Review: ‘Butterfly Moon,’ by Anita Endrezze

The fifteen stories in this finely honed and well-polished collection have the power to cut away assumptions and alter a reader’s focus and direction as only a storyteller’s magic can do. Borrowed and reshaped from older folktales out of Anita Endrezze’s heritage and imagination, these stories take on new life in their contemporary settings.

In her author’s note, Endrezze writes, “I hope Butterfly Moon will take you adrift in another world that challenges and transforms your perceptions, yet leads you back home to yourself.”

Reality, the oldest shapeshifter we know, dances lightly on the pages of Butterfly Moon and often gives way to enchantments, supernatural events, and the whims of gods and fate. As prospective blessings for the reader’s journey, these stories don’t necessarily fit the traditional narrative arc of a problem leading to a climax. Endrezze’s tales are often unresolved slice-of-life glimpses into her characters and settings that end with a dire occurrence, an acceptance of fate, a troubling paradox or the workings of karma.

The joy, anger, life, and death in Endrezze’s vision are not bound by time, nor are they distinctly separate from the active and sentient world in which they’re set. “On This Earth” begins with the words, The house was a forest remembering itself. The pine trees that held up the walls dreamed of stars dwelling in their needles. When Desetnica leaves home to roam the world in “The Dragonfly’s Daughter” because she is the tenth child, it’s clear that the forest is watching when The blackberry bushes parted their thickets as I waded through green knots of fruit. After I passed, still following the dragonfly, the vines knitted together again, so that I was lost to the other side of kinship and orphaned into the unnamed forest.

While tightly knit into the stories’ plots, myth and symbolism add depth without intruding into the author’s economy of words, understated approach and matter-of-fact reverence to the cultural origins of her material. Endrezze does not explain or editorialize, but her omniscient care is everywhere through this collection from the paradoxes of “Raven’s Moon” to the grim unfolding of “The Vampire and the Moth Woman” to the humor of “Jay (Devil-may-care!)”

For the lovers of myths, legends, and folktales, this collection is highly recommended and a unique delight.

–Malcolm

Malcolm R. Campbell is the author of paranormal short stories and contemporary fantasy novels, including the recently released mix of love and fate called “The Seeker.”

Spring Fantasy Novel Giveaway for ‘The Seeker’ – First Excerpt

“The Seeker,” by Malcolm R. Campbell, Vanilla Heart Publishing (April 14, 2013), contemporary fantasy, 224 pages, trade paperback, Kindle, Nook, PDF

The Novel

David Ward grows up on a Montana ranch where he develops an enduring love of mountains and the magic of the high country secrets he learns from his medicine woman grandmother. A vision quest at the summit of a sacred mountain opens his eyes to his future while blinding him to the details.

As a seasonal employee at a mountain hotel, David meets Anne Hill during the summer of Glacier National Park’s worst flood. Out of the ravages of water, they spend an idyllic summer in the beautiful Garden of Heaven.

When Anne is confronted by a stalker on a dark street in her Florida college town, the magic David uses in an attempt to save her changes her and leads them into the dark territory of misunderstandings and the blood of Tate’s Hell Swamp.

The Giveway

One autographed trade paperback copy available within the United States and three Smashwords coupons for e-book downloads in multiple formats available anywhere.

How to Enter: All you have to do is leave a comment, hopefully friendly, on any of the five posts entitled Spring Fantasy Novel Giveaway for ‘The Seeker,” followed by an excerpt number by midnight (U.S. eastern daylight time) on May 31, 2013. Please include an e-mail address, Facebook page, web site, or other online way so I can find you if you are among the winners.

On June 1, 2013, I will put the names of all the commenters from the five posts into a hat. The first name drawn out wins the paperback; the next three win a Smashwords coupon.

Good luck!

