Blog Archives
Trust and Unconditional Love
Uncommon Strangers follows a writer and the men he creates as they confront family trauma, sexuality, masculinity, loneliness, and the difficult journey toward accepting themselves and the love others offer. Why did you choose to explore these themes through a combination of memoir and fiction?
I enjoy moving back and forth as author, narrator, character, and as a person in dialog with readers, taking them through multiple levels of experience as we engage in the creation of meaning. Mixing genres of memoir and short-story forms allowed me to explore my own past in a way that provides readers with the means to insert themselves in the underlying themes without feeling they are merely passive observers of a narrator’s story and confessions. My goal is always to reach toward the universals of the human experience and invite readers to reflect upon their own lives and their place within the human community and then to act upon their insights.
Dorr Reed functions partly as an alter ego and is himself a writer. What does that additional layer allow you to explore?
Dorr allowed me to step into the potential that is in people who others write off as odd or too far gone to spend time with, to help, and nurture. He wanders from place to place, drinks, uses drugs, won’t commit to anyone. And yet, his writing represents a depth of thought and feeling, a need for love and compassion that so many find missing in their lives. In many ways, he is what is left after the devastation of war and the disappointment that comes with learning that the values and beliefs he held as a young man are compromised by the decisions and behaviors of others. I see him as the potential that can be found when trust and unconditional love mitigate the trauma of living.
How do friendship and romantic love help the characters challenge the stories they have believed about themselves?
Friendship and human interconnection are essential ingredients of the human need for community and feelings of safety in living our lives. In many ways, at least for my generation of men, feelings that moved beyond friendship into romantic feelings for persons of the same sex produced a firestorm of hostility within the culture. The blatant messages we received were that we were sick, bad, perverted, terrible human beings worthy of beatings and death. The psychological restraints forced many of us to feel bad about ourselves and to think we had to fit in somehow, learn how to fit the images of masculinity available to us as presented by the majority. I think the stories I have created in Uncommon Strangers allow for my characters to learn earlier than I did that the only way to deal with being different is to accept that difference and find ways to be whatever we are, find people who love us and care for us, and go about the task of living, following our own unique dreams, and using our talents to help others become more accepting of differences among human beings. The bonds of friendship, love, and respect among the central characters provide the means for them to accept themselves and one another as men without labeling them according to their sexual proclivities.
What do you hope readers who have struggled with expectations surrounding identity, sexuality, or masculinity recognize in these characters?
The bottom line for me is that human beings learn to accept themselves and others for whatever they are without culturally imposed limitations related to issues of sex, race, creed, religion, skin color, sexual identity, or any other superficial restraints human beings use for sorting and feeling superior to others. I would hope that people who have struggled with identity, sexuality, or definitions of masculinity will find that they are not alone, that they are worthy human beings, that they have as much right to function in the world as anyone else, and that, though many people are still lost in myopic views of what it means to be human, those struggling with self-worth and identity can learn to accept that it is society at large that is the problem, not them! It took much of my lifetime to come to this conclusion. I hope my words help others long before too much of their lives have been spent.
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Building on his own life story the author looks at the impact of growing up in a poor and dysfunctional family and engages his fictional characters in the pursuit of their own truths about themselves and their attempts to deal with the problems of the human condition while they search for answers to the essential questions we all face.
Orson Welles is credited with saying, “Only through our love and friendship can we create the illusion for a moment that we’re not alone.” The author demonstrates in Uncommon Strangers that art, too, creates the necessary illusion.
Journeys Through Heartbreak
Tango with Ghosts follows a 72-year-old Canadian who escapes to Buenos Aires only to encounter the ghost of a poet and tango dancer, drawing him into a haunting mystery rooted in his apartment’s secrets and Argentina’s buried history. How did you research this difficult period of Argentine history?
Most of my research was done using Google; however, there are many people who had family and friends who were taken away. I did many interviews with family members and relied on their stories.
What was the most challenging aspect of writing Reginald’s emotional journey?
Reginald represents a major part of society that journeys through heartbreak and loss. Many of these people don’t recover; they live in the past and feel there is no real future, whether it is divorce, death, or depression.
If readers remember one idea from Tango with Ghosts, what would you like it to be?
Get off the comfortable chair of self-pity, acknowledge nothing will last forever, and embrace the moment.
