I enjoyed reading Flu Season: Poems by Katie Kalisz, so much so that I looked at her first poetry collection, Quiet Woman. I found the same keen eye upon family and relationships that I found in her later collection.
At the same time, her view is wider, including friends and relatives. The collection opens with the pregnant poet attending a funeral. A child, age unspecified, is in the casket, but a child who died before its mother. And she tries to imagine “the nearly grown child inside of me / dying before I did,” including the possible names of the child engraved on a gray gravestone and a memorial folder providing directions to the funeral luncheon. A later poem describes a wake for a 14-year-old girl, perhaps serving as the amplification of the funeral.
My historical novel Brookhaven has no illustrations. I spent an estimated third of my research time hunting for them.
The novel is set in two different time periods – the Civil War and immediately after, and then 50 years later, in 1915. From the beginning of the first draft, I quickly learned that I had to see both periods. I had to see what people wore, what they ate, how they traveled, what their homes were like, what their streets and communities were like, and more.
From early on, I had to spend far more time looking than reading, and vastly more time looking than writing. Thos 50 years were some of the momentous in American history – rapid industrialization during the war and after, wagons and carriages giving way to automobiles, the advent of flight, the rapid spread of newspapers supported by wire services like Associated Press, rapid changes in the position of women in society, and mechanized agriculture becoming the rule rather than the exception.
To continue reading, please see my post today at the ACFW Blog.
It happens, sometimes. You’re reading a poem, and the finely crafted words trigger a memory so powerful that you’re back in that moment of time. In this case, a poem about a young boy presenting a “stolen” begonia (or one snatched from the restaurant’s plantings) took me back more than 40 years. We were eating with our toddler at a Mexican restaurant, when he decided to slip down from his booster seat, walk to a nearby table, and climb into an elderly man’s lap.
Mortified, we apologized, but the elderly man would have none of it. He was thrilled. He pointing to a younger couple seated at his table. “I keep telling them we’re waiting for our grandchildren.” He talked with our toddler for a few minutes, until our boy slid off his lap and came back to find a corn chip.
Things, like serious crime, are a bit slow in DCI Evan Warlow’s area of Wales, so he and his team are loaned (“seconded”) to a part of Wales a bit further north. A department that’s short-handed for illness and other reasons needs help. A well-known sheep farmer and his son have disappeared, and evidence at the scene of their disappearance suggests foul play.
The investigating officers are on unfamiliar turf, dealing with people they don’t know. But procedure is known, and Warlow soon finds an almost bewildering array of possible motives and suspects. And at least initially, the crime appears to be tied into a spike of sheep rustling that’s been plaguing the area. That’s what the missing farmer and his son were investigating – a call from a fellow farmer who spotted lights on a mostly unused road.
Warlow continues to wrestle with his own demons, not the least of which is his status as HIV-positive, caused by the bite of a suspect in an old case. And his ex-wife has been hospitalized, in serious condition caused by her chronic alcoholism.
Rhys Dylan
All of these happenings and issues begin to play together, as Warlow starts to close in on the killer. That’s assuming, of course, that the bodies of the victims are found.
Suffer the Dead by Welsh writer Rhys Dylan is a terrific read, fast-paced, full of the unexpected, and grounded in routine police procedure. But there’s nothing routine about the way DCI Warlow’s mind works, and that’s what will ultimately solve the crime.
Dylan has published 19 novels in the DCI Evan Warlow series, of which Suffer the Dead is the fourth. A native Welshman educated in London, Dylan wrote numerous books for children and adults under various pen names across several genres. He began writing the DCI Warlow series in 2021; The Engine House was published in 2022. Dylan lives in Wales.
What must be one of the strangest stories I’ve read in a long time is the story of Larry Allan Thorne. He’s an American war hero, buried in Arlington National Cemetery. He started his military career in the Finnish army in 1938 and fought courageously against Soviet Russia when it attacked Finland in 1939. For a few months in 1945, he joined Nazi Germany’s Waffen-SS. He was captured by the British, escaped from a POW camp, made his way home to Finland, was tried (and convicted) for treason, pardoned in 1948, and then eventually turned up in the United States, where he joined the U.S. Special Forces. In Vietnam, he received two Purple Hearts and a Bronze Star. In October of 1965, he died in a helicopter crash. Military.com has the details.
If you saw the movie “Hacksaw Ridge,” starring Andrew Garfield as Desmond Doss, then you know the story of the conscientious objector who served as a medic In World War II and saved the lives of dozens of soldiers during the battle for Okinawa. Director Mel Gibson left out a large chunk of the story, because he believed audiences wouldn’t believe all the heroic acts Doss had done. This story is part of the much larger Okinawa story, and Nathan Prefer at the Warfare History Network tells the story of “Hell on Hacksaw Ridge.”
Barnabas Collins was one of the best known fictional characters of the late 1960s and early 1970s – the central character of the gothic soap opera “Dark Shadows.” Given that he was an odd duck for a villain – a vampire with “moral compunction” –Adam Fuller at The Imaginative Conservative asks if he served at the era’s “moral conscience”.
A century ago, most homes were heated by coal. And coal presented a problem: it stained the wallpaper. A man named Cleo McVicker invented a substance to clean the stains, but as homes began to switch to gas and electric, the market eventually disappeared. Later, a schoolteacher used the substance for something else, and the rest, as they say, is history. See Bill Grandi’s post at Living in the Shadow.
In my novel Brookhaven, one of the scenes involved the Battle of the Wilderness, which stretched over days and then became the Battle of Spotsylvania Courthouse. It was a horrific battle, with Union artillery killing more Union soldiers than anything the Confederates did. At Emerging Civil War, Lisa Samia has a poem about the battle, or a poem about the graves on the battlefield.