Brief Excerpt Number One – Burgers and Fries

David and his grandparents are eating in a cafe in Browning Montana with the mountains of Glacier Park not far away – gohomekiki photo on Flickr

For reasons unknown to David—and he knew better than to poke into the matter—his grandparents finished their hamburgers before attacking the fries. Katoya stacked her fries up as though she planned to set fire to them; they looked like kindling arranged for a campfire. Then she dumped ketchup over the resulting pyramid and sloppily plucked them out two or three at a time. Jayee stacked his fries up like cordwood on the left side of his plate, saving the longest of them for constructing an enclosure on the right side of his plate for a man-made lake of ketchup. Under no circumstances was any of the ketchup allowed to sully the plate’s central work zone. Jayee lifted each fry in turn off the cordwood stack with his fork, cut it into equal lengths with his knife in the work zone, put the knife down across the far edge of the plate, transferred the fork to his right hand, carefully dipped the fry into the lake, and ate it without smearing any of the ketchup on his mouth. Nonetheless, he swiped a folded napkin across his face after finishing the last piece of each fry. He sipped his Coke after every three fries.

He ate with precision and order.

“I thought we might drive down to Heart Butte and see the tipi rings,” said Grandmother as
she licked the ketchup off her hands.

Jayee jumped like a spooked cat. His fork, which was hovering over the ketchup with a precision-cut section of a French fry, crashed into the lake. The damn burst and ketchup flooded across the work zone, engulfing the fries stacked on the far side of his world.

“Now look at this mess,” said Jayee. “I’ll need another plate. I’ll need another God damned
plate. Lucy, bring me another order, will you?

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–Malcolm

You can see the book’s Amazon listing here and it’s Barnes & Noble listing here.

Review: ‘The Best of Glacier National Park,’ by Alan Leftridge

The Best of Glacier National Park, by Alan Leftridge, Farcountry Press (April 30, 2013), 136 pages, photographs, maps, resources

“We’re here! What should we do, what is there to see?” In the preface to his practical and well-illustrated Glacier National Park guidebook, Alan Leftridge writes that as a park ranger, he often heard those questions from excited visitors who “wanted to start making memories.”

Many of Glacier’s two million annual visitors travel a long way to reach northwestern Montana, and when they arrive, they are not only in awe of the scenery but of the scope of the prospective activities that await them in a 1,012,837-acre preserve with 762 lakes and 745.6 miles of trails. While Glacier is best experienced without hurry or stress, the economics of vacation travel make it necessary for visitors to maximize their time in the park.

The Best of Glacier National Park highlights, as Leftridge puts it, the park’s “iconic features.” The book begins with an overview of park facts, geology, and cultural history. This is followed by twenty-six “best of” chapters describing everything from scenic drives, picnic areas and nature trails to wild flowers, birds and photography opportunities.

Each chapter includes a map, color photographs and clearly marked headings and subheadings that make the information easy to find. This book is meant to be used as a quick and easy reference whether you are stopped at an overlook on the Going-to-the-Sun Road or standing in a subalpine fir forest on the Swiftcurrent Nature Trail. The hiking sections, which are broken down into nature trails, day hikes and backpack trips, include directions and special features you’ll want to see and photograph.

Glacier’s rangers, naturalists, boat crews and saddle tour operators are probably asked more questions about the park’s flora and fauna than anything else. The “Best Wildlife” chapter includes a mammal checklist and tells you where to find marmots, deer, elk, bighorn sheep, moose and bears. The book includes appropriate warnings about Grizzly bears, suggesting that they be observed at a distance. “Best Birds” highlights ospreys, eagles and ptarmigans, among others.

Naturally, “Best Wildflowers” begins with beargrass. Leftridge notes that “It is a myth that bears rely on this lily to satisfy their diet. If you see beargrass’ tall stalks with missing flower heads, know that other animals, including rodents, elk and bighorn sheep, nibbled here.”

According to the National Park Service, there are 1,400 plant species in Glacier. While “best” is a subjective term, this guidebook focuses on such popular and showy wildflowers as the Glacier Lily, Indian Paintbrush, Lupine and other visitor favorites.

Naturalist John Muir said Glacier National Park includes the “the best care-killing scenery on the continent” and suggested that visitors  “Give a month at least to this precious reserve. The time will not be taken from the sum of your life. Instead…it will make you truly immortal.”

Whether you have a month, a week or a only few days for the high country known as the Crown of the Continent, The Best of Glacier National Park is an excellent all-purpose, general guidebook for discovering everything to do and see when faced with thirty-seven named glaciers, 175 mountains, and 151 maintained trails of waiting memories.

