The Consequence of Stars review and interview with memoirist David Berner

The Consequence of Stars: A Memoir of Home

Spring 2019 from Adelaide Books, New York/Lisbon

Paperback now available.
$19.60
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Read my Review below.

About the Book

THE CONSEQUENCE OF STARS is a unique and thoughtful memoir on our eternal search for home. Told in a series of essays on love, loss, travel, music, spirituality, and the joys of solitude, memoirist David W. Berner, reaches deep to discover where he belongs and ultimately where all of us belong.

A brief interview with the Author

David, what do you love about this book?

The book is so universal, I believe, to the human condition. We are all seeking "home"—some place of our own, of peace and solace, and great spirit. THE CONSEQUENCE OF STARS is a memoir in essays, each piece is about finding home, whatever that may mean to all of us. It's part travelogue, part memoir, part diary. 

Share a couple of things you learned while researching this story.

I learned, in a writerly sense, how to link essays, how that is best done. But I also learned about myself, what's truly important to me. Joan Didion once said, "I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking." This very much was my experience. I have written several memoirs prior to this book, and this has been true for all of them, but this one particularly opened me up. I am so complicated. Aren't we all, really?  

What do you hope readers will tell others when they’ve finished the book?

I hope readers will see the connection between all of us in the words of this book. We are more alike than we are different. That's an old cliché, but clichés come from truth. And connectivity is a universal truth.  

What are you reading now?

I'm re-reading a Jim Harrison novel, THE ENGLISH MAJOR. Love this book. I'm also reading a book on Zen meditation, re-reading Kerouac's THE DARHMA BUMS, and looking for a new book of essays to jump into. 

What’s next?

I have a completed memoir manuscript about a season of walking. It's done. But I'm so focused on THE CONSEQUENCE OF STARS release and the work involved there, that I haven't really shopped it around yet. I'm also working on a work of fiction. 

About the Author

David W. Berner is a memoirist whose personal stories tell all of our stories. His memoirs reflect on our collective relationships and how those experiences link us to the world we share. From stories of fathers and sons, to road trips, travel memoir, pets, and music, David's books are mirrors of our common human experience.

www.davidwberner.com 

http://www.adelaidebooks.org/

Lisa's Review

David W. Berner, author of Any Road Will Take You There and There’s a Hamster in my Dashboard, offers in his newest memoir a series of nineteen linked essays traversing his childhood in Pennsylvania through early adulthood to contemporary life. In this book, Berner tackles the idea of “home” through a series of defining moments. The opening chapter is a revelation of what home means, launching life from the safety and wonder of the front porch with sleepovers, board games and plotting explorations of the neighborhood.  “This is how one built a life in my hometown. It’s what people did. They grew up in unexceptional little neighborhoods, went to the same Sunday church services, attended the same elementary, middle, and high schools, got jobs at the mills or the local banks, bought homes near their parents, drank at the corner bar with their old high school friends on Friday nights, and raised kids who would grow up and do it all over again. For a time, I was moving straight down that path, doing what you’re supposed to do.”

Berner’s first inkling of the meaning of home came at age seven when he determined to run away. “Leaving home was supposed to evoke sadness in the person being left behind”; a part his mother refused to play as she cheerily waved him onward. A short trek through the safety of his concerned neighborhood soon routed him back.

Exploring home takes Berner back to study the lives of his parents, who never ventured far from their natal community. War time duty and a stay in a tuberculosis sanatorium may have been enough adventure for the couple who married and raised children near their extended family.

The essays feature themes of growing up, the gradual realization that life is an ever-expanding bubble rapidly enveloping the mysteries of “outside”; “things we don’t talk about,” such as the effects of the Vietnam War to memories of the way we want to believe events unfolded instead of how they truly happened. A look backward shows Berner the truths of friends and family that no one can see in the moment.

“Life is a series of comings and goings,” Berner writes as he prepares to leave for (not very far away) college. He was the “oddball” thinker in a family of blue collar workers, destined for higher education. By the time he was eighteen years old, he “understood that we must abandon our homes to find our new ones, and leave our hearts behind in hopes that our souls will be endlessly restored.”

