Happy (un)Valentine’s Day!

Happy Valentine’s Day!

Do you, for some sick and twisted reason of your own, desire this art at print resolution? Never fear! Just double-click and Hey Presto! there you are. In my own defense, may I just say that I wrote this in the midst of a messy, messy relationship with a man who preferred to “take a step back” just before Valentine’s Day every year. I can only think he was realizing economies on flowers and dinners. He’s gone, and things are much better now. It’s only at times like this that I suspect I might not be quite as happy as I feel.

On the off chance that you’re feeling all valentine-y and red and lacy and chocolatey, check out Creating Motherhood’s blog–they’re being all sweet and friendly and happy in this post. You can just sort of think of us as bread and butter–blogs that honor two different aspects of Valentine’s Day.

Teriyaki, Slow-Cooked

Tonight The Boy and I went out for teriyaki. It’s a Friday night, and we’ve been in the deep trough between checks for quite some time now and then one came in yesterday, and, well, it’s Friday night and we felt festive. We go out to eat often, but usually it’s in our own little town. Tonight we wanted to do something special. We talked it over as we drove to the Big Town down the the road, and settled on our favorite teriyaki place. We don’t go there often; but when we have gone the food has been uniformly tasty, and the service excellent.

When The Boy and I walked in we saw a number of people already in the place, but there was only one person in line. It looked good.  The Boy and I settled on our orders and I got in line while he went to the bathroom and found us a table. The person ahead of me ordered, and it seemed to take a little longer than usual, but I chalked it up to a new counter person. When it was my turn I stepped up to the counter, opened my mouth–and the phone rang. “Wait, please, while I take this order,” the counter person said. And then, without waiting for my agreement (which I would have given, because I am a Nice Person, but still, it would have been nice to have been given the opportunity), she proceeded to slowly, slowly, take an order–a big order–over the telephone.

The counter person hung up and I placed my order and paid, which is how we do things at this teriyaki place. Because I am a Nice Person, I even added a substantial tip to the receipt. And then I went to the restroom and found The Boy, who had chosen a table with backless stools. Because I’m a fat middle-aged lady, I pulled rank and moved us to a table with chairs, with actual backs. And then we waited. And waited. And waited. Other people came in. A couple sat down at the table The Boy had initially chosen. The waitress came out carrying part of another table’s order. Everybody got their food except for one man, who sat and watched his friends eat. The couple who had taken our first table got their food. And still we waited. A lady at the table told the server that her meal was burned. The server carried the plate away and returned a few minutes later with another plate of freshly cooked food.

And still we waited. When the server passed our table I flagged her down and asked about our food. “I think our order might have gotten misplaced,” I said. “I’m seeing people who came in after us being served. Can you check?”

She agreed and hurried off.

Glaciers formed and melted. Species evolved, flourished, and went extinct. And still we waited.

The last man at the table next to us finally got his food. A different server brought it this time. I got her attention and asked about our food.

“I don’t know when it’ll be ready,” she said. “We have a lot of orders. Call-in orders. We cook everything all together. In the order it comes in.”

“But I see people who came in after we did, and they’ve been served,” I objected.

“We cook everything in the order it’s placed,” she said stubbornly.

“Can you just let me know how much longer we can expect to wait? If it’s going to be much longer we’ll need to just get our money back and go somewhere else,” I said.

She grudgingly agreed to check.

A few minutes later  she came back and said it would be five more minutes.

And sure enough, a few minutes later our food arrived. The server had also brought along the order ticked. She had also brought the ticket that she said held the order that had been placed by the couple who took the table The Boy and I had vacated way back in the beginning. In a stunning feat of detective mathematics she proved to her own satisfaction that I was completely unjustified in complaining about the wait “because their order is time stamped at 5:10 and yours is time stamped at 5:15.” She didn’t mention anything about the other people who had come in after us, and been served ahead of us. Apparently her one example, how ever problematic, was all she needed to completely discount our objection to having to wait more than half an hour for food that, even if it was cooked from scratch, should have taken no more than fifteen minutes to prepare–and that’s if the restaurant did no preliminary prep at all.

She swished off, secure in her mathematical superiority. She didn’t bother to explain how it could be that they had taken the table we had left, so had clearly not been in the restaurant before we were.