Author Links: GoodReads | Amazon
Buenos Aires, 2006. He came to hide. Behind him, a shattered marriage and a sold business in Vancouver. Ahead, a year of solitude in a grand, unsettling apartment on Calle Talcahuano.
He meant to write. He avoided the city’s midnight milongas, because he knew too well what lives inside the tango: the unbearable art of holding what you are bound to lose. But some impulses can’t be buried.
Then he discovers a thirty-year-old manuscript by Alejandro Vargas, a writer disappeared from this very building during the military dictatorship. Vargas’s final meditations on dance, death, and the courage to stay become a mirror.
Pulled into the slipstream of the apartment’s past, he is drawn back into the embrace, toward a woman haunted by her own secrets, and toward a truth the city has kept hidden for three decades.
Some cities bury their dead. This one dances with them.
Tango with Ghosts
Bruce R. Hampson’s Tango with Ghosts is a supernatural historical novel about Reginald Emanuel, a seventy-two-year-old Canadian who arrives in Buenos Aires hoping distance will quiet the wreckage of his marriage. Instead, his apartment on Calle Talcahuano greets him with strange music, shifting photographs, hidden messages, and the lingering presence of its former owner, the poet and tango dancer Alejandro Vargas. What begins as one man’s attempt to disappear becomes an absorbing search through a building’s secrets and Argentina’s buried history.
Tango gives the novel its language and its heartbeat. The embrace becomes a way of thinking about love, grief, mortality, and the courage required to remain present when every instinct says to retreat. Hampson clearly understands the dance from within, from the codes of the milonga to the nearly invisible exchange of weight and intention between partners. His Buenos Aires feels equally intimate: humid streets, aging cafés, wooden dance floors, rattling elevators, and an apartment that breathes, remembers, and occasionally loses patience with its tenant.
The mystery reaches beyond the apartment into Argentina’s Dirty War and the lives of those who were disappeared. Through Alejandro, his daughter Elena, the poet Miguel Santoro, and the watchful building manager Jorge, the novel explores the complicated moral inheritance left by terror. These characters carry secrets, guilt, anger, and unanswered questions, yet Hampson keeps returning to the human choices inside that history. Elena is especially compelling, both as a daughter trying to understand her father and as a woman who has made dancing an act of survival.
There’s a warm, insistent generosity at the center of Tango with Ghosts. It believes people can tell the truth after decades of silence, reconnect after years of absence, and step back onto the floor after a fall. The novel’s ghosts aren’t simply there to frighten Reginald. They ask him to witness, to feel, and finally to live. Haunting, tender, and alive with the pulse of tango, this is a novel about holding the past close without letting it stop your feet.
Pages: 216 | ASIN : B0H7YPKL87
An Unconscious Choice of Chaos
Tessa Kinsela’s An Unscious Choice of Chaos is an emotionally candid coming-of-age novel about how quickly adolescence can outrun a young person’s ability to understand it. Ashley begins Year 9 believing that careful thought can keep life orderly. Then friendship, desire, grief, alcohol, secrecy, and trauma begin exerting their own momentum. Kinsela makes the butterfly effect more than a recurring image. It becomes the book’s emotional structure, with each seemingly small choice altering the shape of everything that follows.
Ashley’s voice is intelligent, observant, funny, and intensely analytical. Her attention to bedroom colours, family rituals, school timetables, books, trees, and food gives the novel a vivid everyday texture, while the Queensland heat and bushland make its setting feel lived in. That domestic detail matters because it establishes the warmth surrounding Ashley before her inner world starts to fracture. The chapter titles, from “Anticipation” and “Exposure” through “Shame,” “Resilience,” and “Equilibrium,” create a thoughtful map of that psychological journey.
The novel’s most affecting quality is its willingness to remain close to Ashley when her reasoning becomes tangled. Her relationships with Tanner, Maddy, and Bray reveal different forms of intimacy, but the emotional heart of the book lies in her bonds with her family, especially Lacey. Kinsela handles consent, sexual assault, self-harm, substance use, and emotional distress with seriousness and compassion. The story also captures how shame can distort responsibility, leaving a person convinced that every harm they’ve suffered began with some earlier mistake of their own.