Abandoning home eventually meant settling in the Chicago area, 500 miles away where he lived in several different places in the second reiteration of his life, that of a radio host. “I was the first in my family in nearly a hundred years to leave” Pittsburgh, Berner says, evoking the first tears he’d seen his father shed. Raising his family is a serial repeat of watching lessons Berner learned as a child play out in his own children. Exotic travel and instilling the sense that no matter how temporary the space, Berner notes that a piece of self stays behind. “Leaving” is always undertaken with the sense of “returning.”

Through a lifetime of experiences calling different places home, from a writer’s retreat in Florida to visiting Europe to meeting a new life partner and molding out a space of his own, Berner concludes, “It is by leaving home we can heal best in order to return.”

“Home is what you carry with you. And in that spirit, I have been transporting my home with me wherever I go.”

Lyrically written with earthy language, Berner shares intimate details of a life seeking and understanding his own place “to be”; a place of love and acceptance, a place to practice and grow and share himself. The Consequence of Stars is a call for all of us to revisit our lives and reach for the elusive elements of what we call home.

For my readers: drug use and coarse language.

Structure and Spend Quality Time with Your Kids

New from Julie Morgenstern

In Time to Parent, the bestselling organizational guru takes on the ultimate time-management challenge―parenting, from toddlers to teens―with concrete ways to structure and spend true quality time with your kids.

Would you ever take a job without a job description, let alone one that requires a lifetime contract? Parents do this every day, and yet there is no instruction manual that offers achievable methods for containing and organizing the seemingly endless job of parenting. Finding a healthy balance between raising a human and being a human often feels impossible, but Julie Morgenstern shows you how to harness your own strengths and weaknesses to make the job your own. This revolutionary roadmap includes:

A unique framework with eight quadrants that separates parenting responsibilities into actionable, manageable tasks―for the whole bumpy ride from cradle to college.

• Simple strategies to stay truly present and focused, whether you’re playing with your kids, enjoying a meal with your significant other, or getting ahead on that big proposal for work.
• Clever tips to make the most of in-between time―Just 5-15 minutes of your undivided attention has a huge impact on kids.
• Permission to take personal time without feeling guilty, and the science and case studies that show how important self-care is and how to make time for it.

Released September, 2018

Ebook: $9.99

Paperback: $18.00

Buy on Amazon

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In her most recent book, Time To Parent: Organizing Your Life To Bring Out The Best In Your Child And You (Holt Paperbacks, available now), Julie extends her organizational skills to time management for parents, designed to help them organize their time by bringing more balance and productivity to family life, work time and self-care. Based on her years of field work and nearly a decade of research on the science of human development, Time To Parent presents a framework that frees parents to savor time with their kids and on their own, from birth through college. While organizing our material possessions is important, Julie recognizes that it is how we spend time that often brings the most joy to our lives and provides timely solutions and actionable guidance so critical now with more women and men than ever juggling family, career, and other obligations.

Organization and productivity expert and New York Times best-selling author Julie Morgenstern has spent more than 30 years helping individuals and major corporations (American Express, Hearst, HARPO, Deloitte, Microsoft, FedEx, and more) overcome disorganization to achieve their goals by designing “Inside Out” systems of time and space that feel natural and easy to maintain.Julie’s previous books on organization include the New York Times bestsellers Organizing from the Inside Out and Time Management From The Inside Out, both of which were developed into specials for PBS. Her on-camera interviews have included Today, Rachael Ray, Good Morning America and CNN and she has been featured in print publications including The New York Times, Time Magazine and USA Today, among others.

Kim Suhr shares short stories

Wisconsin author and director of Red Oak Writing Studios announces her new release, Nothing to Lose, a collection of short stories that take place around Wisconsin. Welcome, Kim Suhr. 

                       

Cornerstone Press, Dec. 2018
ISBN 9780984673971
Paperback: $14.95
E-book coming soon
Buy on
Indie Bound
Amazon

About the book:
Drawing on the rich complexity of the American Midwest, Kim Suhr peoples her debut book of fiction with characters that we know, carved out of the Wisconsin landscape and caught between expectation and desire. An Iraq war veteran stalks the streets of Madison. Four drunk friends hunt deer outside of Antigo. A mother tries to save her son. A transplanted New Yorker plots revenge against her husband. A man sobers up and opens a paintball range for Jesus. A woman with nothing to lose waits for her first kiss.