And so it was that The Boy and I ended up spending our evening not enjoying each other’s company, but wishing we had gone somewhere else, and discussing the importance of customer service. It was annoying to have to wait and wait and wait first to order, and then to be served, but that wasn’t the biggest issue. “The thing that got me the most,” said The Boy in the car on the way home, “was that when she finally brought our food she brought those tickets along to ‘prove’ that no one had been served ahead of us. Maybe they called their order in. So what? Bringing the tickets was just rude. If she would have just said, ‘I’m sorry you had to wait so long,’ that would have been enough.”

And he was right–it would have been. The restaurant was busy. It was busy enough they really needed another person working the counter, handling the call-in orders while the first counter person took the walk-in orders. They apparently needed another cook or two. They needed another server. The crowd tonight was not an aberration, if the conversation I overheard at the next table was accurate. “We’re always busy on Friday nights,” the server informed the man who had spent fifteen minutes watching the rest of his party eat their dinners. And somehow that was supposed to make it all right.

And so we ate, and on the way home we talked about how disappointing it was–this should have been a special evening. We were going to a restaurant we enjoyed and didn’t go to often. We’ve been busy–this was the first time in quite some time we’d spent an evening together. It might have been  just another “slammed” Friday night for the people running the restaurant, but it was more than that to us. It was family time, time we’d expected  to enjoy. Instead we spent the evening paying to be treated like an annoyance, and then being shamed when we asked about the service that we should have been able to simply expect.

I doubt if the people who run that restaurant are reading this, but if you are, here’s what I’d like to say:

1. Your food’s great. Seriously. Great.

2. You need to figure out the counter. Having a line build up in the restaurant while your one harried counter person is hunched over the phone taking hundred-dollar orders doesn’t work. Not only does it mean we have to wait and wait and wait, but we know that that huge order means we’re going to have to wait even longer to get our food. Take the call-in orders in the kitchen. You’re making your walk-in customers feel like second-class citizens.

3. Learn the value of a simple, graceful apology. When you run a restaurant sometimes things are going to get busy. People are going to have to wait. Customers are going to get served out of turn. Plates will be spilled. Food will not meet customer expectations. Those things are going to happen. And most of the time customers will be happy with a simple, sincere, “I’m so sorry about the wait/dish/accident.” And, if necessary, “Let me check with the kitchen and get this worked out.” We don’t want to litigate who’s at fault–we’d just like to get our food and get on with enjoying our evening.

And that’s it, really. I’m not saying I’ll never go back. The food’s good. Really, really, good. But I have to also say that this evening has left a sour taste in my mouth. I’m willing to chalk tonight up to bad luck, but if it happens again, I’ll be voting with my feet. I’ll start looking around for another place that not only serves great food, but also understands great customer service. So watch your business. I’ve got my eye on you.

Spaghetti and Red Cowboy Boots

“Are you sure you want us to come over?” Marly, my old friend from college, asked. “David sometimes has a hard time playing with other kids–everything has to be just so. It really bothers him if something’s messed up. And Jamie’s a jumper.”

“A jumper?” I asked.

“He climbs up on stuff and then he jumps off. His big thing right now is climbing up on top of my filing cabinet and jumping off onto the floor.”

“Wow,” I said, looking around my house at all of the six-foot-tall bookshelves and imagining two-year-old Jamie lying crushed and broken on my concrete floor.

“Tell you what, why don’t you come over here? It’ll be easier for David, and Jamie can jump of whatever he wants to. I’ve gotten hardened.”

Actually, what she had gotten was sick. She and her sons were battling the physical fallout of a nasty black mold infestation in their dream house. When you can no longer feel your face and your kids are suddenly falling prey to all sorts of chronic ailments letting your two-year-old jump off a filing cabinet can seem like not such a big thing. You drag a mattress next to the cabinet and wish him well. But I digress.

And that’s how The Boy and I found ourselves out in a fenced meadow between Gresham, Oregon and Mount Hood. The Boy, who was around five, was delighted. David and Jamie had a slide and a climbing structure (from the top of which Jamie naturally jumped) and, once Marly had explained a few ground rules (no touching David’s toys once he had them arranged, the slide could only be gone done in one position, etc), things went well.

The boys ran and played–or, rather, David and The Boy did; poor Jamie limped not because he had sprained something with all that jumping, but because he was wearing his red cowboy boots. Red cowboy boots that had originally be purchased for him as a much, much younger child.

“They hurt his feet,” Marly said. “His heels won’t even go all the way down inside them. But he won’t wear anything else. I’ve given up on that.”

