Book Launch, January 25, 2025: WE'VE GOT SOME THINGS TO SAY, Anthology

I have three poems in this significant anthology, and a group of the authors -- including me -- will be reading pieces in on online format when the book officially launches on January 25. If you'd like to either attend or receive a recording of the author event, please use this form to register.

Why the registration? Well, it's a tough topic -- sexual violence -- and for many of us, it's going to be a bit scary to read aloud what we've put onto paper. So this helps the experience to be a bit reassuring.

I hope you may want to listen. I appreciate that! And if instead you're feeling as shy about the topic as I often do, maybe you'd rather just order a copy to browse in a peaceful moment. Here's the link for both the softcover and the ebook. Thanks for thinking this over.

Poems Published in 2024: Three in a Significant New Anthology

 These are not comfortable poems, but I hope they are strong ones. And I feel enormously honored that they were chosen for the new anthology WE'VE GOT SOME THINGS TO SAY, edited by Mary Simmerling, PhD. Her work in gathering together creative writing that un-hides sexual danger and violence is a gift to all those who've been silenced by others -- and by themselves.

I'm posting images of my own poems here, so you can take a quick look, but I hope you may decide to purchase your own copy of the full anthology, available as softcover or ebook here.

There will also be a reading in January from many of the authors; I'll post about it when it gets closer.

Poems Published in 2024: "Sand Dollars in a Small Wooden Box"

The summer issue of After Happy Hour (what thoughts that journal name evokes!) included my poem on page 71 -- here's the link. There's also an audio segment.

This poem took root when a local friend gave me a set of sand dollars (yes, box included) and explained something of the living creatures to me. It all felt new, even though I'd held a few of the dry disks in the past. And that, of course, led into the poem.

You'll get the flavor best if you click on the link, but in case it doesn't work for you, here's a screen shot:

 

Poems Published in 2024: "Body in a Box"

What joy it was to enter the pages of Cathexis Northwest Press with this poem, reflecting on how Dave seems often very present, even though his "remains" are buried at the beautiful Mt. Pleasant Cemetery in St. Johnsbury, Vermont. See the poem and the rest of the issue here. (The poem is on page 43.)

The Winds of Freedom, Book 3: It's the Money, Honey

 

Merchant "scrip" from North Troy, Vermont.

Realizing that the teenaged girl leading the action in THE BITTER AND THE SWEET (Winds of Freedom book 3) would not be either Alice or Caroline -- the teens we follow in the preceding book, This Ardent Flame -- happened well before I started writing book 3. With a two-year jump for each novel in the series, the next protagonist would have to be Almyra Alexander.

Almyra intrigues me for several reasons: She's from Boston, a transplant to the Vermont village of North Upton (aka North Danville), so she's seen more of the sophisticated scenes than either Alice or Caroline. As a result, she brings with her some fashionable clothing and, more importantly, an assertiveness that goes with her outward confidence. That makes her a contrast to the other teens.

But her confidence is a  bit rocky, because she's almost an orphan: Her mother died young, and her father, a political operative, is way too busy to parent his lonely daughter. So when her North Upton aunt and uncle bond with her, and give her the opportunity to stay in the village instead of returning to the city, she's relieved to experience the first real sense of family support she's had in a while.

That's the underlying emotional pin for the book. Add to that her curiosity and unquestioning embrace of the social issues of the day, namely, the abolition of slavery, rights for women, and ending alcohol abuse, and I had the resonant situation that I wanted to write from.

But of course a historical novel is almost always threaded around an urgent plot of some sort, whether it's an adventure, a crisis, or a mystery. Choosing the one for THE BITTER AND THE SWEET came with the discovery of Professor Stephen Mihm's book A Nation of Counterfeiters: Capitalists, Con Men, and the Making of the United States. Not only is this book full of tales of criminal and law enforcement action in our nation's early years, but -- to my astonishment -- one of the major locations for counterfeiters in the early 1800s was our own borderlands of the Northeast Kingdom and Canada's Eastern Townships.

Professor Mihm even replied to some emailed questions, and soon I was on my way, deep into the new manuscript.

MARK YOUR CALENDAR: We'll have a party for THE BITTER AND THE SWEET at Kim Crady-Smith's Lyndonville, Vt, shop, Green Mountain Books, on Saturday Nov. 23 at 11 am. Later the same day, at 2 pm, I'll talk about the book at the North Danville Brainerd Memorial Library, and explain Danville's own connection to the counterfeiting landscape!

