Blog Archives
Emotional Seasonings
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 greatest emotional seasonings in the book were driven by two days 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.
Love Her Blind & Other Poems
Love Her Blind & Other Poems is a restless, emotionally exposed collection that moves through romantic betrayal, childhood violence, family memory, aging, faith, mental illness, and the strange negotiations required to survive all of them. David Somerfleck’s poems often begin with an ordinary object or encounter, then push it into a more charged psychological space. A rocking chair becomes part of a child’s understanding of violence, a bicycle becomes both escape and resistance, and a grandfather becomes something nearly cosmic. The collection’s range is clear in titles such as “My Grandfather’s God,” “Bicycle Rider,” “What I Didn’t Know About Love,” “Tall Time,” and “Mum.”
Somerfleck writes in a dense, image-driven style, piling physical detail onto memory until the past feels immediate and unstable. His strongest poems let metaphor deepen the experience rather than simply decorate it. In “Bicycle Rider,” reading and riding give the speaker a way to move beyond family cruelty, even when that cruelty follows him into sleep and imagination. In “My Grandfather’s God,” ancestry, nature, grief, and belief merge into a vision of blood moving through soil, roots, trees, and stars. These poems don’t treat memory as a tidy record. Memory becomes a living environment, full of weather, animals, wounds, voices, and figures that appear larger than life.
The book’s emotional center is its ongoing attempt to understand love without simplifying it. Love appears as tenderness, obsession, protection, grief, dependency, and renewed possibility. “What I Didn’t Know About Love” begins with harsh, dangerous images, but gradually makes room for a love that can be delicate, clear, and newly understood. That movement gives the collection more than darkness. Even when the poems enter frightening or surreal territory, they keep reaching toward connection, whether through a partner, a parent, a grandparent, an animal, a remembered landscape, or the act of writing itself.
What makes the collection memorable is the sense that every poem has been wrestled out of experience rather than calmly observed from a distance. Somerfleck’s voice can be raw, funny, grotesque, affectionate, angry, and unexpectedly gentle, sometimes within the same piece. The result is a book that feels intensely personal while still opening outward toward questions many readers will recognize: what families pass down, how pain changes perception, why love survives its own damage, and how imagination gives us somewhere to go when reality closes in. Love Her Blind & Other Poems turns bruised memory into fierce, strange music that keeps sounding after the page goes quiet.
Pages: 90 | ASIN : B0GN54HFYQ
Pivot Turns to Freedom
Louis Tong’s Pivot Turns to Freedom is a coming-of-age novel about Leonard Pan, a Singaporean ophthalmology trainee who moves to England in the 1990s and starts building a life beyond the expectations of his family and profession. Leonard’s work takes him through hospitals in Great Yarmouth, Sunderland, and Nottingham, but ballroom dancing becomes the real thread holding the story together. What begins as a private interest grows into a competitive ambition, complete with demanding coaches, changing partners, financial strain, injuries, and a troubling sponsor who turns encouragement into control. The novel follows Leonard across four years and thirty-nine chapters, giving his search for freedom plenty of room to develop.
Leonard is an entertaining narrator because he’s restless, observant, vain, insecure, funny, and frequently wrong about other people. His medical training shapes the way he sees everything, so dance movements become anatomy, hospital routines resemble choreography, and personal problems are treated like conditions he can diagnose. That habit creates much of the comedy, but it also reveals his central weakness. He’s so intent on proving himself that he sometimes treats dance partners, colleagues, and friends as pieces in his personal success story. The book’s most satisfying movement comes when Leonard begins to understand that freedom isn’t simply getting away from his father or winning medals. It’s learning to make choices without being ruled by pride, resentment, or someone else’s approval.
The novel has something in common with Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist, since both stories follow a protagonist who leaves familiar surroundings to pursue a dream and gradually discovers that the journey is changing him in ways the original goal couldn’t predict. Tong’s approach, though, is grounded in the awkward details of adult life: temporary contracts, immigration limits, petrol costs, aching feet, difficult personalities, and the challenge of finding someone willing to practise on a Tuesday evening. Leonard’s dream isn’t presented as a clean spiritual calling. It’s tangled up with ego, family history, loneliness, attraction, and the desire to be noticed. That messiness makes the book feel more like a personal memoir shaped into fiction than a polished fable.