I have to admit that as Marly and I lounged in lawn chairs in the sun on that spring day I wondered about her parenting skills. What kind of mother allows a two-year-old to leap from high places and wear shoes that clearly are painful? What kind of mother allows her four-year-old son to dictate that once his toys are set up they must remain exactly so until he decides to move them, which he never seems to do?

Sarah Ackerley illustrates one of Connor’s less well-thought-out ideas.

A mother, it turned out, who was parenting two sons who are not only battling a number of mold-related conditions, but also have Asberger’s Syndrome.

This was all years ago. Marly took the contractor who sealed up the walls of her dream house in the middle of a rainstorm to court and won–the first time such a thing had been done in a mold case in Oregon. She moved her family to a better climate for them. She educated herself about mold and Asberger’s, and then she saw to it that her sons got the support they needed to become healthy, happy, teenagers.

Author Jodi Carmichael

And that’s why, when I read Spaghetti is Not a Finger Food, written by Jodi Carmichael and illustrated by Sarah Ackerly, I found myself thinking of Marly, David, and Jamie the Jumper with new understanding and respect. Like David, Connor needs to have things just so not because he chooses to be difficult, but because he has strong, often physical responses to things that most of us take for granted. Order is important because without it there is chaos, and for children like David, Jamie, and Connor the chaos threshold is very low. A toy out of place is chaos. A girl sitting on a stool rather than on a chair is chaos. To a child with Asberger’s Syndrome, the world is a very different place. Everything matters. A lot.

Marly told me that years ago, but Spaghetti Is Not A Finger Food makes that experience real. Jodi Carmichael has given us the opportunity to experience the world as a child with Asberger’s Syndrome might, and it’s a moving and enlightening experience. Connor’s constant battle to get through his day in the midst of overwhelming distractions is by turns inspiring, hilarious, and heart-breaking. This is a book that will appeal not only to the young readers for whom it is written, but to parents as well.

So–story’s great–the book’s worth it for that alone. But I’m an illustrator and book designer, and I just can’t resist noting that Sarah Ackerley’s illustrations are absolutely pitch perfect–they’re fun and engaging without becoming caricatures. And hat’s off, too, to Little Pickle Press art director Leslie Iorillo. I know it’s not sexy to talk about font choices, but Iorillo’s design does a masterful job of keeping this story fun, approachable, and undeniably attractive. It instantly conveys the brightness and simplicity of the best elementary schools, and the handwritten subheads hint at the first-person elementary school-age speaker before a word is read. So–hat’s off to Leslie Iorillo, to Sarah Ackerley, and to Jodi Carmichael, who have created a book as fun as it is important. It’s available from Little Pickle Press, and on Amazon Kindle for a price that’s next thing to a steal. You should buy it now.

Bits and bobs: You will no doubt not be surprised, Gentle Readers, to learn that this is a stop on Little Pickle Press’ blog book tour. I’m proud to be part of spreading the word about some of the challenges children with Asberger’s Syndrome face–and how many of these children find clever, often brilliant, ways of coping with a world that in many cases doesn’t really understand how to cope with them. If you’d like to follow the tour, feel free to visit the links for past dates, and stop in at the host blogs on upcoming days.

• 1/7/13 – The Connor Chronicles
• 1/8/13 – Magic Dog Press, It’s Not All Gravy
• 1/9/13 – mom-ology
• 1/10/13 – Confessions of An Aspergers Mom
• 1/11/13 – Blood Red Pencil
• 1/12/13 – Leslea Tash
• 1/13/13- Inneraspie

About Little Pickle Press: Little Pickle Press is dedicated to helping parents and educators cultivate conscious, responsible little people by stimulating explorations of the meaningful topics of their generation through a variety of media, technologies, and techniques.

Translated, this means that Little Pickle books are the sorts of books that entertain, amuse, and challenge young readers and the adults in their lives. Take a few minutes and browse their website. I think you’ll be as impressed as I am.

If you enjoyed learning about Spaghetti Is Not A Finger Food, you might find the following posts about Little Pickle Press books enjoyable, too:

• BIG News
• Getting BIGger
• Ripple’s Effect
• Review: Snutt the Ift’s the Perfect Gift
• Picturing Safety
• My Fantastic Elastic Brain Book
• Being Present in the Field Beyond

Finding a Reason

The Second Amendment: A well regulated Militia being necessasry to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed.

In the past week, the past week, there have been three shootings in public places–two malls, and an elementary school. We can all recite the names of such places where similar things happened: Columbine, Springfield, Aurora…the list goes on and on.