Making a Scottish/British Crime Series Powerfully New Again: MIDNIGHT AND BLUE, Ian Rankin

A quick count suggests that MIDNIGHT AND BLUE is the 24th novel in the deeply admired Inspector Rebus series from Ian Rankin. Along with similar protagonists, like Michael Connelly's Harry Bosch, John Rebus has reached retirement age. How can a man whose life is framed by his investigative work manage the transition?

Shockingly, it seems Rebus will have to manage it in a dangerous prison, HMP Edinburgh, surrounded by criminals who have good reason to hate and threaten him. "Rebus felt hemmed in, not only by walls but bu the same daily faces too. He had visited the prison many times during his detective years — he recalled being shown the Hanging Shed, now demolished -- but this was different. The various smells were never going to be showered away.  ... Prison, nick, jail, chokey, inside -- many names but only one game: incarceration." 

There's only sparse explanation of how he's landed here with a life sentence, a result of bodily threatening a criminal who minutes later died of a heart attack. Clearly, Rebus's many slippery judgement calls and careless antagonisms of the past must have caught up with him as the courts ground him in their teeth. Protected briefly in solitary confinement, then pressed into the population of his old enemies and, of course, the antagonisms among them, it seems he's only surviving because the death that cost his freedom proved highly advantageous to gang leader Darryl Christie, who's offered to protect him (more or less). 

Of course, Christie is powerful, menacing, and in Rebus's estimation, quite mad. So that protection immediately equals additional danger. Too bad there isn't time to sort it out any further before Rebus's miseries are compounded by a death inside the prison, and fresh expectations from both the investigators and the prison's governor that Rebus will help solve this murder. To do so would quickly mean his death at the hands of the other prisoners, though. Or would it?

It's no spoiler to admit that all the action of this very high-action crime novel takes place in one dangerous week of Rebus's incarceration. Walking with him through the seeming impossibility of crime-solving while balancing threats around him is fascinating and suspenseful, and Rankin provides plenty of aggressive and startling twists along the way.

British cover.

MIDNIGHT AND BLUE will also satisfy readers who want a chance at the better side of human nature despite darkness and violence. Rankin's final acknowledgment shows he knows exactly what he's painstakingly built into this book: "I am grateful to staff and inmates (present and past) who spoke to me and allowed me to tour the facilities. I have taken a few necessary liberties, but I hope I have also managed to show that prisons are places where compassion and hope can be manifested on all sides."

In other words -- you might think you know the author, and the series, but this is a must-read to add to the experience. On my bookshelves, it's hanging around for a second delicious reading over the winter. 

Oh yes, the publisher is Mulholland (aka Little, Brown); I like the British (Scottish) cover design better than the American.

Three Teenaged Girls in 1850s Northern Vermont: My Protagonists for The Winds of Freedom

When I wrote THE LONG SHADOW, the story of Alice Sanborn's discovery of injustice and loss in her home village of North Upton, Vermont, I reached for integrity: not just for Alice and her family as they continue their commitment to the abolition of American enslavement, but also for how we see that time, that piece of our past. I wanted to give readers an experience of aromas and tastes as much as possible, along with the binding constraints of the layers of women's garments at the time, and the ways family could be both supportive and harsh. When Alice's uncle rages about the politics of the time, I want you to feel with Alice the scary and exhilarating moment of seeing someone take a stand for a difficult position.

In fact, I was so immersed in this 295-page novel that when I completed it. I was startled to hear the editor at Gale/Five Star, the publishing house, say "I hope we'll be seeing more of Alice!" "How much more are you thinking?" I asked. She responded, "Until everyone is free." That is, from 1850 to 1865.

Well, why not? Alice's interactions with her younger Black friend Sarah and the innkeepers' daughter Jerushah came to a natural end at the end of that novel. But as we all know, when one friendship ends or changes, another often comes along.

 

For THIS ARDENT FLAME, I chose a very different sort of new friend for Alice: Caroline Clark. Because of her inability to hear, Caroline's spent her school years in a boarding school for the deaf and hearing impaired, in another state. Returning to North Upton for Caroline could be far more traumatic if it weren't for Alice. As the two teens learn to communicate in a layered set of "languages," they learn more about the diverse people around them, and develop their own fierce commitment to abolition, as well as to the linked issue of women's roles and rights.

