Blog Archives
Stories are Told by the Storyteller
Reel Around the Fountain follows a boy from a working-class family navigating his growing awareness about his own sexuality as he searches for answers about his family’s past. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
The core of the book’s genesis wasn’t so much about family history as it was about examining how queer kids are often targeted by predators. Queer kids tend to be good at keeping secrets — at blending into the background, into the walls — and I wanted to explore and expose that. The intersection of queerness and working-class, paycheck-to-paycheck life creates conditions predators can take advantage of. That intersection wasn’t something I saw represented growing up, and it’s still not something I find often, but I wanted to portray it with fairness and affection. It’s a world I know well, and I wanted to honor it.
But I was equally interested in family dynamics, and how those dynamics create room for people like priests to exploit queer kids. As I structured and wrote the book, though, the family itself started to take over. I felt it was important to show that kids from poor backgrounds aren’t exploited because of some lack of love or parenting — it’s that society creates the conditions that marginalize working-class families in the first place, and predators find the cracks in those conditions.
The story captures working-class life with remarkable specificity. How important was it to portray that community with both honesty and affection?
This was extremely important to me. I didn’t want to pander, stereotype, or romanticize working-class life and people. It was key to me to examine how we pull the levers we have access to in this life — and sometimes that may not be many levers at all. In addition to this, I wanted to explore gender roles, and how working-class life is often misunderstood to be rigidly gendered when, in fact, that isn’t always the case. With the grandparents in particular, I wanted to examine masculinity and femininity as a spectrum, not a binary norm. The grandfather and grandmother expose how circumstance often dictates what gender expression in family caregiving actually looks like.
Working-class life also often starts earlier than other facets of life do. White-collar, wealthier kids get a different kind of upbringing — more protected, more cushioned. Working-class kids shoulder different burdens, and shoulder them sooner. Through JP and his family, I wanted to explore that. I also wanted to highlight how the institutions that are supposed to protect people — police, social services, hospitals — often aren’t trustworthy, or aren’t there for people like JP’s family when it counts.
JP slowly learns that every family member remembers the past differently. What does the novel suggest about the relationship between memory and truth?
In any love circle — the one you’re born into or the one you build — stories are told by the storyteller, not recorded by some neutral archivist. As a storyteller myself, I can’t count how many times I’ve sat across from someone I love and found we remember the same event completely differently. I like that. And I know my version isn’t absolute truth. Instead, it’s a form of characterization. So while JP is trying to piece together the story of his birth, that search is also a way for him — and for the reader — to understand each family member through how they tell it. Every version of the story reveals as much about the teller as it does about the event.
I also think it’s important that truth, for the individual, is shaped by survival, not accuracy. What we remember is what we can handle remembering — what lets us survive the day, and the times, we’re living through. JP’s quest for the truth of his birth shows that we can never fully know it. Memory is fluid and fleeting. That’s part of the human condition. I hope that by the end, the reader is still left without the full truth of his birth story — but with the understanding that each storyteller’s memory reveals something about them, not about the events themselves.
What do you hope readers take away about family, forgiveness, and the stories we inherit?
We inherit stories, but since stories are fluid with memory, and truth is subjective, how we choose to shoulder and carry the burden of those stories matters. The truth of a story changes and evolves as we change and evolve as human beings. That’s key to this novel. We inherit family burdens, and those burdens are carried differently as we move through — and change within — this world. I want to be deliberate here with the word change instead of grow. Shouldering the burden of stories isn’t a progressive climb toward growth; it’s up and down, like every other facet of life. Where we are — reacting to outside circumstances — shapes our truth and our memory in that moment.
Forgiveness is a big part of this story, but for me as a writer, what mattered most was that JP needs to forgive himself — for the blame he’s chosen to inherit, both for the weight of his family’s beginning and for the abuse by the priest. If we can’t first forgive ourselves for things — even things that were never our fault, but that we assume blame for anyway — we can’t truly forgive the people closest to us.
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Reel Around the Fountain
Roy Edward Jackson’s Reel Around the Fountain is a coming-of-age novel about JP, a gay boy growing up in a working-class Michigan town amid illness, alcoholism, Catholic guilt, and a family that expresses love through caretaking, teasing, sacrifice, and the occasional hustle. The novel begins with JP learning that his birth coincided with several family upheavals, including the accident after which his father, already living with multiple sclerosis, never walked again. From there, JP tries to assemble the truth from relatives whose stories are shaped by grief, guilt, exaggeration, and self-protection. His questions about the past run alongside his growing awareness of his sexuality and his understanding that, in his world, becoming an adult often means knowing what must remain hidden.
