The reasoning behind our book is that my mom and my dad have a saved marriage,” Erika Chambers said. “Their story is the first one in the book and it’s pretty dramatic.” It tells about Erika’s father, who was having multiple affairs and addicted to pornography. He was a drug addict and an alcoholic. Erika said her mother, who was raised Christian, “didn’t want that stuff going on in her home. So, my father left. My mother did a lot of praying and, you know, my father came back several months later and had given up all that stuff. We believed God worked in special ways with him. That happened when I was about eight or nine years old.”
The book is the faith-based “Can My Marriage Be Saved? True Stories of Saved Marriage.” It’s co-written by Erika and her mother, Mae. In addition to her parents’ story, mother and daughter included 21 others that deal with such marital issues as addictions, financial crises, depression, infidelity, and cultural conflicts.
Ten years ago Mae decided to share her experience with other couples whose marriages were in trouble. When Erika, who majored in Communications and minored in English at Middle Tennessee State University, learned about her mother’s plans, she told her, “Mom, I’m passionate about family too, and I want to help.”
As a result of writing “Can My Marriage Be Saved?,” Erika learned that, “our fate is not determined by our parents.” Specifically, what she saw happen with the couples they wrote about – and they worked directly with all of them – was the realization “that their lives were determined by their own actions and attitudes.” Afterward, “they went on to make conscious decisions to change their pasts.”
Erika said, if the book has “a mission statement, it’s that if you know someone in a troubled marriage, hand them hope. We see this not just as a book but as a campaign of hope.” Erika added that while she and her mother would like to see “more preventive divorce resources made available,” sometimes divorce is necessary, and “we’re not trying to make a statement against divorce.”
In “Can My Marriage Be Saved?” Erika said the goal she and her mother set was to communicate with people from different walks of life – and that means people of different ages, of different faiths, and of little or no faith. She explained that she came across too many books “overflowing with Christian clichés. That kind of lingo is very exclusive.” It has no place in Erika and Mae’s book: “It’s too easy for someone who needs help to get lost in [such] jargon.”
After readers finish “Letters from the Dhamma Brothers: Meditation Behind Bars” (Pariyatti Press), its author, Jenny Phillips, hopes “they are thinking in new and creative ways about the problem of mass incarceration.”That’s what happened to the New York City judge who read Jenny’s book and now believes in rehabilitation. “He told me now it’s going to be harder for him to be a judge,” said Jenny, a cultural anthropologist and practicing psychotherapist.
Donaldson and Vipassana
In January 2002, Jenny writes, the W.E. Donaldson Correctional Facility, located in Birmingham, AL, a high level maximum security prison, “became the first state prison on North America to hold a Vipassana course. Twenty inmates, (the Dhamma Brothers), took part in the intensive ten week program. (Dhamma means “teaching of an enlightened person.”)
Vipassana, Jenny writes, “is a simple, practical way to achieve real peace of mind and to lead a happy, useful life. Vipassana means ‘to see things as they really are’ and is a logical process of mental purification through self-observation… It is one of the world’s most ancient meditation techniques… rediscovered 2600 years ago by Gotama the Buddha.”
The Letters and the Documentary
Much of the book was written by the inmates who participated in the Vipassana course. “It is a story told in letters and about their search for inner peace and redemption,” Jenny explained. “My writing wraps around the letters.” Some of the letters are philosophical, others humorous. “All of them are powerful,” said Jenny, who lives in Concord, MA, and works in prisons for 12 years now.
One of Jenny’s favorite is O.B. Benjamin Oryang’s “fly” letter. “It sort of contains all the meaning in the book, because this man was deeply in touch with his physical sensations and emotional responses to a house fly,” she said. Benjamin writes about the evening he and seven other men were meditating in a sweltering room. Suddenly a fly appeared: “… something very cold and heavy landed on my arm. I opened my eyes… the culprit was a regular looking fly. It continued to crawl across my bald head, face, and arms… Immediately after sitting everyone started to complain, at the same time, about the… one fly [that] had terrorized eight-hardened prisoners for a whole hour.”
In 2007’s award-winning documentary, “The Dhamma Brothers,” Benjamin’s letter, Jenny noted, “Is the very last thing in the film. He talks about how [the prisoners]… were struggling with their emotions about this fly. The film is both sad and inspiring, but after he read his letter, everyone left the theater roaring with laughter.”