–Malcolm

A former Many Glacier Hotel summer employee, Malcolm R. Campbell is the author of nonfiction and fiction with a Glacier Park focus, including Bears; Where They Fought: Life in Glacier Park’s Swiftcurrent Valley and his recently released contemporary fantasy The Seeker.

Book Review: ‘Bitter Orange’ by Marshall Moore

Marshall Moore follows his collection of enigmatic and delightfully twisted short stories, Infernal Republic, with an equally inventive novel about a character we can’t always see. Notice how protagonist Seth Harrington is already fading away on the book’s cover.

If Bitter Orange were a feature film showing at your local theater, a sign on the door would say: ABSOLUTELY NO ONE ADMITTED DURING THE LAST 15 MINUTES. The why of things doesn’t appear until the final pages and it’s well worth the wait.

The problem Seth Harrington thinks he has isn’t the worst problem he has. Personally impacted by 9/11, Harrington has allowed his days and nights to take on an out-of-focus aimless quality as though he isn’t engaged in his life. In spite of a fling with Elizabeth in Spain, he can’t connect with people, either because he isn’t sure of what, if anything, he wants or because others aren’t seeing him as he is.

Others not seeing him is the problem he thinks he has. By fits and starts, he is becoming invisible—literally. But unlike the daring-do characters out of comic books and high fantasy, Harrington not only can’t control his growing ability, he doesn’t seem inclined to use it to save the world or fight crime. In fact, he first uses it to steal a bottle of wine from a convenience store.

Other than his aimlessness, Harrington’s a likeable enough everyman trying to negotiate the world while getting past bitter memories and making sense of the seemingly random chaos of his daily life. In Spain, after telling Seth that Seville Oranges are bitter and bullfights are cruel, Elizabeth says, “So we came all this way for bitter oranges and cruelty to animals. And we meet here instead of back home in the States. What does that say about us?”

Back in San Francisco, Elizabeth—who becomes Seth’s tattoo artist of choice because she’s very good—wants to remain as important to him as she ever-so-briefly was in Spain. While Seth is, or potentially is, more attracted to his roommate Sang-hee (even Elizabeth begrudgingly sees it), he cannot seem to embrace the life he prefers. He speculates about just what that says about him.

As the invisibility problem becomes more complex, Seth travels to Portland and Las Vegas to try and find himself. He notes that the people in those towns can’t see him either. He feels bad taking advantage of that fact.

Marshall Moore tells an inventive story, one with prose as likeable as his protagonist, though some readers may want a  more highly focused plot. Moore keeps both the reader and his protagonist guessing about just how and why a man becomes invisible and whether the problem Harrington thinks he has is literal or figurative.

The solution to the problem provides a fitting climax to a well written, fanciful tale. Poor Seth: he didn’t see it coming.

–Malcolm

Malcolm R. Campbell is the author of contemporary fantasy novels, including “The Seeker,” released this month by Vanilla Heart Publishing.

Announcing a new contemporary fantasy about love and destiny

The Seeker (Garden of Heaven Trilogy), by Malcolm R. Campbell, Vanilla Heart Publishing (April 2013), 224 pages, e-book and trade paperback, contemporary fantasy.

Can we cheat destiny?

Do the rules of life allow us to save ourselves and our loved ones by fighting or running, but not with precognition and magic? Some people believe magic is a way of “getting away with something” that the Universe doesn’t intend for us to avoid, much less survive.

In my new contemporary fantasy, The Seeker, released by Vanilla Heart Publishing this month, lovers David Ward and Anne Hill learn there are consequences to confronting predators and gods.

David knows magic. He learns it from his grandmother, Raven, Eagle and Black Horse. He finds visions in the mountains and wants to expand upon them by climbing the highest peaks on the planet. Yet, as his utilitarian grandfather Jayee sees it, such things are best left alone because the world does not believe in magic and hates people who do.

David and Anne meet when they’re hired as summer workers at a Glacier National Park resort hotel. David grows up on a sheep ranch and loves the Rocky Mountains. Anne lives with her aunt in Florida and has become attuned to the Gulf Coast barrier islands and swamps. Like many others who find each other at a beautiful or exotic location, they believe their intense summer romance will last forever.