The book’s strongest quality is its specificity. The medical scenes, British regional settings, Singaporean family dynamics, and technical descriptions of ballroom dancing give Leonard’s world a distinctive texture. At times, his elaborate observations slow the pace somewhat, and the late psychological mystery involving Joseph adds an unsettling note that I didn’t feel was fully resolved. Still, that ambiguity suits a novel about a man who’s spent years misunderstanding both himself and the people around him. Pivot Turns to Freedom is ultimately a warm, eccentric story about ambition becoming perspective. Leonard reaches the competition he’s chased, but his more meaningful achievement is recognizing that a full life depends on collaboration, gratitude, and the freedom to value the people beside him.
Pages: 280
Intervention in Church Conflict
Dorothy R. Dann’s Intervention in Church Conflict is a practical theological case study of congregational healing. Adapted from her Doctor of Ministry project, the book recounts Dann’s appointment to a divided church and her development of an intervention model combining family systems theory, narrative therapy, pastoral care, and biblical reflection. Its central premise is that a congregation should be understood as a living network of relationships rather than a collection of isolated individuals. Accordingly, conflict becomes a systemic condition shaped by history, anxiety, leadership patterns, and the stories members tell about their common life. Dann’s stated goal is to help congregations develop internal resources that can stabilize their relationships and support a healthier future.
The book’s strongest contribution is its integration of theory with a detailed account of ministry practice. Dann draws from writers such as Peter Steinke, Edwin Friedman, Ronald Richardson, Michael Nichols, Richard Schwartz, Paul Stevens, and Phil Collins, but she consistently translates their ideas into congregational terms. Concepts such as self-differentiation, emotional systems, shared leadership, and preferred narratives become concrete through listening sessions, leadership development, Bible study, planning exercises, and a weekend retreat. Her emphasis on “wholeness, not oneness” captures the model’s respect for difference within a connected community. Rather than seeking forced agreement, the intervention helps members recognize their distinct gifts, accept shared responsibility, and recover a common sense of mission.
Dann’s narrative of the leadership retreat gives the book much of its practical value. Participants examined the congregation’s history, assessed existing ministries, identified strengths, and began constructing a more hopeful account of their future. The process encouraged leaders to separate the church’s identity from its conflict-saturated story. One participant observed, “We realized that we were far better off than we had originally thought,” a statement that illustrates the intervention’s central movement from discouragement toward recognition of existing capacity. The reported results include better-attended meetings, clearer priorities, renewed lay leadership, expanded youth and adult ministries, greater openness in discussion, and increased confidence in the congregation’s mission. These outcomes make the book useful as both a ministry narrative and an adaptable resource for organizational leaders.
The book’s academic origins remain visible in its repeated explanations, extensive summaries of supporting authors, and careful documentation of the project’s stages. This structure gives readers a transparent view of how the intervention was conceived, implemented, and evaluated. The final model gathers the book’s insights into a sequence of practices: create safety, remain present and nonreactive, listen for systemic patterns, make room for a preferred story, support transformation, record appropriate plans, and equip laypeople for mission. Dann’s most persuasive insight is that constructive change begins when leaders shift attention from blame to responsibility, motivation, and available strengths. Intervention in Church Conflict is therefore a thoughtful professional resource for pastors, counselors, mediators, and church leaders who want to understand conflict as a relational reality and guide communities toward renewed purpose.
Pages: 97 | ASIN : B0CW1L7FG2
Secrets and Trauma
The Words She Left Behind tells your story as you become the caretaker for your estranged aunt and uncover, through journals, letters, and the devastation of Alzheimer’s, a more complicated woman than anyone understood. Why was this an important book for you to write?
This book was written with the intention of creating a timeline of events leading up to my aunt’s diagnosis. After unexpectedly finding my aunt’s journals, I realized there were profound secrets between the pages. I felt an intense urge to get to the core of her anger and hatred towards my family. Through the process of reading, interviewing, and research, I was able to find secrets and trauma, which then led me to build empathy and forgiveness. With an understanding of what had happened in my aunt’s life, I was able to share the details of my discoveries with my mother, her sister. We eventually all found healing due to the words she left behind in her journals.
