Don, congratulations on publication of your first book, Rambles and Reflections: Stories Gleaned from a New England Mill Village. We’ll get into it momentarily, but first, tell us some of your background. We see from the back cover that you were a sales engineer, public school teacher, and Navy veteran, among other things.
I was a public school teacher for a few years, in East Providence, Providence, and Lincoln mostly, teaching Jr. High English and Reading. The East Providence tenure was most interesting. It was a pilot project with a one year grant teaching gifted sixth grade kids. I think I learned more than the kids. We had no curriculum, no mandate, no guidelines – just utter freedom to learn and create as far as our freewheeling imaginations could take us. All the things we created and explored were amazing, from art to writing to storytelling, sculpture, and drama plays. Kids that age possess wonderful creativity when encouraged. Of course, then in the 60’s, the internet didn’t exist so they weren’t captive to a digitized world.
I think that experience was my first inkling that we all have an innate capacity within the human spirit that longs to express itself, but life often sidetracks us. I always wanted to join the Navy ever since listening to the stories told by my father and grandfather about both world wars. They didn’t talk much about the trenches in France or being on submarines during the whole Pacific war, but my imagination was wetted by the lure and strangeness of places and events I knew nothing about. I was accepted in the Peace Corsp but chose the Navy instead.
I was trained as a cryptographer encoding top secret documents and interfacing with some pretty high profile people such as Gen. Curtis LeMay who firestormed Germany and Japan. Getting ahead in the Navy meant sea duty so I was assigned to USS Parle, a destroyer escort for 18 months as Gunnery Officer and Anti-Submarine Officer. My next tour was as a combat riverine advisor for another 18 months in the Mekong Delta, where I earned a Bronze Star. The last 30 years of my working life was as a sales engineer for several local companies designing and producing precision metal components using a relatively new technology known as photochemical machining. This enabled me to travel to design shows all over the country.
And you live now in Harrisville, an old mill village in Burrillville, correct?
Yes, I presently live in Harrisville, in a house I built myself over 50 years ago. My wife, Margaret, and I raised dairy goats for over a decade and we established the Southern New England Dairy Goat Association. Every summer for the past 20 years we have traveled to Antigonish, Nova Scotia to visit old cemeteries and research genealogy since she is a certified genealogist and part of her family comes from that area. Some of the descriptions in the book come from these working vacations. The beauty of that landscape never fails to impress me.
OK, so now the book, published by Rhode Island house Stillwater Books. A quick overview, please.
The book has six themes built from 99 short chapters. They are of necessity short because they were written for either a local newsletter or a five-minute presentation to a writers group.
Let’s start with the first theme, Nature. What will readers find there?
Readers will find here stories and observations about what one might discover very close to home in New England. They recount in some detail surprising facts and viewpoints about what surrounds us in nature and what we can discover in things we commonly take for granted. They open new and surprising ways of looking at the world of nature.
Next is Local Color. Same question.
They often continue thoughts about nature but describe incidents that I can recall in my lifetime that either have a humorous bent to them or have made a strong impression upon how I view living in this locale.
And same for Back Roads.
My wife and I have spent much time traveling the back roads of New England. These are short reminisces about experiences we have had or might have had in our travels over the years. They are meant to entertain and describe some of the quirkiness characteristic of Yankeeland.
And War Stories.
I spent 18 months in The Mekong Delta as a riverine advisor. Some of these stories are not biographical but are incidents I was peripherally involved in or had heard about. In that sense, they reveal actual conditions about the war and its effects upon the people involved. Hopefully, what is portrayed is not only the ugliness of war, but the toll it takes on the human spirit.
And Just Stories.
A continuation of miscellaneous recounting of places and experiences I’ve had. Most are human interest accounts of my experiences or humorous anecdotes of places and events over time. Some are imagined. Most were written to entertain. Some are serious, some delightful, all are meant to challenge the reader to be immersed in the range of how people deal with the business of living.
Finally, Commentary on the World.
These brief stories are an attempt to highlight societies’ foibles or look at human behavior from a different perspective. As usual, there’s an occasional dash of humor in many of the vignettes.
So what inspired you to start writing? We understand you began with contributions to a church bulletin several years ago.
How did I start to write? For most of my life I had never written anything save for an occasional poor letter. Never took a writing course or attended a seminar or even met with other writers. There is a correlation between walking in the woods, closely observing nature with its nuances and ever changing patterns, and developing some response within oneself to describe or explain it all. There is meaning and power in the world’s natural beauty that lifts the human spirit above the mundane concerns of daily living. It’s difficult to express in written words, but I’ve felt a tug to try to describe or record it. That’s been my inspiration. I walk often in the woods wherever I go and never fail to discover something of wonder.
We found this passage from the Preface to be profound: “most of us in this fast-paced, hi-tech world live urbanized or suburbanized existences far removed from the natural worlds. We are strangers to how our forbearers lived and to the rhythms of how nature works. What has come to be values is the size of our paychecks, our standing in the community, or the security that money can bring. Peace of mind and contentment are becoming scare illusions. It doesn’t’ have to be that way.” Can you please expand on that?
As humans race to become technological marvels, we have distanced ourselves from the natural world. We all love sunsets and the sound of a babbling woodland brook, but they have become mere snippets to give us momentary pleasure. We don’t allow these experiences to permeate deep into our souls. Our lives are too busy. Society is losing its historic relationship with the natural world, how it works, and why it was once so much a part of our existence. Should we become stranded in the wild, we could not start a fire, distinguish a walnut tree from a sassafras, or what might be the medicinal properties of jewelweed flowers. The natural world is shifting from a provider, a sustainer to an unknown, a dangerous place. I think society has to ask what the implications of this relationship mean for our future.
And finally, is there another book in the works?
Yes, there is another book in the works!