The book’s most striking choice is its second-person narration. Calling JP “you” gives the story the intimacy of someone revisiting a younger self, sometimes compassionately and sometimes with exasperation. It also suits a novel preoccupied with memory. Scenes don’t unfold as a clean historical record but as stories retold, revised, and connected through songs, objects, hospital rooms, bars, Catholic rituals, and family sayings. Records are especially important. Music gives JP and his father a shared language, while scratched vinyl, skipping songs, cassette tapes, and 45 adapters become ways of thinking about damaged memories and lives that keep circling back to the same moments.
Jackson handles painful material with an earthy, observant sense of humor. JP’s attention can land on a dirty carpet, a strange phrase, a record label, or the social rules of a funeral home even when something devastating is happening nearby. That voice keeps the novel grounded in the physical details of working life and poverty. It’s also where the book finds much of its emotional force. JP’s family members are vivid because their care is practical and imperfect. GG manipulates systems, Paw Paw gives up trucking to become a caregiver, Anna turns pain into blunt jokes, and JP learns to work, write obituaries, take photographs, and tell stories. Even after abuse leaves him tangled in shame, the narrative stays attentive to the difference between what was done to him and what he’s been taught to blame himself for.
The novel is episodic and deliberately repetitive, shaped more like an album of connected tracks than a tightly plotted drama. Its recurring phrases and memories occasionally slow the pace, but they also create the feeling of a mind worrying at old wounds until their meaning changes. By the end, JP’s writing, music, and move to Chicago offer him a future built from the people he’s lost rather than an escape from them. The record-adapter tattoo he receives becomes a fitting symbol of that inheritance, something small that connects the music to the person carrying it. I’d recommend Reel Around the Fountain most strongly to readers who appreciate queer coming-of-age fiction, complicated family portraits, working-class settings, and novels in which pop music carries as much emotional history as dialogue does.
Pages: 324 | ISBN : 978-1590218013
Intimacy and Immediacy
The Inheritance of Light follows two families through war and migration and generations of grief and survival. Where did the idea for this novel come from?
The Inheritance of Light grew out of family stories, old letters, historical fragments, and the long memory of two families shaped by war, migration, grief, and survival. But the deeper impetus for beginning the novel was also tied to the approaching 250-year anniversary of American democracy and the question of what, exactly, gets handed down from one generation to the next.
Benjamin Franklin’s warning…“A republic, if you can keep it”…has always resonated with me. It captures the truth that freedom is fragile and that democracy requires vigilance, engagement, and moral courage to survive. In that sense, the novel is not only about family inheritance but also about civic inheritance.
I wanted to explore how people inherit more than land, names, and photographs. They inherit wounds, silences, values, resilience, and obligations. The same is true of a nation. Each generation receives both light and burden, and each must decide what it will preserve, what it will repair, and what it will risk passing on.
So, the novel came from both the intimacy of family memory and the larger American question of survival, how people endure hardship without surrendering their humanity, and how a republic endures only if its people remain awake enough to keep it. Around here, we might say freedom is a little like an old porch roof: you cannot just admire it from the yard. Every so often, you have to climb up there with a hammer before the whole thing starts leaking on everybody.
Were there particular traits or patterns you wanted to trace across the Templeton and Sewell families?
Yes, very much so. I wanted to trace the ways certain traits keep showing up in families like old songs nobody meant to teach, but everybody somehow knows.
In both the Templeton and Sewell families, I was interested in resilience, certainly, but not the shiny, sermon-on-Sunday kind. I mean the lived-in kind, the kind that gets people through war, loss, disappointment, uprooting, and the long stretches when life is more grit than glory. I wanted to follow how courage, endurance, loyalty, and a deep sense of duty can be passed down right alongside silence, stubbornness, pride, and unspoken grief.
I was also fascinated by how families develop emotional habits. Some people learn to bear pain quietly. Some learn to press forward no matter what. Some turn to humor, storytelling, or hard work as a way of keeping despair from taking over. In the South, that often means somebody is cracking a joke while the whole house is on fire, then asking who wants iced tea while they look for the hose.
Another pattern I wanted to trace was the tension between independence and belonging. Both families produce people who are strong-willed, sometimes maddeningly so, yet they are also bound by kinship, memory, and obligation. They may leave home, rebel against family expectations, or try to outrun the past, but the pull of inheritance, emotional, moral, and historical, never quite lets go.
I also wanted to show how love travels through generations in imperfect forms. It is not always spoken tenderly. Sometimes it arrives as sacrifice, protection, labor, duty, or sheer persistence. In families shaped by hardship, affection is not always dressed for church. Sometimes it comes to the table in overalls.
So yes, I was tracing patterns of resilience, sacrifice, pride, silence, humor, loyalty, and the complicated ways people carry both wound and wisdom forward. What interested me most was how those traits can save a family, burden a family, and sometimes do both at once.
The novel uses letters, linked episodes, and shifting perspectives—how did you develop this mosaic structure?
I developed the mosaic structure because it felt truest to the way families and nations actually remember. We do not inherit one seamless story. We inherit letters, fragments, silences, conflicting memories, and episodes that only reveal their meaning over time. I wanted the form of the novel to reflect that.