This is a confronting read, but it’s also a deeply humane one. Ashley’s recovery arrives through honesty, professional care, familiar places, books, and the quiet presence of people who keep loving her. The ending feels earned because healing is presented as an ongoing practice. Tessa Kinsela captures the terrible velocity of one small choice becoming a storm, then shows how tenderness can teach a life to hold steady again.
Pages: 252 | ASIN : B0HBRGDZR3
Hearing Her Own Voice
When Paris Whispers centers around a young woman from Virginia who leaves grief, a controlling mother, and a cramped sense of self behind for a fresh start in Paris in 1981. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
The seed of the story was planted long before I ever wrote a word of it. At twenty-two, I spent a year in France when a Rotary scholarship sent me to the Loire Valley. For the first time, I discovered what it felt like to exist outside the shape my family and my hometown had drawn around me. There’s a particular kind of freedom that comes from settling somewhere no one has known you since childhood, where you get to decide, moment by moment, who you actually are rather than who you’ve always been. I never forgot that feeling, and I wanted to give it to a character who needed it even more urgently than I did.
Catrine grew out of a question I kept turning over after observing a complicated mother-daughter relationship: What happens when a young woman’s grief and her mother’s control become so intertwined that she can no longer tell which one is actually holding her in place? I wanted her escape to Paris to be about more than geography. I wanted the city itself, and the literary ghosts she encounters there, to give her permission to grieve and celebrate honestly and to hear her own voice again after years of hearing everyone else’s.
And 1981, around the time I lived in France, felt right almost instinctively. It’s close enough to the present to feel intimate, but distant enough that Catrine has to be genuinely alone with herself. She can’t simply reach back into her old life with a call or text home whenever she wavers. She has to navigate the city, make mistakes, and sit with her loneliness. That isolation, that forced self-reliance, is essential to who she becomes.
Many stories about Paris focus on beauty and escape, but your novel also explores loneliness, confusion, and personal growth. Why was it important to show both sides of the city?
Paris has been mythologized so thoroughly across the years, as the city of love, of light and instant transformation, that I think we forget the myth can be its own kind of pressure. If you arrive expecting magic and instead find yourself lost, overwhelmed, and unbearably alone, that gap between expectation and reality can make the loneliness sting even more. I wanted to be honest about that gap, because it’s the truer story, and I think it’s the more universal one. Almost no one’s life changes in a straight line toward good fortune. It usually changes through confusion first.
For Catrine, Paris can’t simply hand her a new self. She has to earn it—get lost in unfamiliar streets, misread situations, feel the particular ache of eating alone in a café where everyone else seems to belong. Those moments of disorientation aren’t obstacles to her transformation; they are the transformation. The city’s beauty means something to her only because she’s also felt its indifference. I didn’t want to write a postcard. I wanted to write what it actually feels like to rebuild yourself somewhere far from home, the exhilaration and the terror of it, often in the same afternoon.
There’s also something particular about the literary ghosts she hears, Flaubert, Chanel, Proust and the other voices from the past that inhabit the city for her. They don’t offer her comfort so much as company and suggestion in her confusion. They remind her that beauty and difficulty have always coexisted in this place, that she’s not the first person to feel undone by Paris even while falling in love with it.
Catrine and Freddie’s relationship reflects how some friendships can shape us while also keeping us from growing. Why was that complexity important to include?
I’ve always been drawn to the friendships that aren’t simply good or bad for us, because those are the ones that feel most true to life. Freddie offers Catrine something real: companionship, introductions to other friends, an entry into Parisian life as an expat, someone who is also young and far from home. But comfort and growth don’t always point in the same direction, and I wanted to explore what happens when a person who makes you feel safest is also, whether on purpose or not, the person who keeps you staying small.
Freddie knows an earlier version of Catrine, and there’s something easy about being with someone who doesn’t ask or expect you to change. It’s a relief, at first, not to have to explain yourself or justify who you are. But that same familiarity can quietly become a kind of ceiling or box. I wanted to show how easy it is to mistake the comfort of being known for the comfort of being seen for who you are and how those are actually two very different things. Catrine has to recognize the difference before she can decide what she’s willing to put up with and what she’s outgrown.
I think most of us have had a friendship like that at some point, one we needed exactly when we needed it, and then, eventually, needed to leave behind and grow beyond.
