Category Archives: Story and Narrative

Reflections on the art and craft of storytelling

05.26.25
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Remembrance and Honor

We went to Monona again this year for the Memorial Day Parade. 

Last year, our granddaughter, Elsie, marched in the parade with the Monona Grove High School band, playing her trombone. We were very proud. 

This year she was chosen for the honor of twirling one of the band’s decorative flags, so she donned a special outfit and left the trombone at home. She was not carrying our nation’s colors, you understand—just one of several blue-and-white flags that decorate the band’s arrival as it marches down Monona Drive. She marches ahead of the instrumental players and twirls the flag in a decorative display. We were very proud. 

Elsie twirls the flag. 

This parade is not one of the solemn events of Memorial Day. It’s more like a celebration of community spirit. It starts with a color guard carrying the U.S. and Wisconsin flags. Then everyone in Monona, except spectators, marches or walks down Monona Drive. Many sprinkle items of candy upon the bystanders. Some of them drive old-fashioned cars or huge trucks with elaborate paint jobs. There is a gentleman dressed as Uncle Sam who zips up and down the street on a penny-farthing bicycle. It’s all very grand, and happy.

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Bratwurst on grill. Photo by Dan Fuh, licensed under CC-BY-SA-2.0

Memorial Day—the Monday observance of the official Memorial Day—is the culmination, here in the Madison area, of a long weekend of food indulgence at The World’s Largest Brat Fest. The event, held on Willow Island near the Memorial Coloseum, features bratwurst sandwiches of all possible descriptions served to enthusiastic consumers in the name of hundreds of worthy charities. It starts on Friday morning with Take Your Brat to Work Day, your annual opportunity to zoom through a quick bratwurst pickup lane and bring a few thousand calories of warm sausages with you to your office, and it ends on Sunday night or whenever the brats run out.

It, too, is a celebration of some kind.

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Veterans—in uniform and with U.S. flags—are integral to both the parade and the brat fest. They show up everywhere, usually being thanked for their service.

As a Vietnam veteran of the U.S. Air Force, I find myself charmed and gratified whenever our fellow citizens thank us for our service. But thoughtful veterans may reflect that not all of us came home to enjoy the blessings of liberty, to chomp the bratwurst, to march in the parade.

Some paid in blood. Some paid the ultimate price. Some laid their lives as a sacrifice upon the altar of freedom. Memorial Day is about them, about their loss of life, about our loss of their continuing company. It is, on that account, a day of rue and woe.

Franklin
Stanley

I think of my uncles, Stanley and Franklin Sommers, both bomber pilots, both shot down in flames before I was even born. I feel like I know them, even though I never met them.

Billy Harff

I remember Bill Harff, my buddy from the Rattlesnake Patrol in Boy Scout Troop 27, Kenosha, Wisconsin. Billy died of fragmentation wounds near Polei Kleng Airfield in Vietnam in 1968, hit by fragments from a mortar round that burst in the air above him. But I recall him alive and vibrant, pounding tent pegs at a campground or playing a rough-and-tumble Scout game called “British Bulldog.” 

Brian and Ryan in happier days.

I remember Ryan Jopek, the hale, cheery 20-year-old son of my friend Brian. I photographed them, father and son together, before Ryan went off to Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2006. He was killed by an improvised explosive device in Tikrit. I know his father feels the loss every day.

There are almost too many to count, yet each one is counted by somebody. Every death is personal to someone. Through blunders of policy or failures of execution, our nation can waste young lives in fruitless battle. Yet those who died in vain cannot be less honored than those who won some clear, unarguable victory. 

They are all ours, they gave their all for us, and the least we can do is remember.

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Don’t get me wrong, Dear Reader. I love my granddaughter, and she looks great in a majorette outfit, twirling a flag. 

For the record, I like brats as well as the next man, maybe even better. 

But we who remember the honored dead ought to say something about their sacrifice, at least once a year.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer

05.20.25
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What Happened Here?

Last week in this space, Dear Reader, I mentioned my trip to the Grand Canyon. A pilgrimage, I called it. But in truth, I just wanted to visit a landmark, to cross an item off my bucket list.

Like everyone else, Your New Favorite Writer knew Grand Canyon from Disney films, National Geographic specials, and the like. But that is not the same as being there. I figured it was about time I joined the park’s visitor list.

I signed up for a week-long Road Scholar tour of the canyon’s North and South Rims. Road Scholar, formerly known as Elderhostel, is an organization that provides educational travel programs for older adults. I’ve taken five of their tours and always found them interesting and enjoyable. This sixth was no exception.

Twenty-four of us, first-timers at the canyon, gathered in Flagstaff, Arizona. Our guides would be Joel Kane and Rocky Sullivan. Joel, a geologist, previously worked seven years as an interpretive park ranger in Grand Canyon National Park. Rocky is a writer and cowboy poet who has also been a hot air balloon pilot and cabinet maker. Their kindness and expertise, and the uniformly warm spirit of the group members, made the trip work.

We spent one day exploring the red rock country of Sedona. The next day, we drove north from Flagstaff past the San Francisco Peaks, through a forest of ponderosa pine, ascending from 6,800 feet elevation at Flagstaff to 7,000 at the South Rim, arriving at mid-morning in a state of high anticipation. 

What would we make of it? Would our reactions echo those of many who have gone before, or is each person’s experience of the place unique?

We stepped off our van at the South Rim Visitors’ Center and walked to the nearby Mather Point overlook. Joel suggested we keep our eyes on the path in front of us and raise them only after arrival at the viewing point. I followed his suggestion.

“All right,” he said. “We’re there. Look up.”

I looked up. 

It was staggering. 

The visual scale was overwhelming. 

This was nothing you could prepare for, nothing I can describe. 

I-Max, eat your heart out.

Charlotte Stone, one of our Road Scholars, views Grand Canyon and visitors from the top of Mather Point.

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For thousands of years, proto-Americans and historic tribes have lived and worked in the depths of the canyon and on its rims. Today’s Hopi, Zuni, Hualapai and Havasupai peoples are thought to descend from earlier peoples who left abundant evidence of their sojourns. National Park Service archeologists have explored less than five percent of the region’s area, yet have found more than two thousand separate sites for study.