The letters create intimacy and immediacy. The linked episodes let me trace how choices and losses echo across generations. And the shifting perspectives allowed me to show that history looks different depending on who is carrying it. That was especially important in portraying people trying to fit into a new country or culture. Belonging is rarely simple. It involves dislocation, adaptation, misunderstanding, and the struggle to hold on to your identity while learning how to survive in a place that may not fully welcome you. The mosaic form gave me a way to honor those layered experiences without forcing them into a single, tidy narrative.
A family story is rarely one straight sermon. It is more like six cousins talking at once, one aunt crying in the kitchen, somebody reading an old letter out loud, and a newcomer on the porch wondering whether they are ever really going to belong. That felt like the right shape for this novel.
What is the next book you are working on, and when will it be available?
The next book I’m working on is tentatively titled Too Much Gravy for One Enchilada, which ought to tell readers right away that I have not entirely surrendered my fondness for the odd, the heartfelt, or the slightly overstuffed.
It’s a collection of short stories, poems, plays, and essays I’ve written over the years, so in many ways it brings together the different rooms of the same house. Some pieces lean literary, some humorous, some reflective, and some carry the kinds of voices and questions that have stayed with me for a long time. What ties them together is a deep interest in memory, survival, human folly, and the strange ways people try to make meaning out of love, loss, history, and everyday life.
I like to think of it as a gathering of mischief and meditation under one roof. Around here, we’d probably say it’s the kind of book where laughter and heartbreak might sit down at the same table, pass the biscuits, and argue kindly over who gets the last word.
As for availability, it is still in progress, so I’m reluctant to give a firm publication date just yet. Let’s just say late 2026 or early 2027. But it is very much alive on the worktable, and I’m hoping it will make its way into the world once I’ve had time to shape it into the collection it deserves to be.
Author Links: GoodReads | Facebook | Charles L. Templeton | EMergeLit | Website | EMerge Magazine | Flapper Press | Amazon
In a layered portrait of American family and identity, generations of the Templetons and Sewells are carried along the currents of history, each one bearing the hopes and burdens of those who came before.
Through the earliest battles that forged a fledgling nation to the streets of midcentury Washington and the crucible of World War II, their stories are masterfully woven together to paint the resilience, devotion, faith, and bonds that define family in this historical fiction. It’s an epic, both gritty and deeply human, that traces the extraordinary paths of love, identity, and family, showing how the choices of one generation ripple across the next.
Through heartbreak and triumph, devotion and sacrifice, these intertwined lives illuminate what it truly means to honor the past while shaping the future, carrying forward a light that guides generations yet to come.
With profound insight and narrative mastery, bestselling author Charles Templeton brings history and relationships to vivid, unforgettable life in this monumental family saga fiction.
The Inheritance of Light
Charles L. Templeton’s The Inheritance of Light is a work of historical fiction that braids together the stories of two family lines, the Templetons and the Sewells, across generations of war, migration, labor, marriage, grief, and survival. It begins in the Revolutionary era and moves forward through the War of 1812, the Civil War, and into the twentieth century, using linked episodes, family memory, and a strong sense of inheritance to ask what exactly passes from one generation to the next: blood, certainly, but also courage, stubbornness, tenderness, damage, and a way of seeing the world.
Templeton is not trying to be slick, detached, or fashionably ironic; he is trying to honor people. That choice gives the novel an unusual warmth. I felt it especially in the letters, the battlefield passages, and the domestic scenes where homes are being built even as history keeps barging through the door. At its best, the prose has a weathered musicality to it. It’s full of smoke, mud, river, iron, and lamplight, and the book understands that endurance is rarely glamorous. It is usually repetitive, familial, and half-invisible until someone remembers it properly.
I also admired the ambition of the structure. This is not a narrow historical novel but a generational mosaic, and mosaics always risk becoming static. Here, though, the book keeps finding pulse through recurrence: fathers and sons, brothers and wives, duty and homecoming, violence and mercy, the old ache of leaving and the old ache of return. I respected the scale of the undertaking. I finished the book feeling that Templeton had written not just toward the past but toward obligation, toward the belief that family history, however ragged, is a kind of lantern.
I’d recommend The Inheritance of Light to readers of historical fiction, family saga, multigenerational fiction, Southern historical fiction, and genealogical fiction, especially anyone drawn to novels where lineage matters as much as plot. Readers who enjoy the rootedness of Wendell Berry, or the generational reach of books in the vein of Jeff Shaara’s war-centered historical storytelling, will likely find something to admire here. This is a book for people who like their history human-scaled and their memory hard-won. I think The Inheritance of Light argues, persuasively and with heart, that what survives a family is not just blood, but light.
Pages: 323 | ASIN : B0GGJQS3FC