In the wake of such overwhelming tragedy it is perhaps natural that we seek meaning. Was the student bullied? Was the shooter obsessed with Gabi Giffords, or acting at Sarah Palin’s unspoken behest? Was the shooter mentally ill? Was he or she suicidal?

We look for reasons. And sometimes we find them–whether they are there or not. Most of the time, we don’t. Instead, we learn that the person who has just blazed his way through a crowd, a school, a theater, is “just like us,” and the crowd, too, is “just like us.”

We seek for differences–distinguishing traits that we use to create a distinction, to put a little distance between ourselves and the horror. “That kid came from a broken home…was molested…had learning disabilities…a personality disorder…was mentally ill…was depressed…was manic…was on drugs..” and the very plethora of our reasons hammers home the central fact that the kid is no different from millions of other kids who face similar challenges.

“The teachers weren’t alert enough…the town had a lot of crime…the victims didn’t act fast enough to defuse the danger…they hadn’t run enough lockdown drills…they disregarded the advice of the police…they refused to believe their eyes…they didn’t run fast enough…they were in the wrong place at the wrong time…they were wearing provocative clothing…they weren’t nice to the shooter…”

And so we seek try to justify why classrooms full of children, theaters full of movie-goers, public servants, mall shoppers–people like us–lost their lives. And implicit in our search for a reason is our need to somehow make this, if not the shooter’s fault, the victims’ fault, something that happened because of their failure to respond quickly, effectively, and decisively to mortal danger.

The horrifying reality is that increasingly things like this are done by and to people who look just like us. Just about a year ago, my plumber was gunned down in his shop by an angry neighbor who chose to exercise his “Second Amendment Rights” by spraying bullets through the store’s plate glass window. I was just talking to my little sister, who lived with her schoolteacher husband a few blocks away from Springfield high school when Kip Kinkle decided to take a gun to school for a little target practice one day. She was visiting her best friend, whose house backed up to the school playground. She and her friend stood on her friend’s porch and and watched the big, strong boys on the football team come pouring out of the school, screaming, “Help us, help us.” They watched as a school yard filled with terrized children, while inside two brave farm kids took down a classmate and held him down until help arrived. Every role in this tragedy was played by people like us, and by children like ours.

“Tom and I spent this morning at the school,” she told me today. (My brother in law is the principal at a private school in Texas.) “We were checking all the intercoms both on intercom setting and on “All call” settings. We’ve been talking to the police, getting their suggestions about how to keep the kids safe. We have to start running more lockdown drills. There are security guards in the school, but it would be easy for a shooter to come into one building when there was no guard there…”

And once again, I am reminded that what is happening in our theaters, shopping malls, and schools isn’t something apart from us. Incidents like these are gaping, self-inflicted wounds. The monsters and the victims in every one of these cases are ours. They are, in many ways, us. The principal who died protecting the children in her school could have been my brother in law. The teachers who barricaded themselves into closets and bathrooms and turned their bodies into living shields for their pupils could have been the tiny, tattooed blonde who taught my son in Kindergarten. This is not terror that has stalked us from without. This is a horror we have nurtured in our bosom, rooted in the very things that make us who we are.

It’s time for us to stop pretending the problem lies in some identifiable, culpable Other. As Pogo says, “We have met the enemy, and it is us.” Which begs a lot of questions. The first is, are we prepared to change who we are, at least in part, in order make terrible days like this less common–or even non-existent? If not, are we prepared to accept mass murder at ever-decreasing intervals as the right we pay for a minority of us to own guns designed for mass murder? Would we be willing to defend a citizen’s right to stockpile nerve gas–arguably another form of weaponry designed exclusively for killing humans in large numbers? That’s different, you say. How?

As a nation, we chose to sacrifice a number of our liberties in the name of safety in the wake of 9/11. Though questions remain about those sacrifices, the crucial point here is that we chose to limit our own liberties in our effort to curtail terrorist access to treasured freedoms, rights, and privileges. What will it take for us to take a similar look at our “right” to keep and bear guns designed with the slaughter of humans as their sole purpose? How many children have to die before we get serious about removing “Second Amendment Remedies”  from our list of first responses to conflict?