When you found Toni’s journals, letters, and stored belongings, did your understanding of her change all at once or slowly over time?
The healing happened over time. At the same time I was reading her journals, I was also forming a relationship with my aunt–a relationship I never had with her. Through both experiences, I found compassion and empathy for her. This journey of forgiveness took over a year because there was so much hatred built up for almost twenty years.
How did caring for Toni reshape your relationship with your mother, Mary, and your understanding of their history as sisters?
My mother and I have always been close. Mary also never gave up hope that one day she and her sister could rebuild their relationship. At first, it was very difficult for my mother, but she eventually got to a place where love was able to grow between her and Toni again. It’s now a beautiful relationship. This was my goal all along–a gift to my mother.
Author Links: Linktree
My Last Day
My Last Day, by Michael J. Nohe, is an intimate, spiritually minded novel about Robert Sanctus, a brilliant and wealthy Wall Street trader who learns at thirty-four that he has only months to live. Determined to avoid a painful decline, Rob plans to end his life on his own terms after one final day in New York City. He records the experience in a candid journal filled with sharp observations, restless questions, and the gallows humor of a man trying to remain himself while facing the one problem he can’t outthink. Framed by a foreword and afterword from his accountant, the book reads like a personal document left behind by someone who needs to understand what happened before anyone else can.
Rob’s journey unfolds through a series of encounters that gradually pull him out of his private despair. A confrontation with a desperate young man becomes an opportunity for a second chance. A visit to a neighborhood bar uncovers an astonishing family connection. A mysterious conversation in a vanished church challenges Rob’s certainty about faith, control, and death. Later, his meeting with a homeless mother and her son gives his wealth a new and urgent purpose. Nohe builds the story around these human exchanges, letting each one widen Rob’s view of what a single day can hold and how quickly one compassionate decision can travel into other lives.
The book’s strongest quality is Rob’s voice. He’s intelligent, opinionated, funny, generous, skeptical, and sometimes frustratingly eager to wander down a side road. His digressions about finance, baseball, coffee, music, New York, and Rocky Road ice cream make the journal feel lived-in rather than polished into something distant. Beneath the humor is a serious meditation on mortality, suicide, regret, providence, and the difference between earning a fortune and putting it to meaningful use. The conversational style keeps those ideas accessible, while the recurring emphasis on second chances gives the story its emotional shape.
My Last Day is ultimately a story about a man who thinks he’s preparing to leave the world and discovers that he still has time to change it. Rob’s final acts connect families, restore hope, create a lasting refuge, and transform the legacy he’ll leave behind. The result is warm, reflective, and deeply sincere, with an ending that earns its emotion by showing how kindness becomes larger when it’s passed from one person to the next. My Last Day reminds us that a life’s true measure isn’t how long it lasts, but how much hope it leaves behind.
Pages: 114 | ASIN : B0FGJX5FTT
The Rishi Trilogy
The Rishi Trilogy, by Mark Miller, is an illustrated children’s fantasy adventure that combines magical travel, family relationships, humor, and gentle lessons about responsibility. The collection follows Rishi, a curious boy from Wellington, New Zealand, whose life changes after he meets King Montamahilla, the warmhearted gorilla ruler of Gorillia. A glowing staff connects their worlds and eventually gives Rishi and his friend Kiri remarkable abilities, but its only instruction is simple: “Use it wisely.” That idea gives the three-book collection a clear foundation while leaving plenty of room for safaris, experiments, international travel, soccer matches, and royal surprises.
The first story, Rishi and the King, has the cheerful rhythm of a children’s travel adventure. Rishi meets the King during a parade, watches his doctor father help him recover from an illness, and receives an invitation to visit Gorillia. The royal banquet and African safari create an energetic introduction to the series, especially as Rishi encounters flamingos, crocodiles, lions, giraffes, and elephants. Miller tells the story in Rishi’s casual voice, so his excitement, nervousness, and occasional confusion feel natural. King Montamahilla’s fondness for songs, green bananas, grand entrances, and affectionate hospitality also gives the book an appealingly playful personality.
