Why subscribe?

Substack is free or may have a small subscription. There is no charge to read this quartet of novels. You may interact with me, the author, via messages. If you miss an update, each previous week of material will still be available to you on this site.

At some point you may want to subscribe to get full access to the newsletter and website and to help me pay for copyrights to poem and song lyrics that appear in the coming books of the novel. I had been planning this long group of novels since about 1980 and began writing them when I went off work at the post office with an injury in 2011 and retired in 2013. I finished writing the fourth book in 2021. I wrote almost every day during this period, writing by hand in a notebook, sitting much of the time in my truck beside a marsh in a park near home, working there throughout the pandemic, even during the shutdown. I went home and then typed my day’s writing onto the computer and edited it. It would be nice to get a small financial compensation for this long work, but reading and commenting on my work is free.

Stay up-to-date

You won’t have to worry about missing anything. Every new edition of the newsletter goes directly to your email inbox. There may also be a storage file on this site to find earlier sections. The first novel will arrive to you in sections, about 40 pages in writing every week, on Friday at noon Eastern Daylight Time. At the same time, a spoken file will be available to you, representing the same 40 pages, read by me. You can read or listen or both, if you wish.

Join the crew

If many of you feel this is too much reading every week, let me know and we will shorten the sections. At this speed it will take about 15 weeks to finish the first novel, The Lovely Road, which deals with my protagonist’s childhood. If all goes well, I will try to begin posting the second one, The Death of Lake Erie, some time in the Fall. That book deals with the boy’s teen and early manhood years. Book 3 will follow, Black Youth Rising, in which the youth becomes an accomplished poet and goes south in the civil rights movement in West Tennessee in 1964-6. The fourth book, Red in the Morning, follows the youth, his beloved partner and their friends as they build a fighting anti-draft movement against the Vietnam War in Cleveland and begin to go into factories to organize the working class for a revolutionary struggle against the rich capitalists.

My plans are to continue posting here until all the four books have been brought out to you. I hope this will also lead to the publication of them as hard-cover books, for which you will get discounts.

This is a long story and much of the drama of the 60’s Movement is found in the third and fourth books. But I hope you will persist in reading the first two and see how young activists got created. Schwerner, Goodman and Chaney, activists similar to our protagonists, didn’t just up and decide one day to fight for Black liberation; they grew out of an environment. That is our subject: how did their surroundings, the politics of the country, the nature of the relatives and the friends of such young people, influence and form them, and how did the youth grow and struggle.

One of the problems with continuing the publication of these novels is that they contain lyrics of poems and popular songs that have been published since 1927 and thus require that I must buy their copyright licenses. This cost me $900 for Book 1, and the coming books will require more. If you enjoy this first book and want to help me publish the rest, I would like to hear from you.

Read on

(To find out more about the company that provides the tech for this newsletter, visit Substack.com.)