The winding green patch in the center of the photo is Havasupai Gardens, a cottonwood oasis once home to Havasupai people until the National Park Service evicted them in 1928. It is now a public campground for Grand Canyon hikers, and belated efforts are underway to pay respect to the Havasupai for past wrongs endured.
John Wesley Powell. Public Domain.

White, European people touched the canyon as early as 1540, when Captain García López de Cárdenas led a small group of Spanish soldiers to the South Rim. But it wasn’t until John Wesley Powell descended the Colorado River in 1869, with ten men in four wooden boats, that the words “Grand Canyon” came into the American vernacular. Until then, the region was unexplored. Powell, a Union officer who had given an arm for his country at Shiloh, put Grand Canyon on the map. Powell led another expedition two years later. 

Fred Harvey. Public Domain.

Then, true to America’s genius for exploiting resources, others began to arrive: explorers, adventurers, fortune-seekers, builders. Many sought gold or other precious minerals. Ralph Cameron built a toll road to the South Rim and filed many mining claims, not so much to extract metal as to snap up choice real estate.

There came developers like the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railroad, which built a spur line from Williams, Arizona, to the South Rim; and entrepreneurs like Fred Harvey the railroad restaurateur, who established a grand hotel, El Tovar, on the canyon rim.

El Tovar Hotel.
Vista from Hermit’s Rest, one of Mary Colter’s buildings.

There were artist/explorers like photographers Emery and Ellsworth Kolb, who opened a studio and made the earliest still and motion pictures of the canyon. There were artist/builders like architect Mary Colter, whose structures, often of native Kaibab limestone, defined a new Southwestern aesthetic style.

The lives of these pioneers overflow with remarkable incidents and exploits, enough to fill books and museums in plenty. And the feats of more recent Grand Canyoneers—such as the pipeline across the chasm, which supplies the South Rim’s five million tourists a year with fresh spring water from the less-visited North Rim—are just as remarkable.

The formation known as Wotan’s Throne.

But a question rises in one’s brain as all this canyonesque lore unfolds: What is it about this great vacuity—this vast rancho of open air bordered by extravagant tons of stratified, water-chiseled rock—that re-organizes the people, and even the space, within its realm? 

Maybe it’s something about the geology. Perhaps that’s why Joel, with his bottomless treasury of igneous and sedimentary arcana, is the person best qualified to guide our little expedition. For the canyon seizes one’s attention not just by its hugeness or its sculptural complexity. Rather, it compels one to think about processes. 

The Grand Canyon, 277 river miles long, ten to eighteen miles wide, and more than a mile deep, is the only place on Earth where such a large area of land came to be shaped in this particular way. 

Road Scholars view the canyon from the North Rim.

As we amiable tripmates view the Grand Canyon from hundreds of angles at two dozen different viewing platforms, as we overfly it in a special sightseeing plane, looks of concentration and reckoning pass across the faces of my fellow Road Scholars. This visage is composed in equal measures of disbelief and recognition. It says: 

Something momentous happened here, on a giant stage, over vast reels of time. What was it? What happened here?

Joel explains as much as he can by dramas of uplift, folding, eruption, erosion—thick layers of different kinds of rock laid over one another, then dislocated by earthquakes, floods, and other cataclysms over geologic time. The simultaneous uplift of a huge tract—the Colorado Plateau—all in one piece. And always the irresistible power of water flowing downward. 

Rocky adds human dimensions—a keen knowledge and respect for the lore and practices of long generations of native Americans who have called this place home.

Questions remain, an unsettled feeling. This landscape was shaped by titanic battles among the forces of nature. Yet without us, it’s incomplete. I don’t mean to imply, Dear Reader, that it was all staged for our benefit. But without our presence, without our testimony—without our need to relate to the world where we have been placed—what could it possibly mean? 

Juniper and piñon pine embrace the canyon’s incipient glow at sunset.

We are a part of that we wonder at. If not, then how could we be so moved?

The canyon’s real presence demands some kind of imagination. And then you find your own imagination too small to encompass it. And you wonder, at least I do, what imagination was big enough to create it?

A visit here is a soul event. Maybe it was a pilgrimage, after all.

I can’t write about it yet, Gracious Reader. It’s too big.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer

05.13.25
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On the Road

Given a longevity that borders on surprising, I resolved to offer up, as a form of thanks, a pilgrimage to the Grand Canyon. Dear Reader, Your New Favorite Writer had never been there before, in person. 

I decided to ride Amtrak’s Southwest Chief from Chicago to Flagstaff, Arizona. It’s cheaper than flying, if you forgo a sleeping compartment and settle for a 36-hour ride in a coach seat. But railroad car seats are more spacious than those in airplanes.

Taking the train is old-fashioned and romantic—an enjoyable way to go. You travel across space but also across time.

An inter-city bus brings me to Union Station. It’s a grand old pile of marble that weighs down a full block of real estate beween Canal and Clinton Streets in Chicago. (The passenger concourse and tracks occupy another eight blocks, mostly under other buildings.) I used to ride trains to and from Union Station quite a bit . . . but that was sixty years ago.  

The concourse at Chicago’s Union Station in 1956. Chicago Tribune photo. Fair use.

In those days there was a concourse with a high roof girded by steel columns. It was a dim cavern, crisscrossed at all hours by bustling businessmen, students, soldiers, and starry-eyed kids, their needs met by ticket agents, shops, restaurants, news stands, and kiosks whose lights deflected the gloom up toward a ceiling so distant you had to imagine it. Dozens of dark porters in red caps threaded through the throng, guiding carts piled with leather and Samsonite bags, while in the basement other black men toiled at the Sisyphean task of keeping the men’s room clean—and by the way, you’d better have a dime in your pocket if your needs required opening a stall door.

Travelers besiege Union Station ticket windows on July 8, 1966, after a strike against four airlines operating from O’Hare disrupted flights for thousands of people. Your New Favorite Author, then an airman third class, was somewhere in this throng, not photographed, striving to return to duty in California after a brief home leave. Chicago Tribune photo. Fair use.