In The Wisdom of the Staff and Kiri and the Cousins, the series grows into a children’s magical adventure about curiosity and good judgment. Rishi and Kiri test the staff by ripening apples, producing a few coins, communicating through television screens, transporting luggage, and eventually carrying their families across oceans. Their experiments are fun, but they also reveal the emotional intelligence at the center of the trilogy. A wish involving Kiri’s absent father carries more weight than a wish for money, and the children gradually learn that genuine needs, thoughtful intentions, and patience matter. The later trips to Canada and Paris expand the story without losing its family focus, while Kiri’s emerging ability to understand and repair the staffs makes her an especially interesting partner for Rishi.
The book’s many illustrations give this picture book a bright, cinematic quality. The parade crowds, glowing green staffs, palace banquet, wildlife encounters, cozy family rooms, Paris landmarks, and packed soccer stadiums help younger readers follow the action and provide visual pauses between sections of text. King Montamahilla is particularly expressive in the artwork, whether he’s greeting a crowd, singing with his staff, imitating Rodin’s The Thinker, or appearing at someone’s front door. Overall, The Rishi Trilogy is a friendly children’s fantasy series with the scale of an international adventure and the warmth of a family story. Its strongest moments come from watching Rishi and Kiri discover that wisdom isn’t a power the staff gives them. It’s something they build together, one choice at a time.
Pages: 116 | ASIN : B0H4M9LB57
Even Angels Wear Leather Jackets and Ride Motorcycles
J.A. McGovern’s Even Angels Wear Leather Jackets and Ride Motorcycles is an emotionally candid family drama about the people whose influence continues long after they’re gone. The story follows Peter as he learns that his beloved Uncle Eddie is dying and desperately races from Philadelphia to a New Jersey hospital. During that frantic journey, memories carry Peter through family celebrations, nights at local bars, youthful misadventures, romantic conflicts, and private conversations with the uncle who believed in his creative ambitions. These recollections build a vivid portrait of Eddie as a motorcycle-riding rebel, devoted father, loyal friend, and unexpected source of wisdom.
The book’s nonlinear structure reflects how memory often works during a crisis. A train ride, a song, a hospital corridor, or the sight of a leather jacket can send Peter into another moment from his relationship with Eddie. Some memories are funny and unruly, while others reveal Eddie guiding Peter through questions about love, prejudice, family expectations, and the uncertain path of becoming an artist. Eddie’s advice, “If you ever feel lonely pull out your pen and write. Be the guide other wanderers seek,” captures both his role in Peter’s life and the purpose behind the book itself. Peter isn’t simply remembering his uncle. He’s using storytelling to carry Eddie’s guidance forward.
McGovern gives this coming-of-age novel and family loss story much of its personality through working-class New Jersey settings, Italian American family gatherings, neighborhood bars, classic-rock songs, motorcycles, food, cigarettes, and relentless teasing. The family feels loud, imperfect, affectionate, and recognizably alive. Eddie emerges through accumulated details rather than formal descriptions, whether he’s supporting Peter after a performance, defending his relationship with Zoe, helping a stranger, or making a memorable exit on his Harley. That everyday intimacy gives the hospital and funeral scenes their emotional force because readers have spent so much time seeing what Eddie meant to the people surrounding him.
Readers familiar with Mitch Albom’s Tuesdays with Morrie may recognize a similar relationship between a searching young man and an older mentor facing death. Both books explore how one person’s lessons can shape another person’s future, but McGovern’s story unfolds with the rowdy energy of family legend. Its world includes drinking, parties, racial tensions, artistic dreams, local humor, and the restless recklessness of early adulthood. Eddie’s philosophy isn’t delivered through scheduled conversations. It comes through shared meals, spontaneous drives, loud music, difficult choices, and the example of how he treats people.
The ideal audience for Even Angels Wear Leather Jackets and Ride Motorcycles includes adult readers who enjoy autobiographical fiction, family dramas, and emotional coming-of-age stories. It will speak especially strongly to anyone who’s lost an uncle, parent, mentor, or other larger-than-life family member and found that grief can preserve even the smallest memories. By the time Peter places a rose on Eddie’s casket and promises, “I will live in your memory Uncle Eddie,” the title feels fully earned. Eddie becomes the book’s leather-clad angel, roaring through Peter’s memories and reminding him to love bravely, follow his own path, and create something that might guide the next wanderer.
