn’t say whether or not he liked that one, he just said he didn’t quite know what to make of it. I felt that as a kind of disapproval that I indicated that I should be all in about religion around my Dad.
What was really nice about the Wavettes period in the development of Lawton Passage was that these were stories that my parents got to see before they passed away. The sixth and final Wavette was a kind of therapy piece for myself after being with my dad during the last week of his life. It was in that story that I recounted how my cousin told me the night before my dad’s service that his parents used to get into the biggest fights every season whenever the annual Christmas newsletter arrived. “You can’t write that!” Mom told me on the phone after she read the story.
That was the day I discovered the prominence of the annual Christmas newsletter in our family, and that I wasn’t supposed to tell any interesting truths, if they happened to be inconvenient.
Looking back, was Liam’s emotional journey always clear to you, or did it emerge gradually as you wrote?
When I began I just thought it would be Liam’s stories all told with a bit of humor. Except for the very last one (which is not in Lawton Passage), the Wavettes tended to be funny, light-hearted, and tongue-in-cheek. Once I reached the period where I would write about junior and senior high school, the tone had to deepen to stay real because tragedy began to enter the environment. I felt this keenly when my childhood friend passed away at the age of 46, but it would take another ten years before I began writing it down because these were stories that I had kept from my parents. I waited until my Dad was gone and my Mom was under the cloud of Alzheimers before setting pen to paper on that segment.
The journey further deepened in 2021 when Liam returned to Lawton to attend the funeral of his cousin during the time of Covid. So many had been lost, so it became a reflection of not only the loss of friends and family, but also the loss of home. It wasn’t really until I had written it all down, and edited the book again and again and again and … well, you get the picture … that I realized that the end of the book was all about getting closure. Closure with the bridge incident, closure with leaving home, closure with being right with Dad and closure with being right with Mom.
The Christmas newsletters provide a fascinating frame for the novel. What inspired you to use them as a storytelling device?
Most of the stories had already been written before I ever thought of using the Christmas newsletters. I realized they had a special prominence on that day when Mom had said “You can’t write that.” Then I discovered a bound set of newsletters from Dad in a stack of papers in the entertainment center in 2021. It was a couple of months before my siblings and I were scheduled to meet on my birthday at my parent’s gravesite to bury their ashes.
We’d already spent most of our sadness regarding our loss of each of them during their first services years prior. The burial of their joint ashes took on more of a tone of celebratory closure. So I found choice excerpts from Dad’s newsletters about each of us kids, and told a funny story that contrasted with the innocent image that Dad portrayed in the newsletters. I read those over their ashes so we could all share a good laugh the day they were buried. Those excerpts found their way into Chapter 51 of Lawton Passage —- “Wind-Up.”
As I began dividing up my work on Lawton Passage as individual short stories to be released as Lyle’s Weekly Reader, I thought it would be cool to put a fitting excerpt from my Dad’s newsletters to begin each of those stories that depicted a period before junior high school. For junior high school and beyond, I did not initially use excerpts from the Christmas newsletter. Instead I began those stories with excerpted stanzas from rock and roll songs which were current during that day. However, when I learned that I could run into royalties issues, I dropped that idea and used excerpts from the Christmas newsletter all the way through.
Are there more stories from Vale Hollow or Liam’s world that you hope to tell?
The initial draft of Lawton Passage ran approximately 80 pages longer with a section called “Embarkation.” I felt the inclusion of that section would make Lawton Passage too long and would push publication of the book into 2027. The story involves my final days with my dad in hospice. To extend the content to make it a fuller book, I am exploring taking material from three interviews I videotaped with my dad about his life before I was born.
Another story option I am considering would be a fantasy, which would involve time travel between the current day and 1976 in Lawton, Tennessee. It would draw on high school characters introduced in Lawton Passage and intersperse them with a modern-day cadre of armchair philosophers and a wealthy entrepreneur. Together they would travel back in time to stop the murder by a chicken farmer of his wife with a wooden coat hanger.
Author Links: GoodReads | Facebook
Tim Duning’s Lawton Passage follows Liam, a boy raised in his ancestral country home built in the 1840s, as he adjusts to small-town rituals, and the quiet pressures of Southern life during the 1960s and ’70s. Through thefts and schoolyard hijinks, swimming pool accidents, séances, paper routes, and first loves, Liam navigates a childhood and adolescence shaped by faith, family, and friendship—always measuring the perfection his father presents against the messy realities he experiences.
From the explosive humor of sabotaged cigarettes to the tragedies of peer loss, the memoir captures the grit, grief, and laughter of growing up in a town that refuses to stay small. Forty years later, Liam returns to Lawton, tracing the echoes of his past, realizing that home and family live most vividly in stories, not land. Lawton Passage is a poignant, funny, and deeply honest meditation on legacy, memory, and the Southern art of storytelling.
Open Wound
Steven Marks’s Open Wound, the first book in The Last Immunity series, is a speculative medical thriller that turns a secretive luxury clinic into the doorway to a much larger biological conspiracy. The story begins with Celia Harlow, a famous woman seeking a discreet medical procedure at Vale Sanctuary, where privacy has been refined into an expensive art. When Ray Danner, a longtime waste-route driver, discovers a living young woman hidden inside a supposedly routine transfer, the novel shifts into a tense escape story. The woman calls herself Mara, but nearly everything else about her identity, her body, and the institution that created her remains uncertain.
What makes this science fiction thriller so compelling is the way it treats autonomy as something built through ordinary choices. Mara has spent her life observed, instructed, and classified, so sleeping when she chooses, stepping into the rain, or deciding whether to answer a question carries real emotional weight. Ray’s cautious kindness gives those scenes warmth without turning them sentimental. His son Evan brings scientific curiosity and moral unease into the house, while Naomi Crowell, an employee inside Vale Sanctuary, shows how conscience can survive within a system designed to make cruelty sound procedural.
Marks writes this bioethical thriller in measured, atmospheric prose. Vale Sanctuary is especially vivid, with its muted corridors, controlled scents, and language polished until violence sounds like administration. The recurring contrast between managed interiors and the unruly natural world gives the novel a strong visual rhythm. It is worth noting that the narration, at times, circles an image or idea a little longer than necessary, and readers looking for rapid-fire action may find the pace deliberate. Still, that restraint suits a literary suspense novel concerned with surveillance, consent, medical power, and the quiet ways people reclaim ownership of themselves.
Open Wound works best when its conspiracy and character story move together. The mystery surrounding Mara expands steadily, but the book never loses sight of the frightened person at its center. Its final chapters open the story into a broader medical conspiracy involving immunity, human experimentation, and other lives shaped by Vale’s work, giving the series plenty of room to grow. Readers drawn to speculative fiction, medical suspense, dystopian thrillers, and morally complex science fiction will find a thoughtful, unsettling story here, one that understands survival as more than staying alive.
Pages: 512 | ASIN : B0GX2V17G8