Final Words
Though Jenny knows that “there are inmates who are beyond being helped by programs,” her book challenges the warehousing-of-inmates mentality. Her major point is: “… locking up all inmates and denying them any means for significant personal transformation is currently creating a huge, separate system of pariahs and outcasts.”
As Pulitzer Prize winning historian Doris Kearns Goodman wrote that Jenny’s book “is an absolutely compelling story of an astonishing treatment program with prison inmates that, against all odds, worked.”
T.D. Carter, author of “Abraham Lincoln and the Forest of Little Pigeon Creek” (AmeriTales Entertainment), a terrific children’s book, makes several things perfectly clear: She loves history and one of her goals is, she said, “To connect today’s children with yesterday’s. I felt there were so many valuable lessons kids could learn if they looked at the childhoods of people like Lincoln, Amelia Earhart, Thomas Edison, and Jackie Robinson.” T.D., Founder and President of AmeriTales Entertainment, said that her company’s goal “is to be known as the expert on the childhoods of some of America’s greatest leaders.”
Like all good historians who write for children, T.D makes her historical characters believable. She stressed that she wants children to see “History in a different light,” - as fun, exciting and interesting. Young children, she continued, mistakenly “think of Lincoln as some kind of untouchable. But in truth there are a lot of things about him that kids of today can relate to.”
In her book about Lincoln, T.D. continued, “young readers will learn about his desire to read, and what he went through to get books. In the upcoming book about Amelia Earhart, children will learn that she wanted to catch insects and explore caves, which was not considered proper for a little girl at the turn of the century. In fact, some parents would not let their children play with her. Reading about it will help children see how famous people solved their problems and might help them become more confident about themselves.”
Most challenging about writing about Lincoln was, T.D. admitted, “Trying not to throw too much at kids about his childhood at one time.” “Abraham Lincoln and the Forest…” concentrates on nine-year-old Abe’s adventure in an Indiana forest as he sets out to meet Mr. Crawford, who, we read, “had the most famous nose in Indiana,” and who owned “a book about the forest [that young Abe] was itching to read.” T.D’s book tells how the future president overcomes his fear of the forest “critters” and realizes, she writes, “that the forest was the home of the critters. Just as he didn’t want critters in his house, they didn’t want him in theirs. Folks needed to respect the critters’ house when they were in the Forest of Little Pigeon Creek.”
In addition to “Amelia Earhart and the Haunted Winds of Kansas,” scheduled for June release, T.D. has several more projects in the works: books about the early years of Thomas Edison, Jackie Robinson, Sitting Bull, and Christopher Columbus. T.D. stressed these famous individuals are written about “as real life action heroes because they are, after all, people of action. The series format is that of a hero who sets out on a quest to accomplish something. So there’s an adventure involved and the characters go through a series of discoveries about themselves and the world.”
Randy Jennings did the wonderful illustrations for T.D’s book. Visit him at www.ArtFreeLancer.com. T.D’s website is www.info@ameritales.com.
Writing poetry always came easily for Kathryn Kozlicky, author of “Confessions” (PublishAmerica). “I would love to write a story, an actual book, but that’s something I have to sit down and think about,” Kathryn said in a recent telephone interview. “With poetry, I can hear a word or phrase and - boom! - it’s like lightning. I have to start writing. I don’t know why but I feel blessed that it does.”
Robert Frost is one of Kathryn’s favorite poets. “He inspired me when I was young,” she said. And Frost’s clarity and directness is evident in Kathryn’s poetry. Take, for instance, “The Past,” when Kathryn writes, “Isn’t it exhausting/ Living in the past?/ Tainted by the memories/ Of the love that didn’t last?”
In Frost’s “Acquainted with the Night,” he writes, “I have been one acquainted with the night,/ I have walked out in the rain - and back in rain./ I have out-walked the furthest city light.”
After Kathryn moved into her new apartment in Groton, she began writing. “I was in pain and a lot of things were burdening me,” she said. “[Writing] was a healing process for me. I never intended it to be a book about my personal feelings and situation.” When she finished and reread what she wrote, “I realized these are problems other people have gone through, or are going through. If my poems can help someone else, let’s give it a try.”