Readers may have been startled by the decision of these characters at the end of the book: They are headed West, to a place where their presence may be critically important to how America develops the laws and freedoms of its added territories, soon to be states. How could the Winds of Freedom series continue? Was it moving West?

Not at all. When the editor invited me to develop a series for this "young adult crossover" genre -- that is, one that features young adults (teens) as protagonists, but is read enthusiastically and with curiosity by adults, including parents and grandparents -- I saw right away that pushing the sequence by a year at a time, all the way to 1865, would mean a much longer and slower sequence than I wanted to write ... and, more urgently, it would mean that after the first few titles, the main characters would no longer be teens. Not only would that break the genre, it would take me into a kind of novel that didn't interest me. I really like writing "YA crossover."

So I came up with a plan: Each book would jump forward two years, not one; and the protagonists would shift with the timing, like a relay race, passing the action to another girl growing into the responsibility of working for a more moral nation and for the freedoms of those around her.

 

That's why book 3 in the Winds of Freedom series, THE BITTER AND THE SWEET, features would-be minister in training Almyra Alexander, whose Boston mother has passed away and whose politically active father is far too busy to raise a teenager (other than perhaps planning a marriage for her!). Readers met Almyra in book 2, when she was a pesky newcomer, dressed in city fashions and ignorant of rural ways, but already interested in the role she embraces in book 3: to become qualified to lead her own church. What about the push for abolition, a necessity for a moral person of her time -- will that get in the way of becoming a minister? And who ever heard of a woman leading a church??

I'm eager to learn what you think of Almyra's choices and adventures (including with a notorious counterfeiter) in THE BITTER AND THE SWEET. Please do let me know.

And when you've finished the book, tell me who you think the next young woman (teen!) is that I've chosen for the focus book 4. Think carefully, and remember the two-year jump involved. Can you guess the right one? I want to hear your thoughts, of course!

Apples and Autobiography

Cortland apples.

This is a classic "writer's autumn" for me: bringing out a novel in print at last, while also working on a book version of the Vermont memoir I began after Dave's death. (Segments piled up on Medium; if you're curious, read them here.)

In writing the memoir as segments that I placed online, I excavated a heck of a lot of trauma. That turned out to be healthy for me -- but only, I think, because I grew through it, and now I'm in a stage of life that I loosely label "getting off the trauma merry-go-round." Life is good, and I want to pull the pieces together and show how that happened.

So the working title for the book is LOOKING FOR THE LIGHT, and today in chapter 2, I'm writing about apples and related recipes and reasons.  Here's a scrap:

Today I still rely on a shelf of traditional cookbooks, but it’s leavened (that’s a baking powder term!) with vegetarian ones, a paleo gem, international and ethnic compendiums, and, most important for this region, the Bentley Farm Cookbook.

This astonishing volume, eight and a half by twelve inches across the front and more than an inch thick, contains the hand-lettered recipes of one of the region’s beloved home cooks, Virginia Bentley. When I complimented a slice of pie at a community dinner last year and (as we do here) asked for the recipe, the baker said, “Oh, it’s Virginia’s, from the book. You have the book, of course.” She wasn’t asking me whether I had it—she knew I must.

Here's the cookbook, with a bit of the apple portion of the index, and a recipe to show you how different Virginia Bentley could be in how she talked about cooking.

 

The Winds of Freedom: How Vermont's Northeast Kingdom Approached Abolition

In this presidential election season, I think it's been clear that the effects of the American Civil War continue to affect beliefs around the country. President Lincoln's long approach to the abolition of human enslavement in America gave us a fundamental piece of today's view of human citizenship in our nation. At the same time, the long delay in getting there, with some 250 or more years of enslavement behind that, contributes to an awareness that we are not always as "good" or principled as we ought to be. And now we have a nation divided on what goodness and principle mean.

In the 1990s, when I began writing my historic novels, I came face to face with prevailing myths in Vermont history that dismayed me. Many of them revolved around the Underground Railroad, one of the heroic efforts in America in the early to mid 1800s. What we know today, historically, is that the Underground Railroad in Vermont might as well have been called the Aboveground Railroad -- because in the theme noted now at Rokeby in North Ferrisburgh, Vermont, if you were Black and reached Vermont in the 1850s (or had lived here for many years already, like the Mero family of Coventry), you were "Free and Safe." No need for hiding places.