From the Publisher:

David Ward develops an enduring love of mountains and the magic of the high country secrets he learns from his medicine woman grandmother growing up on a Montana ranch.  A vision quest at the summit of a sacred mountain opens his eyes to his future while blinding him to the details.
 
David meets Anne Hill, another seasonal employee at a mountain hotel during the summer of Glacier National Park’s worst flood.  Out of the ravages of water, they spend an idyllic summer in the beautiful Garden of Heaven. Together in their hearts, each returns to their college lives.
 
When Anne is confronted by a stalker on a dark street in her Florida college town, the magic David uses in an attempt to save her changes her, and leads them both into the dark territory of misunderstandings and the blood of Tate’s Hell Swamp.

Excerpt from the Novel:

“After they finished the dinner they prepared together, after the meadowlarks’ piccolo-sharp whistles enfolded into the raspy songs of wind and creek, after darkness flowed up out of the cottonwoods, after they watched the stars materialize in the sky above the circle of box elders, after Anne’s Christian Brothers Napa Rose wine connected them to the light of the waxing crescent moon, they fetched an old horse blanket and a kerosene lantern and walked arm in arm up the bright path to the chokecherry tree. David hung the lantern on a limb below the ripe fruit while Anne flung out the blanket. The pale yellow light spun a cocoon within the night, extending outward just shy of the altar upon which the sweet lamb was slaughtered in the eagle’s dawn raid eleven years ago.

“Anne stepped into the center of the blanket and lifted her arms above her head in a long, slow, cat-like stretch. Her figure was fine and young, and when her hair caught the light, the world stopped, cloaking the rising whispers of his blood within an immense silence, suspended and potent. She looked at him over her shoulder, eyes sweeping his body. Then they looked past each other and waited for signs.”

The Trilogy

The Seeker is the first novel in the Garden of Heaven Trilogy. Book two, The Sailor will be released this summer. Book three, The Betrayed is due out this fall. The Seeker is available on Amazon in trade paperback and on Kindle. The e-book edition is available on Smashwords and on OmniLit. The  novel will also be available on Nook in the near future.

While the novels in this trilogy are definitely fiction, they were inspired by my experiences growing up along the Florida Gulf Coast and working as a bellman at a Glacier National Park hotel during the Montana flood of 1964. David’s navy experiences in The Sailor, grew out of my tour of duty aboard an aircraft carrier, and his work as a college teacher in The Betrayed, is a highly “ramped-up” version of my years as a journalism instructor.

I hope you enjoy the series.

–Malcolm

Briefly Noted: ‘Butterfly Moon,’ by Anita Endrezze

“Endrezze is adept at making her settings and landscape reflective of what is happening in the psyches of her characters and the situations of their lives. She captures her reader with vivid language and some very unique and startling images.” – M. Miriam Herrera

“When I first found Anita Endrezze’s poems, I felt I had come home. Here was the passion, the eloquence, the originality, the insistent song, that I longed to find. But how could I feel so at home? Endrezze is half-West European, half-Yaqui, her origins, her culture, so far from mine.” – Leah Shelleda

What we are drawn to, in part when landscapes and psyches are merged, in part when there is a persistent original song, are ideas and images that speak truth to us even though we’re on vastly different temporal world paths than the authors of the poems and stories.

When a read the selection of Endrezze’s poems included in Shelleda’s deep-ecology friendly collection, The Book of Now: Poetry for the Rising Tide, I, too, felt at home within Endrezze’s words. I looked for more of them because they seemed essential. I’m pleased to say that I found them in multiple places, and for a lover of myths and folktales, best of all in her Butterfly Moon collection of short stories.

The world turns, for some of us, where myth and landscape meet, where worlds merge and where tricksters often command the seasons. Trena Machado put this well in her New Pages review of Butterfly Moon:

“In the mythic way of seeing, there is the archaic layer of our anthropomorphizing nature and the earth that we have lost in our Western culture of commerce and science as we strain the limits of the earth’s balance. Nature has its-own-life-to-itself for which we were once more attuned, held reverence and enlivened by: ‘The house was a forest remembering itself. The pine trees that held up the walls dreamed of stars dwelling in their needles. Jointed, branched, rooted, the trees still listened to the wind.’”

