It seems rather fitting that this Veterans Day weekend also marks the launch of my new book, A Father’s Letters: Connecting Past to Present which is finally on the shelves (at least virtually). It follows my writing pattern of publishing a book once every seven years: The Book Shopper: A Life in Review (2009), Down & Outbound: A Mass Transit Satire (2016). At first glance, no three books could be more different from each other.
I began A Father’s Letters after I was blessedly packaged out to retirement from Turner Broadcasting in 2019. The first draft was awful. And on the advice of brave friends who saw the first iteration, I blew it up. However, some of the remnants had a half-life—especially my father’s correspondence which I had kept with me over the decades. This included approximately 600 letters chronicling two distinct periods of his life—as a combat infantryman in World War II Europe and 30 years later as accountant tethered to a desk job at a small Midwestern canning company. (The picture above is my father Glenn R. Browne Jr. as a 19-year-old infantryman near Kaiserlauten, Germany in 1945.)
I am a slow writer and I spent most of 2022 writing a new book, with assistance from some of those same brave friends. It was a great improvement but only five chapters and 63 pages in length.
Not only did I retrace my father’s combat action, but I also examined the letters he wrote me from 1976 when I graduated from college to his premature death from leukemia in 1985. Certain themes emerged—such as how do we define ourselves in retirement. However, what surprised me was discovering how this correspondence shaped my life then and now. Part of the self-discovery was the process itself, which I write about.
Fortunately, this was not a catharsis of trauma that so many books of this type can often be, but the writing of it felt more like a Field of Dreams movie moment of “Hey Dad, do you want to have a catch?” And since I grew up in east central Illinois it has that Midwestern influence as well.
Most of 2023 was spent getting it proofread professionally, designed professionally and finally printed through Ingram Spark and distributed through Ingram with my Muted Horn publishing imprint. The book contains photographs, a truncated map of my East Central Illinois homeland, cartoons (and I had to get permissions) and this cover art which is part of a permanent exhibit at the High Museum in Atlanta. Like Down & Outbound, I wanted the content to determine the physical form of the book.
Limited Availability
By working with Ingram Spark, the book is available online through Amazon and Barnes & Noble or you can purchase it through Ingram’s book direct sales. (Link to the book here.) I have a few “advance copies” here in my study and they will be available at my book popup Destination Books, which makes a monthly appearance at the Carter Center Freedom Farmers Market (Saturday morning, November 18). I expect that after Thanksgiving I will have more copies readily available for purchase directly though my personal website.
It seemed only appropriate that you blog readers should be among the first ones to know. Thanks for your support.