We are comfortable with the idea of limiting access to alcohol based on age, criminal record, and so forth. Why are we so very resistant to the idea of effectively limiting firearms based on the same criteria? And before you say, “We do…there are laws…” may I just point out here that laws or not, firearms are getting into the hands of those who are clearly unable to use them in responsible, positive ways. So how do we fix this? Do we consider this an unwinnable war? Or do we value our “right” to fill our homes with assault weapons above the lives of people we know and love? How do we balance our right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness against the right to stockpile weapons designed for mass murder–weapons that we say “we never plan on using that way,” but that are increasingly being used in just “that way?”

To say that this is the wrong time to talk about this issue is foolish–now, right now, when the terrible cost of our current gun laws is fresh in our eyes–is the perfect time to talk about this.

More Tasty Fun With Mixes

I am a box-opener, a can-opener, a thawer, an experimenter, and a big chunks chopper. In short, I am a decent cook who doesn’t want to spend a lot of time at it, so I use a lot of short cuts. Here’s my Mighty Fine Cornbread recipe, for like-minded individuals. 

You will need:

1 Krusteaz Honey Cornbread box mix

1 egg

1/3 c. vegetable oil

App. 1/3 c. of milk or half and half (cream’s better, but milk works)

1 can of sweet corn (with juice)

1 large onion, chopped into large chunks with a dull knife

8 to 10 garlic cloves, peeled and smashed with the same dull knife you used on the onions, but not chopped

1/2 c. butter or olive oil

1 box of Banquet Brown-N-Serve sausages (the maple flavored ones are even  lovelier)

App. 1 1/2 cups of Tillamook Medium Cheddar Cheese, cut into large cubes (again with the dull knife, but that’s the only kind I have)

Ground red chili powder, if that’s the way you’re bent–just add it to the onions, garlic, and sausages and let it cook into them.

Here’s what you do:

Sauté the chopped onions, crushed garlic, and sausages in the butter until the sausages are browned and the onions are transparent, and taste sweet.

When the onions and sausages are done, in a large bowl combine the Krusteaz Honey Cornbread mix, the egg, the can of corn (remember to use the juice as well) the vegetable oil and stir well.

Add the onions, garlic, and sausages and stir again.

Add enough milk or cream to make a thick batter.

Pour into an oiled 8×12 cake pan, and scatter the cheese cubes evenly over the top.

Bake at 350 degrees for approximately 40 minutes and check. This will never become as firm as most cornbread, but it should spring back when you press the top gently, as long as you’re not pressing on the cheese.

Serve with butter.

This is wonderful with a simple chili, or with fresh fruit. Patrick and his good buddy Zack just wiped out a whole pan of this stuff on their own.

This is what happens…

by writing classes at Blue Mountain Community College, in Eastern Oregon.

…when you take a writing teacher who thinks it’s more fun to teach a class when you don’t go through the same frigging song and dance every single term, and who is either a Renaissance Woman (as her friends in college maintained) or just plain scattered (as her Not Friends  have suggested). At any rate, this woman (who shall remain nameless, since she’s me), keeps body and soul together for herself, The House Leroy, The Boy, The Girls (our formerly feral cats who now mostly like to lie on their backs and have their tummies rubbed), and the Magic Dog by writing, designing, and illustrating books when she’s not teaching. So long story short, there’s something of a talent pool there just waiting to be tapped, and by golly, was it ever tapped for this bad boy.

This term we talked about Comfort Food–those foods that remind us who we are, that are a part of our history. I don’t know if you know this, but writing classes are structured around a variety of writing styles. One of those styles is the “How-to” paper. Everybody brought a family recipe for that. And then we talked about processes, and how to write about them, and how to edit, and how important it is to provide clear, concise instructions, and oh, all sorts of things. And then the real work started. I made a boatload of illustrations (all of these are my own original work, so if you like them let me know and we’ll work something out), and then designed a book that reflected something of my own history with comfort food–the yellow and white tiles remind me of my grandmother’s kitchen. And then we printed it up, and part of the money this baby earns (if any) will go to support future projects like this with my classes.

(For the record, next term we’re talking about Finding Home–how traditional houses reflect the culture and climate that give birth to them, and new ways of thinking about houses and how to make them.)