The University of Arizona Press blurb is right when it says that Anita Endrezze’s stories are “Enjoyably disturbing, these stories linger—deep in our memory.” This 160-page book was published last September at a time when industrial excesses and environmental concerns occupied much of our attention, if not our overt commitment. No, this is not a Sierra Club tract; it’s pure storytelling at a time when, in addition to the joys of reading, we need to be disturbed and otherwise shaken up.

–Malcolm

Novelist Returns to Nonfiction with Patton’s Oracle Memoir

Today’s guest post is by Robert Hays (“Blood on the Roses,” “The Life and Death of Lizzie Morris”) who returns to his nonfiction roots with Patton’s Oracle: Gen. Oscar Koch, as I Knew Him. Since my writing career also began, like my father’s and Robert Hays’, in journalism, I wondered how Robert handled the move from fiction to nonfiction for this book.

Returning to Nonfiction

After four novels, I returned to non-fiction for my new book, Patton’s Oracle: Gen. Oscar Koch, as I Knew Him. I love writing fiction—the freedom to create settings and characters, the magic of working with different plots, the fun of trying ideas just to see if they work—but I also find great satisfaction in non-fiction. I’ve spent most of my adult life as a journalist. I loved newspaper reporting and the prospect of offering readers factual information that I consider interesting and important never wears thin.

What’s new for me in Patton’s Oracle is the addition of subjective material to the mix. The book is a biographical memoir, my effort to recount a marvelous four years of friendship and work with Oscar Koch, an unsung hero of World War II who became my personal hero as well.

Oscar Koch was a brilliant intelligence officer who deserves great credit for his behind-the-scenes role in the success of his celebrated commander, Gen. George S. Patton Jr. My military service had been two years as a draftee enlisted man and I had just turned 31 when I met Gen. Koch, who besides having a distinguished military career of almost forty years was well beyond twice my age. Surely the likelihood of us finding things in common was slight. But we live in a world of chance and in this case the unlikely came to pass.

I discovered the general to be a modest, scholarly and charming man. He found no glory in war, and sought none for himself. He was not enthusiastic when I asked to make him the subject of a personality profile article for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. I believe he consented principally as a favor to me. He was pleased with the article, though, and invited me to collaborate with him on a book that had become his final goal in life.

Gen. Koch was a joy to work with. His book quickly became almost as important to me as it was to him. But shortly after we began, he was diagnosed with terminal cancer. From that point forward I knew this was a race against time. We finished the book, G-2: Intelligence for Patton, but Oscar Koch did not survive to see it published. It came out in 1971 and still is in print.

As I summarized this experience in Patton’s Oracle: “I was granted only four years to share life with the general, a period that was far too short. In the beginning he lifted my spirits as we joined in a common purpose. In the end, I endured the anguish of watching an insidious cancer purloin the life from his body even though he never would surrender his gallant spirit. But what a remarkable four years it was, how grateful I am to have had that privilege.”

Patton’s Oracle is my tenth book. But it is the one I’ve wanted for decades to write, timid that I might not do justice to the subject. Even though the words are my own, there are passages that bring tears to my eyes. And of the ten, it is the book that is dearest to my heart.

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You can find Robert Hays on the web on WordPress and on Facebook.

A talk with Scott and Smoky Zeidel, authors of ‘Trails’

It’s a pleasure to welcome Smoky and Scott Zeidel to Malcolm’s Round Table to talk about their new book Trails: Short Stories Poetry and Photographs released in paperback and e-book this month by Vanilla Heart Publishing.

Smoky is the author of fiction and nonfiction, including The Storyteller’s Bracelet (2012) and Observations of an Earth Mage, (2010). Her husband Scott, who plays the guitar, teaches music history as an adjunct professor at Mt. San Antonio College in California.

MALCOLM: Trails has been dedicated to the squirrels. Is this the entire family of tree or ground squirrels or a bird-feeder robbing band in your yard?

SCOTT: The squirrels are metaphors for nature. So, to answer your question, the book is dedicated to every type of squirrel in the world, the little bastards.

SMOKY: I started to say, “He doesn’t really mean that last part.” But then, I looked out my studio window, and there’s a pregnant ground squirrel out on the deck, ripping a rug to shreds, to get wool to line her nest, and I think, maybe Scott’s right.