Personal and powerful, Kim Suhr’s Nothing to Lose shows us a region filled with real people: less than perfect, plagued with doubts, always reaching.

A brief interview with the author:

Introduce us to your most difficult character.
That’s a tough one because I love all my protagonists—even the unlovable ones—for their complexity and brokenness. Perhaps the most difficult for me to get inside of was Anna, aka Ellen Wilkinson, from the story titled “Brush Strokes.” I wanted to help readers identify with her even as they become increasingly uncomfortable with her. Who is the “good guy” and who is the “bad guy?” I like to keep the reader guessing.

Can you share two things you learned from your research during the writing and publication process?
I learned that there are artists who actually paint with human blood. (I don’t even want to think about what my Google search history looked like on the day I learned that!)

As for a publishing tidbit, I learned the truth of the adage: “I’m a great believer in luck. The harder I work the luckier I get.”

What do you hope readers will tell others when they’ve finished the book?
This book made me see something in a different way; it made me compassionate for someone who is different from me.

What’s next for you?
I am working on the audiobook version of Nothing to Lose, then probably an e-book as well. I have a couple of short stories in process and a few chapters of something that wants to be a novel. (Ssshhhh! Don’t tell anyone.)

What are you reading now?
I just finished Besotted by Melissa Duclos (which I loved) and have cracked the spine on Saving the Scot by Wisconsin author Jennifer (Rupp) Trethewey, the fourth book in her House of Balforss series.

Lisa---I'm a big Rupp fan, too, but shhhh! Don't tell anyone.

Thanks for sharing, Kim.

About the Author:
Kim Suhr lives and writes in southeastern Wisconsin. Her work has appeared in Midwest Review, Stonecoast Review, Rosebud and others. She holds an MFA from Pine Manor College, where she was the 2013 Dennis Lehane Fellow in Fiction. She is director of Red Oak Writing and a member of the Wisconsin Writers Association Board of Directors. You can follow her at:

Facebook
Twitter (@kimsuhr)
Instagram

Robin Fuson and her new Romantic Fiction

The Encounter

Robin Densmore Fuson

Romantic Contemporary Inspirational Novella

March 23, 2019

Forget Me Not Romances

Buy on Amazon 

Paperback $6.74

Ebook $2.99

About the Book

At first blush, fifty-two-year-old Renee Harris appears to be a confident sophisticated woman. Hidden are the scars of deep pain and fear. A meeting in an ordinary elevator will not only take Renee to the designated floor but also on a journey of discovery. Chaplain Lance Freeman’s only thought is to help a family in their hour of need though unknown to him, the woman in the elevator needs him more than the family down the hall. Elevators can be strange things. Full of ups and downs, they may be used as a vehicle to change the course of someone’s life. Renee and Lance are about to find out just how much a chance meeting can alter a person’s direction. Can real love be a part of their new beginnings? Will they allow God to lead and interrupt their lives so they can eventually find peace, joy, and love?

My Review

After I got over the shock of Renee and Lance’s first meeting and the unusual reaction Renee had to her husband’s passing, I was entranced with how Renee picked up the pieces of her life. As she slowly reveals her history, she forges a new direction and takes control of her destiny as a challenge to the childhood that had been stolen from her. Lance is one of those wonderful, fantastic people who deserve a break, and as a bonus, has Renee’s daughter firmly on his side. He finds new love in Renee, but realizes they have a lot of work to do to mend from their recent traumas. After healing, they revisit a potential relationship. Renee learns that Lance has kept important information from her, a blow to her delicate recovery. Together they explore whether they are truly meant to be together or better as friends.

About the Author

Robin recently moved to Tennessee with her husband Jimmy. Together, they celebrate with seventeen grandchildren. An award winner for romance and flash fiction. Robin is multi-published and writes stories on her blog for children. Robin is a member of ACFW, Vice President of ACFW Colorado Western Slope, and member of John316 Marketing Network. She enjoys leading a Bible study group and singing in two community choirs. Robin loves company and challenging her young guests to discover the many giraffes in the obvious and hidden nooks and crannies of their home.