I asked Kathryn what she’d like her readers to take away from her book. Her hope is, she said, that “anyone who has gone through the situations I have gone through, well, I just want them to know they are not alone, because for many years I felt very alone and kept everything secret. There are people out there they can talk to and get the help they need.”
Many of the poems in “Confessions” are grave, for example “You Are,” wherein Kathryn writes, “You are the man that severed all ties/ Abandoning me in a haunting sea of lies./ You are the man that simply moved on/ Now all that was beautiful is just dead and gone.”
But several poems are hopeful too, like “Loving You.” In it Kathryn writes, “Loving you has taught me that I am strong/…Loving you has given me a sense of well being/…I’ve learned many things simply by loving you.”
In “Confessions” Kathryn unflinchingly reveals her suffering and transforms it into a learning and perhaps healing experience for the reader. Her writing is clear-eyed, courageous, and never self-pitying. Like Frost’s, her poems are deceptively simple.
As for her future writing plans, Kathryn has a second book in the works that she will submit in September to PublishAmerica. “It will be…a kind of coming out of the dark and into the light,” she explained. Her book signing is July 26, from 9 a.m.-1 p.m. at Pearl of the Thames Café and Catering, at 175 Thames Street, Groton.
“Clair-obscur of the Soul” (Little Red Tree Publishers) is a book of “unstructured poetry,” said Jean-Yves Solinga, the author. “I’m not at ease with the structure of traditional poetry. What I’ve done, and it has been done before, is poetic prose.” In his Introduction, Jean-Yves writes about his “choice of poetic form and lyrical structure.” He quotes Trepilov in Chekov’s “The Sea Gull:” “I’m coming more and more to the conclusion that it’s a matter not of old forms and not of new forms, but that a man writes, not thinking at all of what form to choose, because it comes pouring from his soul.”
In his Foreword, Michael Linnard tells us Jean-Yves “was born in Algeria of French parents and moved to Morocco [and] at 14 was abruptly…brought to America by his family.” Michael holds that Jean-Yves’ book “must be read by all those interested in a singularly unique view of life that may redefine the capacity of poetry to be what it should be: the art of expressing pure thought about the existential human condition.”
Reading Jean-Yves’ work exposes the reader to his culture (French) and presents different perspectives about American-Anglo Saxon culture. “It’s a learning experience for both myself and the reader,” Jean-Yves said. Jean-Yves hopes that his work will bring “the lyricism of one [culture] to the direct and acoustical strength of the other.”
Ray Bradbury said that writers learn when they write. Jean-Yves learned while writing his book was, he said, laughing, “How things change but stay the same. What you have to find is a different angle.” In other terms, anyone who writes a poem about war, “isn’t writing the first poem ever written about war,” Jean-Yves explained. “You have to add something personal to it.”
Of course, there were times when the Gales Ferry resident found writing “Clair-obscur…” difficult. “As it is that with most writing,” he said, “you have to take away. It’s almost like cooking. You have to reduce the sauce. With writing you have to get rid of wordiness, of an extra sentence.”
My favorite poem is “Mankind and Its Place” - especially when Jean-Yves writes: “…true heroes…have glanced without/ blinking into the enormous void of things…” They come back “from the precipice to face the rest of their individual lives…/without whining…without duplicity and especially without eternal laws…” The key, here, is that Jean-Yves’ heroes are courageous enough to survive looking into the abyss and then able to “[fashion] moments of solidarity and a mutual gift/ of happiness for the other…”
Jean-Yves said, “Clair-obscur in French is a technique of painting. In Italian it is called chiaroscuro” - that is, to quote from my Merriam Webster dictionary, the arrangement…of light and dark parts in a pictorial work of art.” A feast for one’s mind and heart, “Clair-obscur of the Soul” will be launched on July 17, at The Book Barn, 41 West Main Street, Niantic, from 6-8p.m.
The reasoning behind our book is that my mom and my dad have a saved marriage,” Erika Chambers said. “Their story is the first one in the book and it’s pretty dramatic.” It tells about Erika’s father, who was having multiple affairs and addicted to pornography. He was a drug addict and an alcoholic. Erika said her mother, who was raised Christian, “didn’t want that stuff going on in her home. So, my father left. My mother did a lot of praying and, you know, my father came back several months later and had given up all that stuff. We believed God worked in special ways with him. That happened when I was about eight or nine years old.”
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