Those parts of the station were demolished in 1969 and remodeled into catacombs that may be more utilitarian but are less exciting.

Today’s Great Hall. Photo by Velvet, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Today, Union Station’s Grand Hall—the anteroom, you might say, to the business at hand—is airily majestic, blessed by natural light which filters down from vast skylights. It has benches and waiting areas, an information desk, and miles of clear marble floor that today’s train-riding public is not numerous enough to crowd. It’s a serene, august space. But they still run a lot of trains from there, shooing passengers efficiently through a corridor that leads to the same old shed full of tracks. It’s all grand and functional for the postmodern age, but I do miss the buzz and hustle of the old place and the delicious cheesecake at the Fred Harvey café. 

On this occasion I make do with a quickly gulped BLT club sandwich, french fries, and coleslaw at Lou Mitchell’s, a typical old Chicago diner just down Jackson Street from the station. Then I burrow through the underground tunnel and board the Southwest Chief, Amtrak’s main long-distance train between Chicago and L.A. 

It is an amalgamation of the Santa Fe’s iconic Chief, Super Chief, and El Capitan trains of yesteryear. It follows the old Burlington Route from Chicago into Iowa and Missouri but switches to the Santa Fe main line for the rest of the trip. All these tracks are now owned by the giant BNSF Railway, but back then they were separate companies—the Chicago, Burlington, & Quincy, and the Atchison, Topeka, & Santa Fe—in competition with each other. 

A 1938 postcard view of the Santa Fe streamliner Super Chief. Public Domain.

Famous old Route 66 paralleled the Santa Fe main line through much of the Southweast. Thus, many of our station stops will sound like Bobby Troup’s old song honoring the highway—“Gallup, New Mexico . . . Flagstaff, Arizona . . . Kingman, Barstow, San Bernardino . . . .” I’ll be getting off at Flagstaff. 

As the train leaves Chicago, my seatmate is a young man named Max. He’s been in the Windy City on business and is headed home to Fort Madison, Iowa. 

“Fort Madison,” I say. “My mother used to work there, back in the War—the Second World War, that is. She worked at the Sheaffer Pen Company.”

“Yeah,” says Max. “My dad worked for Sheaffer Pen.” I suppose he means his dad worked his whole career at Sheaffer and is now retired. That would make him about my age or maybe as much as a generation younger. Looking at Max, a nice young man in early middle age, I figure the latter is more likely.

“Mom was part of the steno pool there,” I tell Max. 

“Steno pool—what’s that?”

Oops.

I laugh, caught in my ignorance of the passage of time. 

Employees at work in Seattle Municipal engineering department steno pool, 1959. Seattle archives, fair use.

“In those days,” I explain, “companies like Sheaffer—or any big company—hired lots of young women as stenographers, hired them right out of high school. When an executive needed to send a letter, he would call in a girl from the steno pool and speak the letter out loud. She would take it down in shorthand on a notepad. Then she went back and typed it up at sixty-five words a minute, errorless, and brought it back so he could sign at the bottom with his Sheaffer White Dot fountain pen. All the typing was done on a clunky manual typewriter. The job took strong fingers.

“My mother went to Sheaffer’s in 1940, right after graduation, and shared an apartment with three other girls her age. They were in their first jobs and excited to be on their own in the big city.”

“Yes,” Max said. “Fort Madison was bigger back then. But the W. A. Sheaffer Pen Corporation closed a few years back. You can still see their building just as the train crosses the river. It sits empty—nobody’s done anything with it yet.”

A World War II era Sheaffer fountain pen. Image by M Dreibelbis, licensed under CC-BY-2.0.

The Southwest Chief rattles down the rails toward familiar Prairie State stops—Naperville, Mendota, Princeton, Galesburg. I feel rattled also by the mere speed of change: how soon a svelte writing instrument lined with a rubber ink bladder becomes a museum piece, how fast the wheels clack over the rail joints, how swiftly Lou Mitchell’s diner and yesterday’s Chicago slip away behind us where the rails come together and vanish. 

On we rush, after dropping Max off in Fort Madison—on toward the high plains of Colorado, the brown sands of New Mexico, and Arizona’s eternal canyon. If the train runs me right, I’ll be in Flagstaff tomorrow night.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer

05.06.25
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Ups and Downs

This is a repost of an item that originally appeared November 19, 2024. Although the information is six months out of date, the emotions are still true. Hope you enjoy it.

I’m creeping up on eighty.

At such an age, one ought to have something for the world. Something to leave behind when you go. Wisdom.

Not just any old wisdom, you understand. 

Not just: “Treat people well on your way up, because you might meet them again on your way down.” 

Or: “Don’t neglect to floss; ignore your teeth and they’ll go away.”

Comic Henny Youngman. Public Domain.

Good nostrums both, but I mean something deep. Something universal, touching one’s inner life.

Take emotion. I say that in the Henny Youngman sense: “Take my emotion . . . please!” 

As in, “You can have it. I don’t want it.”

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With me, a little emotion goes a long way. 

In old age, I’ve become a writer of fiction. (See Izzy Strikes Gold! and the soon-to-be-republished Price of Passage.) What we fiction writers principally strive for is to pluck emotional strings in the reader. 

Sure, we want to entertain, we want to inform; but the brass ring on this carousel is moving the reader. Emotion is the gold standard of art.

Ansel Adams. Photo by J. Malcolm Greany. Public Domain.

Ansel Adams, who obsessed over the minute details of photography—lens aperture, depth of field, developer time, characteristic exposure curves of different films and papers, the tonal scale of the finished print—that Ansel Adams, the supreme technician, said: “A great photograph is one that fully expresses what one feels, in the deepest sense, about what is being photographed.” (My italics.) He wanted to express emotion. 

Adams also said, “I give it to you as a spectator, and you get it or you don’t get it, but there’s nothing on the back of the print that tells you what you should get.” He saw that what he strove to express might not strike a resonant chord on another person’s emotional keyboard. But the possibility of doing so was the whole point of his art.

Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico, one of Ansel Adams’s  most famous photos. Photographed on November 1, 1941, 4:49:20 p.m. local time, as subsequently determined through independent analysis by amateur astronomer Dennis di Cicco. Public Domain.

I show my stories to quite a few people for critique—colleagues, friends, so-called beta readers—before turning it on the public at large. The feedback I most often receive is that my characters seem to lack emotion. They need humanizing. 

Why am I reluctant to inject emotion? 

I happen to like my characters flat and unaffected. Only after several colleagues tell me that a character is too calm and phlegmatic—only then will I revise my work to develop an underlying core of fear, joy, or throbbing pain. 

Once I give in and do that, the work gets stronger and more interesting. From long experience, I know that.

Yet I resist doing so. 

The fact is, Dear Reader, I dislike emotion. 

Now, don’t get me wrong: I don’t hate emotion. I don’t despise it. I don’t abhor it. That would be emotional, which is the last thing I want to be.

I distrust emotion. I look upon it with suspicion. 

Rex Harrison as Henry Higgins. Fair use.

I’m like Henry Higgins of My Fair Lady, as voiced by Rex Harrison: “. . . a quiet living man . . . who likes an atmosphere as restful as an undiscovered tomb . . . a pensive man . . . of philosophic joys who likes to meditate, contemplate free from humanity’s mad inhuman noise.”

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Is it possible to live life free of emotional upset? 

Tilt-a-Whirl. Fair use.

Could it be that life is a teeter-totter, after all? Or maybe a Tilt-a-Whirl?

One Thursday night recently, I dreamed a dream: I drove through pleasant countryside. In the seat beside me was my wife. Only we weren’t married yet. We were still the young people we had been many years before. I sincerely hoped she was enjoying the ride, and liking my company enough to want to do it again. 

But the windshield turned opaque. It grayed out. The car hurtled along the road, but I couldn’t see where it was going. I was terrified. 

I woke up , and it was Friday. 

I dismissed the dream and drove off to Onalaska, about three hours from home, to attend the Wisconsin Writers Association annual conference. There I saw some old friends, made some new ones, and learned a few things about writing and marketing. It was a good conference. 

On the way home Saturday afternoon, I stopped in Mauston for dinner. When I came out of Denny’s half an hour later, night had fallen. I drove south on the highway, into the black.

Strange optical effects vexed the darkness. The sky ahead—which should have been black stippled with small points of light from farms or vehicles—was instead a uniform sheet of gray. It looked like I was approaching a raised concrete overpass, one which kept receding as I drove toward it. 

But the overpass was illusory. In fact, when I did drive under an actual overpass, it caught me by surprise. I didn’t think it was real until it passed overhead. And there, splayed across the windshield before me, hung another overpass—one that I was almost sure was a phantom.

The sides of my vision seemed to be lined with vertical concrete walls, as if the road were passing through a tunnel. You could say I had tunnel vision.

What I actually have, Dear Reader, is macular degeneration—an insidious condition that robs me of sight inexorably, by tiny degrees. These night-time illusions were just the latest symptom. 

Before reaching Sauk City, I decided I will no longer drive at night. At least, not at speed, on rural highways. It’s the first clipping of my wings due to old age. A curtailed freedom.

A day or two later I remembered my odd dream the previous Thursday night. It seems prophetic now.

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Only minutes after my momentous decision to give up night driving, I struck a deer that leapt in front of my car. It was purely coincidental. Because of how it happened, I can say for sure that the deer strike was not caused by my night vision problems. 

Still, it shook me up. But you would hardly know that, Gentle Reader, from the flat, just-the-facts-ma’am, report of it which I posted here last Tuesday.

At any rate, within a space of three days, I had received a fateful prophecy, made a dreaded decision, and incurred major vehicular damage.

Some people might call that a tough weekend.

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One week after the collision with the buck, I traveled to Washington, D.C., in the company of eighty-six fellow veterans, and escorted by my much-loved daughter, Katie,  on Badger Honor Flight Mission 57. I’ve posted that in some detail here and here, so I shan’t belabor it further. 

Stunned by the reception. Photo by Kari Keunzi Randall. Used by permission.

Only: It was something I had never expected to do, an opportunity offered me as if to make up for a decades-old slight from the nation, which I did not grieve at the time. Now that this honor was virtually thrust upon me, I felt such a catharsis of long-withheld gladness—such a glorious rush of love—that I now question the value of this lifelong habit of stuffing my emotions into my back pocket where I can ignore them. 

That’s all.

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Being the Alert and Perspicacious Reader that you are, you will no doubt have noticed an underlying theme to these ruminations: Your New Favorite Writer is getting older. He is tripping over events that may spark strong feelings of a kind that he has little experience of, and little taste for, welcoming in an honest and open way.

You might say a prayer for him, if you’re so inclined.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer

04.22.25
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Credo

I’m looking forward to an inspiring weekend, a time of meeting new friends and learning new things, at the Faith Forward Writers Retreat near Sparta, Wisconsin. I’ll be a panelist in the open-to-the-public “Meet the Authors” event Thursday night. 

It’s billed as a retreat for “Christian-faith based writers.” It makes me wonder, this Easter week: What qualifies me  to speak at a Christian writers’ conference? Am I a Christian writer?

I am Christian; I am a writer. Therefore, I’m a Christian writer. But the term calls up an image of one who writes “Christian books”—Bible explorations, for example. Or inspiring essays. Or Christian romance, meaning romance novels in which the heroine’s Christian faith plays a pivotal role in the development and outcome of the plot. Some of my good writer friends, like Barbara M. Britton and Deb Wenzler Farris, write with excellence in some of these genres.

My books feature fictional characters—Anders, Maria, Daniel, Izzy—who live in a Christian world and whose faith is conventional, largely unexamined. Faith plays a role in forming their personalities, and it influences their actions, but it’s seldom at the front of their minds.

The Christianity in my books is like an iceberg, or like an old tree trunk that has floated in a lake or river long enough to become waterlogged. Only a bit may appear above the surface, but mariners: ignore it at your peril.