Terri Wangard WWII Fiction

No Neutral Ground 

Book 2 of Promise For Tomorrow

Terri Wangard

WWII Historical Fiction

2016 Hope Springs Books

Connect with the author about purchases. 

About the Book

After his father divorces his mother because of her Jewish ancestry, Rafe and the rest of his family flee Germany. As a B-17 navigator, he returns to Europe. On the ocean voyage, he meets Jennie, an artist journeying to Sweden to work with the OSS. Flying missions against his former homeland arouses emotions that surprise Rafe. Despite being rejected, he is troubled by the destruction of Germany and his heart still cries for his father’s love. Sweden may be neutral, but it’s full of intrigue. Jennie assists the OSS at the American legation in Sweden. She thought she’d be doing passive, behind-the-scenes work. Instead, she’s pushed into an active role to gain intelligence and frustrate the Germans. How can Rafe and Jennie succeed in their dangerous roles when they are so conflicted?

My Review    

After a year and a half delay, I finally got back to Terri Wangard’s very nice and beautifully researched World War II historical romances. This second story is set for the most part in Sweden, a country that attempted to remain neutral during World War II. Our romantic couple meet on the Queen Mary as they are on their way to England from the States at the early stages of the war. Rafe is a German ex-patriate whose Jewish-ancestry mother fled with Rafe and his siblings to the US just before the outbreak of war. Rafe grew up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where his mother, divorced, remarried. Rafe then joined the US Air Force as a flight navigator, still fighting his demons of abandonment and love for his homeland, friends and family still there, against whom he now is at war.

Jenny is thoroughly American, and follows her father, a lieutenant in the military intelligence, to Sweden, where he and her mother live in Stockholm. Her father’s work is with military personnel who are interred in Sweden, and Jenny’s job is she uses her artistic talent to do whatever it takes to harass the German military, whether to create false rumors or anti-propaganda posters. When Rafe’s damaged plane seeks asylum in Sweden, he and Jenny reunite.

Their developing relationship is never a secret nor in doubt, nor even conflicted. It’s Rafe who must overcome the wounds of both childhood and what the war is doing to his family and his beloved homeland. While he works through fighting Nazis, not Germans, with the support of Jenny, the war grinds on, eventually to a close, allowing the healing to begin.

About the Author

Terri Wangard's first Girl Scout badge was the Writer. These days she is writing historical fiction, and won the 2013 Writers on the Storm contest and 2013 First Impressions of the American Christian Fiction Writers, as well as being a 2012 Genesis finalist. Holder of a bachelor's degree in history and a master's degree in library science, she lives in Wisconsin. Her research included going for a ride in a WWII B-17 Flying Fortress bomber.

Write Now Literary Tour with Rufus Chambers

Write Now Literary Book Tours is pleased to be organizing a two-week book tour for Does Your Vision Need an Engineer? by Rufus Chambers 111.  This tour will run April 22- May 3, 2019.

 Click here to book your own book tour.

Genre:                 Christian Leadership

Rufus Chambers is a dynamic business & ministry professional with over 20 years of experience who built a successful career in the construction industry. He has an expertise in Project Management and a teaching gift that empowers leaders and individuals to overcome challenges and achieve greatness. He has worked on numerous construction projects in the role of an Owner’s Representative, General Contractor, Construction Manager, and Construction Manager at Risk.

As a dedicated ministry leader with significant corporate and ministry achievements, Rufus has been afforded the opportunity to make significant inroads in the communities of Oakland, Pittsburg, and Richmond. These inroads consist of partnering with local school districts, faith-based organizations, non-profit agencies, and law enforcement agencies in serving the previously mentioned communities.

Rufus resides in Los Angeles with his wife of over 15 years, and they have 2 beautiful daughters together.