MALCOLM: I’ve had many conflicts with squirrels over the years, usually a difference of opinion about just who the bird feeders are for. Scott, when you write that you once thought everyone remembered their own birth, I thought of people who had either bad vision or better than normal vision and supposed everyone’s eyesight was the same. What has this memory given you that others do not have—long-term vision, connectedness to your family going back in time, insight into the big picture of our incarnation, or something else?

SCOTT: I can’t speak for others, but, like I said, I do remember my birth. Nevertheless, was I instantly awake, instantly aware, at the moment of my birth? On a purely rational level, is this even possible? I think not. On a metaphysical level, when did my life really begin as a sentient being? When will it end? These are the big questions.

MALCOLM: Smoky, some people say that old stories change every time they’re told. Did you hear different versions of your childhood stories over time and do you now find yourself telling them differently when you relate them to others? Do you begin to wonder what parts of them have slowly become fiction?

SMOKY: I assume you’re referring to the stories I relate in the book about how I became a storyteller; the stories about my mother being a turkey murderer and my uncles’ wild snake stories. Hell, when I heard them the first time I wondered how much of them were true and how much my mother and my uncles made up. Even as a little girl I recognized these magical stories as being part truth, part fiction. What I garnered from them wasn’t whether my elders were being totally truthful or not, but rather the love they poured into the stories as they told them. Stories without love are dull, and seldom are they remembered. But these stories? There was so much love in them it wouldn’t have mattered if my mother said she’d slain a dragon, or my uncles done battle with Kaa (from Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book) himself. The stories would have stayed with me.

MALCOLM: Scott, when you follow Smoky into the hospital for seemingly an infinite number of visits leading back to her being struck by lightning in 1989 and you sit, as you wrote, in another waiting room that looks the same as all the others, do you see it all as being within the hands and plans of the universe or do you watch people, read books and wait in a stoic limbo mode?

SCOTT: My intention was not to be particularly deep or philosophical here. I’m just a man. This is what I do; this what everyone should do. We all should hold out our hands and arms to others, friends, enemies, loved ones. What else is there? I comfort Smoky because this is what I do.

MALCOLM: Smoky and Scott, before either one of you wrote the first word of this book, did one of you say to the other, “Let’s co-author a book about life, walking and nature” or was it a muse or a publisher that suggested the project?

SCOTT: Our wonderful publisher, Kimberlee Williams, suggested the project. She has been so supportive and helpful. Kimberlee is our muse.

SMOKY: Let me clarify that “Kimberlee is our muse” thing. I talk about Muse frequently in the book; Kimberlee is not that muse. Kimberlee could ask me a thousand times to dive naked into a freezing mountain river and I wouldn’t do it. Muse, however… well, you’ve read the book, Malcolm. And whoever reads this here, on your blog, can read the book to learn more about that Muse.

MALCOLM: Smoky, has it taken a lifetime to learn the lesson of the California buckeye, that it’s part of a continuing process of life rather than a work of art to be preserved for all time as it was during one moment? Or, did the beauty of nature’s changes come to you more as an epiphany when you looked at the seeds you collected?

SMOKY: The beauty of nature’s changes first came to me when I was three years old and sitting in a blooming apple tree in my parents’ back yard. (I wrote about that experience in my “I Am Nature” essay in my book, Observations of an Earth Mage.) I’ve always been keenly in tune with the cyclical nature of Nature. In tune so much, in fact, I feel intense physical pain when rain is coming, for example, or when I’m near a place where our Mother Earth has been ravaged by bulldozers or mining equipment. The lesson of the buckeye is best summarized as a lesson in the impermanence of beauty; the impermanence of life as we know it. Life goes on, of course. It just changes form. The buckeye becomes a sprout, then a seedling, then, over time, an enormous tree. It would be wrong—it would be impossible, in fact—to try to contain it in any one form, no matter how beautiful. We also talk about that in the last chapter of Trails.

MALCOLM: Scott, you traveled a long way—and many years—from your childhood play in the dirt outside your house to the Big Sur where you re-discovered the land on a rainy night while reading Vonnegut. Do you wonder now why the journey to the Big Sur took as long as it did or whether you had missed signs and hunches early on that you needed to go there, or somewhere, to re-connect?

SCOTT: I do wonder why it took so long. I certainly missed signs along the way, many signs. When I would sit at a table in one of my many Ph.D. seminars, I felt like a robot, a machine, waiting for something. But sometimes I felt something taping, taping on my shoulder. Now I know what it was. It was Poe’s raven. It was my muse. I just brushed it away.

MALCOLM: Smoky, you write that you “find there are two kinds of people: those who believe it is possible to talk and listen to trees, rocks, animals, and rivers, and those who do not.” You talk and listen. Are you “wired differently” or are whose who don’t understand the dialogue brainwashed that it’s impossible or too busy to consider it?

SMOKY: Brainwashed might be too harsh a term. I think children hear Nature speaking. But as they grow, they’re told to put aside their playful, creative natures and buckle down and study hard so they can get a good job and support a spouse and 2.3 children and begin the cycle all over again. The quashing of creativity quashes the ability to hear Nature speak. By the time we reach adulthood, we’ve learned the only people who talk to rocks and trees are crazy people. So call me crazy, but I know what I know, and I know when Nature and her children—the rocks, trees, birds, rivers—are talking to me. And I think other people hear it too. They just don’t remember the language. It’s not unlike being dropped on some random street in, say, the Middle East, and all you hear is Farsi. You hear something. You just don’t understand it. The good thing is, this is a skill that can be re-learned, understanding what the trees and rocks are saying. You just have to sit still and listen long enough.

MALCOLM: Scott and Smoky, what draws you to the Kings River in the Sierras? Would another river serve the same purpose or is the voice of this one Sympatico with your thoughts and feelings?

SCOTT: All mountain rivers inspire us: the movement, the sound, the color, the smell. So sensual. But there are many levels to a mountain river. They’re veins through the natural world; they’re Gaia’s poetry; they’re the beauty of life; they’re spirit. But the Kings River is special; it’s a mountain river on steroids.

SMOKY: For me it’s all that Scott said, but I’d add one thing: the Kings was the river of a profound spiritual renewal I experienced and write about in Trails. While other rivers are sacred to me—the Little Pigeon in the Smokies especially comes to mind—none of them have affected me, spiritually, as profoundly as the Kings. The Little Pigeon is the river of my heart; the Kings is the river of my soul.

MALCOLM: My feelings about mountain rivers are the same. Smoky and Scott, one of you is inspired by a guitar and one of you is inspired by Snake. Is this an example of opposites (or differences) attracting, or is there a synchronicity here that lurks within your respective muses?

SCOTT: Yes, synchronicity! Someone strums a snake; someone strums a guitar. There’s really no difference. As Rumi said, “Everything is music.”

SMOKY: Our muses are definitely entwined, which evokes an image of Snake. And music is a theme of our lives: there are times we live our lives at a fevered pitch, and times when we sit in quiet repose. There are slow, dark sonatas when I am sick; there are times the music plays so fast we can hardly dance fast enough to keep up.

MALCOLM: Does each of you have a favorite line from the book that best communicates the depth and breadth and intent of the book?

SCOTT: For me, it’s what I just said, “Everything is music.”

SMOKY: For me it would be “ …we went to the mountains, deep in the wild Sierra, to refresh our tired bodies and restore our faith in all that is Nature, and wild, and sacred, and good.” I hope our book, Trails, is like that, that it restores readers’ faith that there is good, and it is as close as our own back yards.

MALCOLM: Thank you for stopping by the Round Table today with your wonderful background about Trails.

Trails is available on Kindle, Payloadz and OmniLit. More formats will be released in the coming weeks.

Announcing. . .’Emily’s Stories’

I’m happy to announce the Vanilla Heart Publishing release of Emily’s Stories, my e-book fantasy collection of three short stories about Emily Walters, a sharp, inquisitive fourteen-year-old north Florida girl who loves maps, her rusty old bike, and the forest behind her house.

Sometimes her dreams tell her the future and sometimes her waking hours bring wise birds and other spirits into her life. In these three short stories, join Emily in her adventures and mysteries.

In “Map Maker,” Emily uses her skills to fight against a developer why wants to turn the woods behind her house into an upscale subdivision.

The family travels to the mountains in “High Country Painter” where Emily must learn to paint dreams into reality to avoid a hiking tragedy.