Since I’ll be billed in a public event as a Christian writer, this is a good time to inform you about the particular Christian faith that undergirds my doings, writing included. Though Your New Favorite Writer’s books are neither Bible commentaries nor theological treatises, Dear Reader, you may wish to learn the spiritual identity of their author. 

Who knows? It might be catching, and you deserve fair warning.

So here it is.

Credo

I believe there is a God, and I know it’s not me.

I think we are all creatures of a Great Intelligence far beyond our imaginations, exempt from our own limits of history and finitude.

I believe in Science; I believe God is its Author. The greatest scientists—the Keplers and Newtons and Einsteins and Hawkings—are its imperfect annotators.

Whether or not I know God is not as momentous as the fact that God knows me.

It is wondrous that, despite my imperfections, despite my dual nature as saint and sinner, God loves me wholly, forgives my transgressions, and showers blessings on me daily. God seems to ignore my just desserts. That is why God is called Love. 

Photo of a painting of Jesus healing the paralytic from the wall of the baptistery in the Dura-Europa church circa 232 A.D. It is one of the earliest visual depictions of Jesus. It was excavated by the Yale-French Excavations between 1928-37 in present day Syria and now resides in the Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven, CT. Public Domain.

Jesus Christ is the avatar of that Love.

As a Christian, I ought to be wholly on Christ’s team. But in our complex world, it’s often unclear to me whether I am batting for Jesus or the Other Guy. 

I have come to rely on God’s forgiveness, because I so often need it.

A Few Corollaries

The Bible says God commanded us to “go and make disciples of all nations.” I am choosing to use the method of drawing them to Christ through the attractiveness of my example. I know this seems a forlorn hope, but it’s what I’ve got.

How can I convert you? I have a hard enough job converting myself. 

Maybe that’s only my recessive personality speaking. For example, I also don’t wish to baptize you into my political views or my sports team. In fact, I’ve never hankered to run your life. You need to figure things out for yourself.

Yet, if I have the salvation power of Jesus Christ, and if that is the Greatest Gift in the World, should I not want to share it with everyone I meet? 

Well, of course I should. But I’m a writer, not a miracle worker. 

“If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give away all I have, and if I deliver my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.”

Paul the Apostle.

I’m still working on the love part. Once I master that, we can talk about the rest.

Amen.

P.S.—You may still be able to attend the Faith Forward Writers Retreat. The sign-up is here.

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Evangelist

04.08.25
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Mystery to Me

Madison’s favorite independent bookstore has turned a gentle corner in its storied history. As of January 2, 2025, Hannah Davidson and Hilary Burg took over as owners of Mystery to Me, from founder Joanne Berg, who retired to Arizona.

Hannah, Joanne, and Hilary, just before Joanne’s retirement. Photo courtesy of MTM.
Mystery to Me on Monroe Street.

I call it a gentle corner that’s been turned, Dear Reader, because long-time patrons of the cozy shop at 1863 Monroe Street are not likely to notice jarring departures from past custom. The two young women, new mothers and former employees at the store, are interested in making the shop’s magic continue to happen. They expect to “build upon Mystery to Me’s success by introducing a variety of new in-store events, strengthening partnerships with local organizations and schools, and prioritizing personal recommendations to connect more readers with books they’ll love.” Both new owners were MTM employees before becoming prinicpals.

This store and its staff have a special place in Your New Favorite Writer’s heart not only as a bookstore but as the locus of my two successful book launch parties—one for the original edition of The Price of Passage in 2022 and the other to launch Izzy Strikes Gold! in 2024. The booksellers at Mystery to Me really know how to treat an author. In each case they arranged to have award-winning journalist and author Doug Moe interview me about my book, and they facilitated a joyous celebration/book-buying/autographing party.

Author left, and Doug Moe right, at launch of The Price of Passage.

Not because I’m so special, Gentle Reader. They do this for everybody. At least, for local authors with good books to pitch. 

Despite the store’s name, it’s a full bookstore that caters to a broad variety of tastes across multiple genres. It includes a prominent children’s book section, developed a few years ago with the aid of a grant by author James Patterson.

Hilary helps a customer at Mystery to Me.

Mystery to Me dates back to 2013, when founder Joanne Berg retired from a career with the University of Wisconsin and purchased the inventory and shelves of Booked for Murder, a specialized bookstore on University Avenue. She moved the whole operation to Monroe Street, changed its name, and began to expand its scope. Soon the store was playing host to a wide variety of author events. 

Kashmira Sheth at Mystery to Me.

Mystery to Me puts a lot of time and energy into hosting authors. This hospitality, overseen by Events Coordinator Elizabeth Walsh, is a great boon to struggling artists like me. And not only me. Famous authors including Hank Phillippi Ryan, Donna Leon, and James Patterson have been known to appear at Mystery to Me. 

One of my personal favorites is my friend Kashmira Sheth, a prolific children’s book author formerly from Madison but now living in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. Kashmira will showcase her new middle-grade novel, I’m From Here, Too tonight (Tuesday, April 8).

If you live anywhere in the Madison area, be sure to swing by Monroe Street and check out Mystery to Me, this fabulous local independent store that is such a central part of our literary scene.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer

04.01.25
by

March of the Generations

My wife, Joelle, and I are entering the sunny uplands. We both turn eighty this spring. We’ll be OCTOGENARIANS.

There is something rounded and satisfying about the prefix “octo-”, which is more than you can say for the cramped and unbalanced “septua-”.

Hitler in 1938. German Federal Archives, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 de.

Did you know that Jo and I are America’s secret weapons? She was born April 1: Within days Germany surrendered. I was born June 12, and it was not two months before the Japanese capitulated! You’re welcome, America.

Tojo in 1943. Public Domain.

I’ve always thought myself to be part of the postwar Baby Boom, because Dad came home from the Army, married Mom, and nine months later I was born. That was the definition, I supposed: Kids born when their fathers came back from the war and turned their energies to procreation. 