                                               

Does Your Vision Need an Engineer? It is a simple question with an answer that may seem to be obvious.  Countless people have dreams and visions, but few are able to translate them into a practical plan that can followed.  Rufus Chambers takes readers on a journey of understanding how to connect a plan of action to their divinely inspired vision.  If you are struggling with understanding what to do next or who to recruit to join your team, this is the book for you.  There is nothing more frustrating than having a vision but being clueless on how to actively pursue.  Rufus will take you into the mind of a vision engineer, whose singular focus is creating a strategic plan that can systematically execute vision.

ISBN-10: 1795624744

ISBN-13: 978-1795624749

 

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 TWITTER|FACEBOOK| WEBSITE

 

Tour hosted by wnlbooktours.com

Debut Young Adult

Spoken by Melanie Weiss

Young Adult fiction

March 2019 Rosehip Publishing

$7.99 Ebook

$9.99 Print

Buy on Amazon

About the Book:

High school freshman Roman Santi has everything -- good looks, great friends, a mansion with an infinity swimming pool -- except the one thing he really wants. A relationship with his father.

When Roman’s life gets turned upside down, (thanks, Mom!?), he is forced to leave his pampered Hollywood lifestyle and move into his grandparents’ Midwestern home. Sleeping on a lumpy pullout sofa and starting at a new high school is the worst, but Roman’s life starts to look up when his pink-haired friend, Zuzu, and his crush, a classmate named Claire, introduce him to performance poetry through the high school's Spoken Word Club. While his mom is flying back and forth to L.A., trying to return them to the life they had, Roman becomes part of a diverse group of characters who challenge his rather privileged view of the world. Through Spoken Word, Roman recognizes the hole in his own life he needs to fill and discovers his voice. Spoken Word leads Roman on a journey of new friendships, first love, and finding the dad he never knew.

“Spoken” is an uplifting, funny, and heartfelt coming-of-age story that captures how the honesty of performance poetry binds together students from all different walks of life and forever changes Roman’s life.

Review:

Weiss’s debut young adult fiction captures the angst and inner workings of a teenager, Roman Santi, whose life is turned from mansion with a housekeeper in LA to sleeping on grandma’s sofa bed with a statue of the Buddha staring at him. The novel is a lovely, refreshingly sweet and poignant story about a kid not warped by society whose goal is to simply live happily ever after, be a friend, find friends, but also to find the father he’s never known. One of my favorite lines is from Roman’s first day at his new school, when he’s challenged by his mother’s over-the-top appearance as a minor movie star in exile: “Welcome to my world, where I’m happy my hippie grandma is the one taking me to school today.”

Everybody knows about being fifteen. Teens suffer amid the transcending moments. Roman finds his transcending moment when a poem and a girl spark his interest and he joins an after-school poetry club. Weiss, a trained journalist, writes what she knows about Midwestern living and the experiences of the Spoken Word movement in high school. She shares about her inspiration for the novel. During the late nineties, when the character Roman was born, Spoken Word was incorporated into the English classroom in Oak Park. Weiss credits this performance writing as a means for students to share their struggles and triumphs. Her character. Roman, found his niche in his program, although he decides not to share his poetry with his family. “The only way I can be real about what I write is if I know I won’t have to explain myself to them,” Roman says. Participating in Spoken Word allows him to uncork his bottle of stuffed feelings about his place in life, his environment, and his upbringing.

 When an opportunity to go to Europe arises from a Spoken Word competition, Roman, with the encouragement of his friend Zuzu, takes a step on a journey to find his father. Roman knows only that his father is a French cruise ship entertainer his mother met the summer they both worked on board. But first he has to earn the right to be part of the poetry team to compete against their London counterparts.

Roman shares his story through first-person present tense narrative, an effective method of bonding the reader to him. Spoken is not one of those in-your-face epic hero journeys. It’s a rare school year peek into contemporary high school freshman year, where the onus to grab life and make meaningful memories in on us. It’s difficult to find comparisons to today’s contemporary YA. Spoken is a finely-tuned story about coming to grips with identity without needing to kill, die, have sex, or do drugs. The cover is an evocative rendering of experiencing not only what you learn, but how you can share it.

About the Author:

I am a member of the Chicago Writers Association and live in Oak Park, IL. As a graduate of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, I have worked as a journalist and in marketing. This is my first novel.