What do you hope readers who have experienced their own transitions—leaving home, starting over, or redefining themselves—take away from Catrine’s journey?
I hope readers who’ve stood at their own threshold of leaving, whatever that looked like for them, see something of their own courage reflected back in Catrine. Starting over rarely feels brave while you’re inside it. Mostly it feels like fumbling, like being unsure whether you’re running toward something or just running away. I want readers to know that both can be true at once, and that it doesn’t disqualify the journey. Or the break.
More than anything, I hope they take away permission, permission to grieve what they left, even if leaving was the right choice; permission to be lonely without treating loneliness as proof of failure; permission to let a new place, or a new season of life, change them slowly rather than all at once. Catrine doesn’t arrive in Paris and become a different person overnight. She becomes herself in pieces, through small ordinary moments as much as through revelation. I think that’s closer to how real transformation works than the version we sometimes get in stories.
And I hope readers walk away trusting that the versions of us shaped by our hometowns, by grief, by the people who raised us, aren’t obstacles to becoming someone new, or better, or stronger. They’re the foundation we build the new self on, even if we reject some of it. Catrine doesn’t leave Virginia completely behind so much as she learns to carry it differently. That felt important to me, that Catrine’s story not be one of escape, but of integration.
Author Website
When a brief romance ends in abrupt eviction, Catrine is left broke and unmoored, suspended between a city that won’t release her and a past she refuses to reclaim. An unlikely friendship with a widowed Sorbonne professor leads to an impulsive road trip to Normandy and everything begins to unravel. What follows is not the Paris she expected, but something more unsettling-and more honest.
Is the City of Light rescuing her, haunting her, or revealing something she’s been too afraid to see?
When Paris Whispers
When Paris Whispers is a reflective work of literary women’s fiction with strong coming-of-age, romance, and travel fiction elements. The novel follows Catrine Gray, a young woman from Virginia who leaves grief, a controlling mother, and a cramped sense of self behind when she moves to Paris in 1981. What begins as a long-dreamed escape becomes something more complicated: a test of friendship, a love story, a reckoning with family secrets, and a journey toward finally choosing her own life.
I was drawn to the way Marianne C. Bohr makes Paris feel both magical and stubbornly real. This isn’t just postcard Paris, though there are plenty of cafés, pastries, literary streets, and romantic corners. It’s also dirty laundry, bad directions, bruised knees, awkward French, and the ache of realizing that a dream place will not fix you unless you are willing to change. I liked that. Catrine’s love of France could have become overly sweet, but the novel gives it texture. Paris whispers to her through literature, memory, and those strange guiding voices, yet she still has to do the hard human work herself.
The author’s strongest choice, for me, is making Catrine’s growth feel gradual. She doesn’t arrive in France fully formed. She is bookish, wounded, naive, observant, and sometimes frustrating in the way real people can be when they have spent years being diminished. Freddie is a sharp contrast, all color and appetite and performance, and their friendship has that uncomfortable sting of a bond that once saved you but later starts to shrink you. The romance with Vincent adds warmth, but I appreciated that the deeper love story is really Catrine learning to trust her own mind. That part resonated with me. The family revelations near the end widen the book beyond Paris and romance, giving the story a fuller emotional shape.
I would recommend When Paris Whispers to readers who enjoy character-driven literary fiction, women’s fiction, and coming-of-age stories set against a richly rendered European backdrop. It will especially appeal to Francophiles, readers who love books about books, and anyone drawn to stories about leaving home, making peace with the past, and becoming brave by practice rather than by nature.
Pages: 372 | ASIN : B0H2NT46LQ
Modern Stoicism
Companionship follows a man in Estonia who works as a paid companion for women who need dates, reassurance, or someone to just listen. Where did the idea behind this novel come from?
It was a culmination of factors. The first one was a short piece I wrote on something unrelated, based in Japan, for a writing group. I remember hopping between videos for research, and one of the men’s faces lingered in my mind while he was filmed during one of those paid dates. I couldn’t help but think about what he must be thinking. The second was the workers in Amsterdam’s Red Light District; I only visited for the first time last year, and at first I didn’t notice it, but afterwards I thought about all the security measures they have in place to protect the employees. It’s very European in that regard. The third was several books I had read; the most influential of which is probably Luster by Raven Leilani. I hated the emotional withholding while reading that, but two years later, it still lingers in my mind. I was curious what that kind of restraint would look like in my hands.
The novel treats loneliness with remarkable nuance rather than melodrama. Was that emotional restraint something you consciously aimed for while writing?
Yes. My writing usually teeters on melodrama, and I have to remove a lot in editing, whereas in trying to write Toomas, I actually had to add more. It was my first time writing a full-length story from the POV of a man, and I tried to embody modern stoicism into it. It’s how I see men, I suppose—there’s a quiet loneliness in having to perform the role within societal expectations. I tried to subvert the stereotypes that men aren’t emotionally versed or that anger needs to be this explosive thing; every emotion exists through Toomas’s body, but he doesn’t linger on why they exist to begin with.
Several clients leave a lasting impression, each revealing a different kind of loneliness. Was there one supporting character you particularly enjoyed writing, and why?
The overall favorite among early readers was Helene, and I’m happy about that because I haven’t written anyone like that before, either. Helene was the conduit for Estonian history, and I’m glad she comes across as a likeable character with a rich history rather than someone old who happens to ramble. I liked writing their dynamic. To me, it was the most authentic relationship Toomas had in the whole book.
What do you hope readers take away from Companionship about loneliness, intimacy, and the ways we seek connection in the modern world?
I hope they see similarities in their own experiences and draw conclusions about their own defense mechanisms. Despite the perceived cost of being emotionally vulnerable with someone, they still do it anyway. If they are chronically online, there are still people in the real world who feel exactly as they do, but it takes courage to put yourself out there. Courage takes many forms, and whichever resonates with them, I hope this is their sign to do it.
Author Links: GoodReads | Website | Amazon
Until he isn’t.
Companionship is what that costs him.
Companionship
Companionship follows Toomas, a man in Estonia who works as a paid companion, or rented boyfriend, for women who need dates, reassurance, practice, attention, or simply someone to listen. The setup sounds like it could lean into gimmick, but the book treats the work with a steady, intimate seriousness. Toomas moves between clients, app notes, carefully maintained boundaries, and his strained relationship with Annika, his girlfriend, who is building a startup and slowly pulling away into a different life. The result is a story about emotional labor, loneliness, and the strange blur between paid care and real feeling.
What makes the book compelling is how closely it stays inside Toomas’s body and routine. He’s always checking his watch, adjusting his hair, trimming his nails, reading rooms, counting hugs, and deciding what version of himself each person needs. One of the clearest lines comes early, when he says of his clients, “They just need someone to listen to them.” That sounds simple, but the book keeps showing how complicated listening becomes when it’s packaged, timed, reviewed, and sold. The companion work isn’t just a job here. It becomes the way Toomas avoids himself, even as it forces him to notice everyone else.
The strongest relationships in the book are not always romantic. Eliise’s anxiety and longing, Helene’s cranky tenderness, Karin’s watchful honesty, and Toomas’s mother’s judgment all pull different parts of him into view. Annika, meanwhile, brings the pressure of ordinary intimacy, the kind that can’t be managed through an app or reduced to a protocol. The book is especially good at small gestures: a hand left on a table, someone not reaching for it, a hug held too long, a couch that suddenly feels unsafe. These moments give the story its charge without needing big declarations.
The writing style is observant, dryly funny, and often quietly tense. Tallinn’s streets, saunas, buses, apartments, restaurants, and corporate spaces feel lived in rather than decorated. The book also has a sharp eye for modern work culture, from startup language to platform metrics to the corporate habit of turning care into process. Karin cuts through Toomas’s careful self-presentation when she tells him, “That’s not what you are though, is it?” That question lingers because the whole novel is, in a way, asking what he is when he’s not performing usefulness for someone else.
By the end, the book feels less like a romance than a character study of a man who’s very good at closeness and not very good at being known. It’s conversational, melancholy, and often uncomfortably perceptive about the way people outsource connection while still needing it to feel real. The ending doesn’t tie everything up neatly, but it fits the story’s emotional logic. Toomas is left in motion, still working, still reaching for warmth, still not entirely sure whether the life he’s built is helping him survive or keeping him from living.
Pages: 163 | ASIN : B0H2RLW4RR