But I was an early arriver. Dad came back in September 1944, almost a year before war’s end, having already completed two-and-a-half grueling years in the Southwest Pacific. He was out of uniform, and I was at large in the world, before the war technically ended. But the arbiters of generations, whoever they are, seem to date the Baby Boom from V-J Day. 

To my all-conquering spouse, this is no obstacle. She reasons that since we were both born too soon to be Boomers, we must be part of the Greatest Generation. This could be a valid point, given our respective contributions to victory, as noted three paragraphs above.

Yet, I don’t know how we can be members of our parents’ generation. It flies in the face of—how you Americans say?—logic.

My parents—and Joelle’s parents, who were several years older than they—struggled with the privations of the Great Depression and did their varied duties when the world went to war. Journalist Tom Brokaw dubbed them and their whole age cohort “the Greatest Generation.” Who could argue with that? It seems akin to lèse-majesté if we were to appropriate for ourselves this distinction that they earned honestly.

Wikipedia to the rescue! It turns out, if you go to the trouble to look it up, there is a whole generation reckoned to fall between the Greatest Generation and the Baby Boomers. It comprises  people born between 1928 and . . . wait for it . . . 1945. At last, Gentle Reader, we have found a home. We cannot be members of the Greatest Generation; that would be our parents. Yet, we have not quite reached Boomerhood. 

Generation timeline created by Cmglee  from Wikipedia. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

We are the Silent Generation. According to Wikipedia, “The Silent Generation, also known as the Traditionalist Generation, is the Western demographic cohort following the Greatest Generation and preceding the baby boomers.” There you go. That’s us.

Time magazine said, in 1951, “The most startling fact about the younger generation is its silence. With some rare exceptions, youth is nowhere near the rostrum. By comparison with the Flaming Youth of their fathers & mothers, today’s younger generation is a still, small flame. It does not issue manifestoes, make speeches or carry posters. It has been called the ‘Silent Generation.’” 

Well, there you have it, Gracious Reader, to a tee. Even though we were among the very youngest members of the Silent Generation, neither of us ever embraced the flaming ideological adventurism of those even a few years, or months, our juniors. While people we knew, fellow-students sometimes, taunted the police, breached barricades, and provoked volleys of tear gas in the War Against the War, we were busy recoiling in—well, at least in distaste, if not in horror. We preferred silence to angry confrontation. The color selection of our wedge in the generations graphic is gray. 

“In the U.S.,” says Wikipedia, “this group includes most of those who may have fought in the Korean War and many of those who may have fought during the Vietnam War.” Well, um, yes. That’s a fact.

After us Silent People came the Baby Boomers—and we all know what a mess that turned out to be. 

The next identified generation is “Generation X.” The generation-namers could not think up a catchy title for kids born form 1965 to 1980. An unknown, they were dubbed X. It seems a slight, yet it’s the label our daughter, Katie, must endure.

Gen-Xers have also been called “the Latchkey Generation” or “the MTV generation.” If you read the full description on Wikimedia, it’s pretty clear nobody has figured them out yet. They remain a big X. If we judge by our Katie—and we might as well—Gen X-ers may be intelligent, capable, compassionate, and independent-minded people. 

Katie’s kids, Elsie and Tristan, are split between Generation Z and Generation Alpha. 

Two Gen Z girls share a selfie at the Palais des Beaux-Arts, Lille, France. PBA photo by J.M. Dautel, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Elsie, born in 2009, is a Zoomer. It’s hard to know about Gen Z. They’re still developing. But the prevailing thought, says Wikipedia, is that they are “‘better behaved and less hedonistic’ than previous generations. They have fewer teenage pregnancies, consume less alcohol (but not necessarily other psychoactive drugs), and are more focused on school and job prospects. They are also better at delaying gratification than teens from the 1960s.” Looking at our Elsie, she seems to fit the pattern. She’s a focused, organized achiever. What a great kid!

A pair of Gen Alpha twins share a laugh while camping. Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

Her brother Tristan, born in 2012,  belongs to what’s now being called “Generation Alpha.” They’re still in childhood; not much is known about them. If I were to advise the generation arbiters, based on my grandson, I would say Generation Alpha—at least some of them—could be fearless, untrammeled, intellligent, and invested with a native curiosity about life. Could be worse. A lot worse.

Of course, Dear Reader, all this is malarkey. We are individuals. 

Those who are born in certain years and thus are destined to live through particular times in history may share similar responses to the circumstances of their lives, that’s all.

We march on, irrespective of what the generation namers say.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer

03.25.25
by

Beating Hearts in Watertown

Dear Reader, it was the kind of moment that keeps this old heart beating.

Literatus & Co., Main and Fourth, Watertown.

I stood by a small table on the way into Literatus & Co. bookstore in Watertown, Wisconsin, with small stacks of my historical novels: The Price of Passage and Izzy Strikes Gold! My agenda was buttonholing passers-by to introduce them to my books and myself. 

One young woman and her husband or boyfriend heard my spiel. “I’ve always thought I wanted to be a writer myself,” she said, “but I’ve never done it.” 

“Maybe you will,” I said.

She made a meek face. “May I ask . . . how old were you when these books were first published?”  

I scratched my head. The Price of Passage first came out in August 2022, Izzy Strikes Gold! only last July. “I must have been in my late seventies,” I said. “I’ll be eighty this June.”

“That’s so encouraging! I still have time!” She flung her arms around me and squeezed long and hard. Of course I squeezed back. Hot tears rolled down her cheeks—I knew they were there but could not see them, so fierce and arresting was her hug. Eventually, she let go. 

Not yet forty, she had come close to giving up on her dream of writing. 

“Of course you still have time,” I said. “Just write. Don’t look for fame and fortune, but write. You’ll make friends of other writers and maybe get together to read one another’s drafts and offer mutual critiques. You’ll find fellow writers are incredibly generous and supportive.” I said that last bit because I’ve found it to be true.

Someone else who is generous and supportive is independent bookstore owners, like Isabelle Eller and Wesley Crnkovich of Literatus & Co. (The always well-informed Wesley asserts there is an unseen vowel in his last name. Say “CHIRNkovich.”)

Isabelle, left, and Wesley, right, with Your New Favorite Writer in the middle.