But many people couldn't process that idea when I talked about it. So, based on my personal connection with historic fiction, I opted to write about the 1850s here through the voices and experiences of local people, hoping that readers could internalize that experience and reshape their own vision of what happened.

That led to THE LONG SHADOW, book 1 in the Winds of Freedom series, set in North Upton (aka North Danville) in 1850, from the points of view of teenagers enmeshed in adventures there. At the moment, the printed version is out of stock, but you can get the ebook here. Also ask Kim at Green Mountain Books to watch for a gently used copy for you!

More about that story later this week ... and then about books 2 and 3.

If you'd like to hear how the abolitionists of St. Johnsbury, Vermont, and the surrounding towns saw their world in the 1850s and how they entered the movement toward abolition, here's my talk recorded at the St. Johnsbury Athenaeum. I hope you find some fascinating discoveries when you listen/watch it.

Billy Boyle World War II Mystery #19: THE PHANTOM PATROL, James R. Benn

Sure, autumn is great for crisp air, colorful leafs, and seasonal sports. But when cold rain or darkness (or needing a break) sends you back indoors, one of the big treats of the season is a new Billy Boyle mystery from James R. Benn. And number 19 in the series, THE PHANTOM PATROL, comes out this month. 

Apparently the publisher suffers from mild autumn flu or something, and has pushed back the release date to September 24. Definitely a nuisance for the author, as well as for bookstores hosting release events! But it will all work out. And I've got an advance copy, so I can fill you in and you can place a pre-order now, for delight in three weeks.

Yes, the new Billy Boyle is a keeper! This series has moved slowly through World War II, digging up extraordinary pockets of history that this young Irish cop turned wartime detective (working for "uncle Ike," General Eisenhower) discovers in assignments, official or not. His powerful friendship with Kaz, a Polish baron also working in his corps, his alliance with his boss Colonel Harding, and his romance with the very British Diana, who has even engaged in espionage behind German lines, have all lit up the books and given them emotional resonance.

In that way, THE PHANTOM PATROL cuts new ground for Benn. Although Kaz and a few others are with him as the book opens in the darkness of a Paris night, December 13, 1944, in the enormous Père Lachaise cemetery, much of the action depends instead on how Billy interprets what's going on a round him. We get to track his experience, his questions, and his choices, smart or not, as he sorts things out.

"I fired at the afterimage of the muzzle flash, then ducked as another burst slammed into the mausoleum. Kaz let off two more shots and I backed up, taking cover behind a tree as a gunman fired into the position I'd just vacated. I didn't have a clear shot at him, but as I scrambled between the graves, I realized these guys must be soldiers." 

Most of these enemies escape—leaving only one behind, neatly executed so he won't talk. "Excellent planning and ruthless approach," comments Billy's friend Kaz. ""Who are we dealing with here?" 

"And what the hell was in that grave?" I asked.

A quick bit of perspective: At this point in the war, the German occupying forces in France knew they'd been licked, and most officers invested in personal aspects of retreating. That included carrying away the spoils of war, which notoriously included priceless artwork. But others may have a stake in the profits. Soon it's clear that the gang activity Billy's hunting down must be engaged with masterful paintings. The obvious questions are, how are they being moved and how can the American team cut the supply lines?

Lightening up the action are cameo appearances from some of the American noncombatants embracing Paris and sometimes reporting for newspapers or enlarging their careers. Watch for J.D. Salinger and Ernest Hemingway, as well as British actor David Niven, drawing on his own military expertise from between the two wars. (I found myself pausing often to look up some of the surprises, and Niven's career was one of the really remarkable ones.)

David Niven (Wikipedia).

Benn is fully trustworthy as a historian and researcher, and deftly braids his details into Billy Boyle's investigations and personal stakes. It's hard to guess how long this series will run, as Benn's been adept at mining the war, month by month—but readers know the war will end, maybe not as soon as Billy and Kaz and Diana would like, but as even the Nazis know, the tide has turned and can't be resisted. Ramping up the suspense of this period is Benn's subtle threat to the relationship between Billy and the love of his (young) life: Will a Boston cop and an English aristocrat find a way to sustain their love and purposes when peace finally arrives?

Billy's own comment near the end of the book sums up what's at stake, and I can quote it without spoiling the plot: "When this is over, it damn well better have been worth it. We deserved a world worthy of both the sacrifice of the dead and those exquisite paintings. We deserved a world of love and beauty."

Don't miss this episode; it's the footing for the remaining Billy Boyle volumes, a rich platform of meaning and suspense garbed in the significant history of our time.

 

Two Poems Recently Published -- Four More "Accepted for Publication"

A poem begins like a wild apple growing -- from a delicate blossom that's around briefly.

 

A good day for me is when I write a poem that I feel is -- yes, good. It's also nice to have them published. That's the whipped cream on the hot fudge brownie sundae. Or, with the upcoming Caledonia County Fair and the Robillard family's historic gifts in mind, the vanilla ice cream on the apple crisp.

If you haven't taken time to follow the links that I place on Facebook, here are the two most recent published poems of mine. I hope they echo in your thoughts to something vital of your own.

In the summer issue of New Feathers Anthology, which I hope you'll visit by tapping here to see the amazing image they've paired with this, is "My Mother, 1937."

My Mother, 1937

 

Bewildered farm girl with a dying mother (cancer, too late):

ignored, she clung to Lucky Lindbergh’s transatlantic flight,

hoarded newspaper articles about Amelia Earhardt,

refused to beg her cocky cousins for attention—

she could claim the future, sky high, better than theirs. When

death landed as predicted, love retreated into

the unreal hardness of one frozen knuckle (they made her

kiss it). Amelia, she told herself. Amelia would do this

without falling. Her cousins watched, whispered.

 

Amelia, a borrowed badge, a resonant insistence. Next month

her father said “Your mother’s cousin Ruth arrives on Tuesday,

to be your new mother.” Thrust a photo into her hand. That night

she lay sleepless in the bed, next to where her real mother

used to sit, stroke her hair, sing good night. The next evening

the radio hissed, coughed, spat out news: Earhardt lost. Airplane

vanished. Fog. Feared drowned. Lost, lost, lost.

“Stepmother” came just like Hansel and Gretel’s story, strict, tall,

declining soft clothes or embraces. Never call her Mommy!

Be a lady, little Joan. No more running or jumping. No lady wears

goggles or a helmet. Gloves are for Sundays. Not air controls.

 

Each night, after dark, her heart and mind refused to behave.

Flying, falling, weeping.

 

BK

 

This will also be available in print! Watch for news of that.

 

There's a very different poem in After Happy Hours Review, inspired by the gift of a 3-inch wooden box with hinged lid that contains three sand dollars. (Thank you, neighbors!) It keys in with a very dangerous experience I've described in my memoir pieces on Medium, where someone I now call The Villain hoped to terrify me on a small boat out in Casco Bay, Maine. It was quite effective but not as quickly as he wanted. Well, we all make some bad choices, and learn from them to make better ones.

 

 

Sand Dollars in a Small Wooden Box 

 

This is wealth: three delicate sand dollars, gray, pale,

tucked in a tiny wooden box. Souvenirs of a friend’s

beach rambles. Surfaces shedding fine gold-gray sand

with every touch. See, she whispered, here is the mouth

centered within the five-petaled surface. And here,

the anus. Algae in, remainders out. I, who never held

a live sand dollar, never witnessed one propel itself

through wet sand,  spurting, spined, moist, stroked again

the rough emery finish, the grained surface, and settled these

(three, for luck or love) into their container.

 

The mind, they say, is a curious thing; the brain, surely so.

Wet, questioning, curled in its own tidal pool, saltwater

and moon collaborating. My fingers are sliced open by a net

of knowledge; dampen my morning with dreamy details.

In its dry casket, a sand dollar is a skeleton of a sea urchin

bereft of nourishment and moisture. Of impulse. It had spines.

It digested. It explored, left larvae, expelled exhilaration

plucking a single note of life, life, life. Hunger accompanies

harmony. Lift this to the tongue. The sand dollar tastes of

salt and secrets. See, here is my mouth. Lost on a raw

Atlantic beach, say in Maine, where cold winds rip

and the surge of water overwhelms, I screamed. Once,

someone tried to drown me. Now my fingers, five parts

scratching and scrabbling, spread like the sand dollar—

scrape at the sand, scramble toward skeletal certainty.

When I’m finished, I’ll wait in that little wooden box.

 

BK

 

If you like to listen to a poet's voice with the words, tap here for the read-aloud version. 

 

And oh yes, I have four more "accepted for publication" in the future. That's like, umm, homemade chocolate chip cookies waiting in the freezer for a special moment.

At the Caledonia County Fair ...