And, in “Sweetbay Magnolia,” she learns the secrets of her grandmother’s favorite backyard tree, the old house down on the driver, and why a certain ghost who comes around for a visit already knows her name.

Excerpt from “Map Maker”

Just yesterday, she asked her dad why his civil engineering firm cared about Barrett Hills.

“When I saw you experimenting with my old case of drafting instruments, I thought the map might provide an interesting learning experience.”

She laughed. “You’re always thinking up interesting learning experiences for what I call doodling.”

“Who knows, Punkin, you may doodle yourself into a career as a map maker,” he said. “But there is another matter you’re not going to like. The last of the Welles family’s known heirs passed away several months ago and his estate wants to sell the property behind our house.”

“How can they part with their The Ancient and Sacred Forest?” she asked.

“Nathaniel Welles is probably the last of the line,” he said. “If no heirs are found, the executor will dispose of all the assets in accordance with Mr. Welles’ will. A developer would want everything from our property line down to Old Welles Road to make a project viable.”

“Viable? What does that mean? What will happen to our woods?”

“Several developers have expressed an interest. With all of it, there’s enough space for 25 new homes and prospective new friends. That’s progress we can watch from our own back yard.”

Emily’s dad sounded upbeat, even excited. Maybe that meant Walters and Associates would design the new streets. If so, she didn’t want to know. The thing was, he was staring out the living room windows while he talked as though something highly interesting was happening between the back door and the Millie Macs.

“Losing The Ancient and Sacred Forest doesn’t sound like progress to me, Dad.”

“I know.”

“It’s regress, you know what I mean? When Mr. Welles’ executor disposes of assets he’s disposing of the shortleaf pine, the blackberries, hundreds of oak trees and the homes of thousands of birds and small critters.”

“Sorry, Punkin.”

“Saying ‘Punkin’ doesn’t fix it, Dad.”

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Enjoy the stories. In addition to Kindle, the book is available in a variety of e-book formats, at $2.99, on Smashwords, OmniLit, and Payloadz.

–Malcolm

Review: ‘Crescendo’ by Deborah J. Ledford

In music, “crescendo” indicates a gradual increase in force or loudness. If Deborah J. Ledford’s three-book Steven Hawk/Inola Walela Thriller Series (Staccato, 2009, Snare, 2010, Crescendo, 2013) were a concerto, the audience would leave the concert hall at the end of the performance electrified by the force of the third movement and the virtuosity of soloist Inola Walela.

Crescendo (Second Wind Publishing, January 27) begins with great force when antagonists Preston Durand and private investigator Hondo Polk push Billy Carlton to tell them what he knows about the location of Durand’s son and ex-wife. The book’s volume increases when Inola’s partner is killed during a traffic stop by a bullet that might have come from her gun and a female passenger in the stopped car is struck and killed by another vehicle just after she says, “I got you the money.  Where is my son?”

Though she’s a decorated Bryson City, North Carolina police officer, Inola is put on administrative leave pending a departmental investigation into the deaths at the scene. She’s told to stay away from the investigation, including trying follow up on her gut feeling that the woman’s son has been kidnapped.

Inola’s fiancé Steven Hawk, now the county sheriff, wants to play everything by the book. He tells Inola that there’s no evidence of a kidnapping and the city police and county sheriff’s departments can’t take action until evidence and leads, if any, materialize—and she is to stay home.

Readers of the Steven Hawk/Inola Walela Series were introduced to Inola in Staccato when Hawk, who was a sheriff’s deputy then, first became aware of her: “Hawk had noticed Inola Walela, the only female cop on the Bryson City police force. She was captivating, beautiful, smart, tough, exactly what he hoped to find in a woman.”

Inola, who played a larger, but secondary, role in Snare, is Ledford’s on-the-hot-seat protagonist in Crescendo. She comes into her own in this tense novel as a three-dimensional, risk-taking police officer who needs to find the young woman’s son and who has kidnapped him even though she may be suspended or terminated regardless of what she learns.

This is a richly told psychological and physical thriller. Ledford, who knows her characters and her settings well, increases the volume of this story until the last shot is fired.

–Malcolm

Malcolm R. Campbell is the author of contemporary fantasy novels, including “Sarabande’ and “The Sun Singer.”