It was no random chance that brought about the mutually helpful encounter between me and the young woman who wants to write. It was, rather, part of a careful design. 

I love bookstore proprietors like Isabelle and Wesley. They struggle, they care deeply about books and about people, they extend themselves to create islands of happiness and success. In today’s commercial milieu, that’s not always easy, but it’s done with aplomb.

Literatus & Co. stands in an old brick-faced corner at 401 East Main Street, smack in the center of Watertown. Like a lot of main streets in our part of the world, this one has seen more prosperous days. Literatus & Co., since its founding in 2019, has been “dedicated to keeping a thriving book culture alive in Watertown.” 

And, boy, are they succeeding. 

Wherever you may live, it’s worth the drive to spend a morning or afternoon at Literatus & Co. Let me tell you what you’ll find: 

The front window has a dazzling display of books. At present it’s mostly bright-colored picture books for children. Maybe they change that from time to time. 

Open the door, and you enter a long, narrow space, two old-fashioned stories high, lined with bookshelves. There are tables in the front end of the store where folks gather in ones, twos, threes, and sixes to meet, chat, and pass the time of day. An intense young man furrows his brows at a laptop computer; three mothers with shopping bags and coffee drinks exchange news while they watch their toddlers; a senior couple peruses books they have just bought or maybe are thinking about buying. 

All are enveloped in the comforting smell of book-paper, humanity, and hot food.

Upstairs or downstairs, take your pick. Space for browsing and socializing at Literatus & Co.

Overhead, a railed mezzanine stretches the length of the store, with upstairs tables for two dozen more loungers/loafers/chatters. On ground level, reaching rearward from mid-store, is the hub: A cash register, a case of goodies baked fresh by Isabelle, and a coffee bar cum short-order kitchen where you can get hot and cold beverages, soups, sandwiches, and hot panini made to order.

On any brisk Saturday when customers mill about, Wesley, Isabelle, and one or two part-time employees spend their time ringing up sales and preparing food and drink orders, with a special combination of relaxed chatter and easy attention to detail. The store owners are on a first-name basis with most customers. It’s the place you go for a fix of community spirit when you’re downtown on a Saturday morning. 

Browse through the bookshelves—take your time, Gentle Reader—and you’re bound to notice the collection is carefully curated. Books of a feather are shelved together, many turned face-outward so you don’t have to squint at narrow spines to divine what they are. The scope and variety of titles are stunning. 

But, as an author flogging his own wares here, I have noticed it’s not only the books that are well-curated. The customer base is just as well-cultivated. 

The owners and staff of Literatus & Co. know what they’re about. Their homepage says it: “A setting to gather, discuss, engage and learn—as real people. A place to form human connections and share stories. . . . Most of all—we commit to creating a place where minds are opened, and all ideas are welcome. In short: knowledge, curiosity, and civility.”

Isabelle’s baked goods.

This welcoming space does not just happen by itself. Wes and Isabelle pursue its elaboration with missionary zeal. If you’ve ever met real honest-to-goodness missionaries, you have noticed they don’t foam at the mouth with pet theories. They play the long game, work humbly and steadily to make their animating vision a new reality in people’s lives. 

In just six years, Wesley and Isabelle and their helpers have created a place in Watertown frequented by lots of people just looking for coffee or a sandwich or some human warmth, but also by lots of readers—discriminating readers—who come in looking for books, searching the shelves for new offerings, willing to chat and listen to an author who might have something to share. 

The booksellers at Literatus & Co. have made this new thing in their community. I am in their debt, and our whole wider Wisconsin literary community is as well. 

Make the trip. You’ll like what you find.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer

03.18.25
by

When is a Bookstore Not a Bookstore?

Answer: When it’s Open House Imports, 308 East Main Street, Mount Horeb, Wisconsin.

Open House Imports, an elvishly decorated Queen Anne-style house on the right as you enter Mount Horeb from Madison, is really a gift shop devoted to all things Norwegian (or even Swedish or Danish). But it’s one of my favorite bookstores!

Here’s why: The owner, Janice Christiansen Sievers, embodies the Norsk concepts of velvaere (well-being) and koselig (coziness). It’s natural for Janice to help out a struggling author by buying and displaying his works, in case any of her customers are interested.

Your New Favorite Writer with Janice Sievers.

That kind of hospitality and openness is a theme we’ll explore repeatedly, Dear Reader. This is the first in a series of posts on bookstores Your New Favorite Writer knows and loves. What they all have in common is owners who care—who relate to authors, and to readers, whole-heartedly and with the joy of the human touch. 

Fine examples of Norwegian rosemaling (flower painting).

How did Open House Imports get to be one of my favorite bookstores? Well, my first book, The Price of Passage, is about Norwegian immigrants navigating the social, political, and military challenges of the Civil War era. For years, my wife and I have shopped at Open House Imports, mostly during the Christmas season, when all its lovely wares seem especially relevant to our needs. So I knew that—right along with the rosemaling, Norwegian sweaters, and cooking utensils—the store has a robust display of Scandinavian-themed books.

Guess whose books you can buy there?

So I took the book out to show Janice. I told her the story of how The Price of Passage came to be, and what it means to me. I admit I choked up at one or two places, because the book’s themes are personal with me. I got a grand, koselig hug from Janice to help me through my spiel. She purchased several copies right on the spot, displayed the book in a prominent place, and even ordered more copies through my distributor.

Janice continues to promote my literary career. The last time I stopped in, I mentioned my second book, Izzy Strikes Gold!, a nostalgic trip back to 1957 from the viewpoint of a 12-year-old. Apologetically, I said, “Well, there’s not really a Scandinavian theme or connection in this one. ” Because her store is all Nordic, all the time, and Izzy is just an American kid with no particular national background. Didn’t matter. She wanted Izzy. So now he has a place on her shelves beside The Price of Passsage.

Scandinavian yummies.

Fair Reader: If you don’t yet have your copy of Izzy Strikes Gold! or The Price of Passage, Open House Imports is a great place to get it. While you’re there, you might also pick up one of many other books, fiction and nonfiction, with a Scandinavian flavor. Not to mention Scandinavian cookbooks—or receipe books, as Janice calls them. 