Free is Good…Yet ANOTHER UPDATE November 27

Today’s the last day to download Past Lives: A Journey free. Tomorrow, November 24, we’ll have a complete change of pace, when Redeeming Stanley: Redeeming Stanley: A Savage Little Tale of True Love, Old Gods, Bitches, Bestiality, Burnout, and Above All, Payback becomes the free download. Stanley’s been popular since he first met the public way back in 2009 (and won Audiolark’s Best of the Best e-books award, incidentally). Stanley is, of course, available in paperback and Kindle (and for free from November 24 to 28!), but he’s also available as an audiobook from Audiolark. He’s not free there, regrettably, but he’s still a darned good deal. So go on, download…download…

Available in paperback and on Kindle from Amazon

November 19-23: Past Lives: A Journey
This is a tiny little collection of short stories that grew out of a series of past-life regression exercises. The stories are poetic, evocative, and thought-provoking, from the girl trapped in the desert to prove a point to the mistress who has discovered too late that relationships can be transforming to the milkmaid who lacks the courage to fight back to the woman who discovers that she has lost something she never realized she had–and in redeeming her present rewrites her past and her future, these are stories about love, what it means, and how we find it, lose it, and sometimes, if we’re lucky, discover it again within ourselves.
Reviews Download FREE November 19-23 (it’s always free to Amazon Prime members)

November 24-28: Redeeming Stanley: Redeeming Stanley: A Savage Little Tale of True Love, Old Gods, Bitches, Bestiality, Burnout, and Above All, Payback
This little book right here is the reason I sometimes am startled to find myself turning up on Alternative Porn Sites. I think it’s the “bestiality” in the title. Which is warranted, but it’s the sort of warm, fuzzy bestiality that sort of slips by, only later provoking a double-take and a “Whoa, did she really go there?” Why yes, this book does indeed go there. It’s a fun, unlikely story about a collection of characters who really should have mutual restraining orders–old gods, the born-again christians who try to Save them, self-described Babe Magnet and armchair explorer of the female psyche Weldon Frame, The Freak, Satan, the Whore of Babylon, the Coppess (body by Frigidaire) and some trucker in a Peterbilt and a gimme John Deere cap. It won a “best of the best e-books” award back in the day, and has continued to sell steadily ever since. Also, reviews keep popping up from time to time, so word on the street is that it’s still a fun, funky, “guilty pleasure” sort of book, ideal for anybody who has discovered that she’s been dating in the shallow end of the gene pool, decides to stop, and learns that sometimes things can get a little messy. But funny. Book clubs like this one. I think you will, too.
Reviews  Download FREE from November 24-28 (it’s always free to Amazon Prime members)

November 27-December 1 Good on Paper
Once upon a time, a king named David got the hots for a steamy little number named Bathsheba. Lucky for David, Mr. Bathsheba was busy being one of David’s best generals, so Bathsheba was home all by her lonesome…

See where this is heading? Of course you do.

So does Sarah Conrad, reluctant Bible scholar and unwilling paramour of televangelist Pastor Jimmy Jay Rayburn. It’s a destination she knows well. But the destination is only the beginning. Sarah doesn’t wind up sleeping with an aging “man of God” by accident. Eldest sister Elaine’s minister husband isn’t divorcing her on a whim. And middle sister Elizabeth doesn’t vanish in a fit of pique, leaving a dead dog, a roomful of blood, and Sarah and youngest Conrad DJ behind.

The Conrad children survive by keeping up appearances. But it costs them. When family patriarch Dan Conrad is diagnosed with terminal cancer and the children come home to help appearances are no longer enough, and tensions rise. When somebody winds up murdered the Conrads are forced to unravel their past in order to survive their present.

Set on a family farm in a fast-disappearing slice of America, Good on Paper is first and foremost a story in which to lose one’s self–readers consistently comment that they “couldn’t put it down.” But beyond that, the story raises questions. How do we determine who is “good?” How do we decide what is real? Do we respond to the victimization of others, and if so, how? How do we integrate a painful and abusive past into a vibrant and creative present and future? Above all, this story leaves readers wondering, with DJ Conrad, “…what it is about our family, our church, our society, that allows abusers to not only survive, but thrive.”

By turns infuriating, hilarious, magical, frightening, and lyrical, the Conrads’ story captures the paradox lying at the heart of abusive relationships, as well as the courage, honesty and humor that the Conrad children use to survive.

Tracing the Conrad children’s journey to healing and resolution makes for a powerful and haunting read, one that should appeal to a many, particularly those interested in understanding how the pain of an abusive past can become the fertile soil from which a rich, meaningful future can spring.

Reviews  Download FREE November 27-December 1 (it’s always free to Amazon Prime members)

So that’s what’s happening–don’t be shy about downloading, and if you like the books, we’d love it if you’d post a review or response on Amazon–or even write about it here! I’ll be reposting this from time to time, to just keep everybody updated on what’s going on, free-wise. Happy holidays!