By the way, if you’re going to do any cooking out of those cookbooks, you might need utensils, or place settings—or ingredients! Don’t worry, Janice has you covered. Open House Imports has a full range of the things you need for breakfast, brunch, lunch, dinner, and snacks that will really ramp up your velvaere in a big way.

Norwegian sweaters.

Did I mention the Norwegian sweaters? And clogs. And tee-shirts. And all manner of essential housewares, from fine crystal to authentic wooden serving dishes decorated with sumptuous rosemaling. 

And cards, calendars, knicknacks, figurines of trolls and elves (nisser), postcards, maps, et plenty of cetera. Chances are you can find a great gift for almost anyone you are buying for.

I could go on and on, Gentle Reader, but remember: Best of all, it’s a great bookstore!

Even if you aren’t in need of anything mentioned above, drop in the next time you’re near 308 E. Main Street, Mount Horeb, and introduce yourself to Janice. Have a nice chat. You’ll be delighted. Tell her Larry sent you.

P.S.—But if you’re too far away, don’t worry. You can buy online at https://openhouseimports.com/shop/.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer

03.11.25
by

Past, Present, Future

“Those who do not know the past are doomed to repeat it.” 

But rest assured, Dear Reader: It is no part of our purpose here to paralyze you with platitudes. 

Edward Gibbon. Public domain.

The fine example shown above has been attributed to Winston Churchill, George Santayana, Edward Gibbon, and Mickey Mouse. 

Just kidding. Nobody ever attributed it to Edward Gibbon. The best candidate is Santayana, a Spanish philosopher, who in 1905 wrote:

Robespierre, with head. Public domain.

. . . when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

Santayana could not have meant that literally—at least, not in detail. For example, there will never be another Robespierre. Yet over the years, any number of Robespierre avatars have goaded their nations downward, in circumstances reminiscent of the French Revolution. 

Maybe that’s what Mark Twain—or was it Theodore Reik?—meant when he said, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes.” 

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Alexander Cutting the Gordian Knot, Study for a Fresco in the Castel Sant’Angelo, Rome. Perino Del Vaga (Italian, 1500-1547). Public domain.

Ah, Fair Reader, what Gordian knots of human concern attend the passage of Time!

Consider Time’s chapters: past, present, and future. 

One night long ago, Your New Favorite Writer happened on a passage in Huai-nan Tzu, a Taoist text, that made him think of a rug being unrolled. The part already unrolled, lying flat and thus fit for examination, is the past; the part still wound in a tight coil, impenetrable, is the future. Exactly which part is the present I cannot say.

Caveat: If you search through Huai-nan Tzu for this rolled-rug metaphor, you won’t find it. It’s only an image in one reader’s mind, which was triggered by some obscure Chinese phrase describing the way events flow through their course.

I was about thirty years old at the time, and impressionable. Since then, I’ve seen the past as actualized, whereas all the contents of the future are merely potential. The past is real, whereas the future is theoretical. 

Gracious Reader, if you grew up in the same Modern Western Civilization where I did, you may envision past, present, and future as a giant map over which we are creeping, making our way toward what is already there but we haven’t encountered it yet. This is the basis of all time travel stories: There is a future somewhere that already exists, a place you might get to through a newly-developed mechanism or a wrinkle in the fabric of the Time-Space Continuum. 

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Well, it turns out that Huai-nan Tzu didn’t know the half of it. The latest version of physics calls into question whether Time itself is real. Isn’t it, rather, just something that happens as a result of unprecedented events, like the Big Bang? No Time, no Space—but everything explodes, and by some interaction of matter, gravity, and the Quantum Field—Time and Space are bent into being. And they’ve been hurtling outward ever since. 

Milky Way and night sky. National Park Service image by Jacob W. Frank. Public domain.

One might imagine the starry cosmos to be a visible record of the past, constantly receding into an inconceivable void where the future might be said to reside—if, for example, the future had to list its place of residence on a form to get its Real ID-compliant driver’s license.

Your New Favorite Writer is hardly one of those who believe a thing is true because somebody called a scientist said it. But Time fabricated by the unfolding of real events has a certain attractiveness to it. 

In that kind of Time, the past is not just a dusty page upon which a moving finger has writ. Rather, the past is woven through everything I or my ancestors, human and otherwise, have ever done or experienced.

I can’t know what will happen next year, or tomorrow, or five minutes from now. But I am free to search out and ponder all the curlicues and lateral arabesques of any and all events that have happened. 

Maybe that’s why I write historical fiction. I don’t know what my ancestors, or other people’s ancestors, went through that caused mid-19th-century America to fight with itself, and conquer itself, over the question of slavery. But I had a kind of notion, based on a real acquaintance with historical facts, and I wrote that notion in an imaginary way until it became The Price of Passage, a novel about Norwegian immigrant farmers and fugitive African American slaves. It’s not factual, but it’s plausible. The tiny details are factual, the great movements are made up. In a strange way, time has been re-bent to serve my narrative purpose. Try it, you might like it.

Likewise, I took things that I really, personally knew, from my very own childhood experiences, and invented a story called Izzy Strikes Gold! It’s about a 12-year-old boy struggling to find his way through the problematic year 1957. All the details are real, but the lives of the characters do not exactly match the actual lives of anyone I ever knew. 

But that’s okay. God has made billions of people, each with an individual story. If I add a few more to the pot, I don’t suppose it will hurt anything. There will just be a few more stories. Time and space will have been bent to new and interesting purposes in the realm of the imagination. 

Rod Serling would approve.

Right now I’m working on a World War II novel, in which two brothers from a small Midwestern town wind up in the Southwest Pacific, the continent of Africa, and other places to fight the Axis Powers and their own demons, which arise from their troubled relationship. You won’t want to miss it, but it’s only halfway done, so you won’t be able to read it for a while. In the meantime, Dear Reader, knock yourself out on the Price of Passage and Izzy Strikes Gold!

Until next time,

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer