Straight From the Mouth of Memoirist Mary Lawlor

 

The Inspiration Behind 'Fighter Pilot's Daughter'

By Mary Lawlor

Fighter Pilot’s Daughter was one of the most difficult projects I’ve ever undertaken.  It was also probably the most important thing I’ve ever done for myself.  Putting the book together was like a process of self-therapy: it had a powerful stabilizing effect that stays with me now.  Part of this came with the clear account the research and the writing made of my family’s zigzagging past.

Like most military families, we moved a lot (fourteen times before I graduated from high school).  And like other Army fathers, my Dad was away often.  My mother and sisters and I would worry about his safety, especially when he was flying in war zones.  He would write my mother fairly regularly for a while, then his communications would dwindle off under the weight of more pressing matters close at hand.  This would leave us wondering how he was, and I often had nightmares of him being captured, imprisoned…

In spite of the fact that we missed him fiercely, Dad’s homecomings weren’t as easy as we expected them to be.  Familiar as he was, his tall frame in the doorway and his blaring blue eyes with that far-away look were strange and frightening.  After a while, we’d get used to him; but I wonder how long it would take him to get used to being home.  He’d been in such a different, all-male world where violence reigned.  At home, there were only women.  My mother and sisters and I knew little about what he’d been through, not just because we were too young to know but because a lot of what he’d been up to was secret.

We never talked about any of this, so our house was a tense, uneasy place when Dad came home.  Indigenous people in many parts of the world have rituals for bringing warriors home—practices aimed at diminishing the potency of trauma and other effects of prolonged exposure to violence.  I guess we’re starting to see something like this in the debriefings and psychological attention given to soldiers and marines returning from war.  But in the sixties there wasn’t anything like it.  Dads just came home, still warriors, and now being asked not to be.

The story of Fighter Pilot’s Daughter had to have a plot—not just the order of our moves but the dramas that accompanied them.  It was difficult enough getting all my father’s military records so I could see the the crazy chain of our moves from one place to another.  It was even harder to go back into memories that reawakened painful feelings of confusion and anxiety that came with being new all the time.  All those scenes where I was a stranger and everybody else belonged still stung.

Making a story out my family life meant describing my parents, sisters, and myself as if we were characters.  I had to give physical portraits, convey personalities and make us say things.  The truth had to be the first priority, but the truth can be messy.  These portraits had to be shaped so readers could make sense of who I was talking about.  I think human character is, in the end, more complex than any literary character.  Picturing human beings in their ordinary rawness is very difficult.  A reader needs a writer to give their literary characters more specific shape and continuity than most of us usually have—features that allow a reader to recognize a person from one page to the next.  In memoirs and biographies, those shapes and continuities have to be made from real materials—the habits and speech styles and surprising ticks of real human beings.  So my family members and me ended up appearing in the book in more definitive shape than we actually had.  Still, these descriptions adhered to the truth of my memory as much as I could make them.

Writing Fighter Pilot’s Daughter gave me a chance to air the ragged feelings still running in my brain and heart from those days long ago.  Some of these feelings had to do with the work my father did.   As a teenager, I had a hard time understanding how I felt or should feel about the things he did as a warrior.  When I went away to college, I drifted from my parents and made friends with people in left political groups and the anti-Vietnam War movement.  In Paris, in May of 1968, I participated in demonstrations against, among other things, the war my father was fighting At the time, he was posted outside Saigon.  When I saw him again, the tension between us was almost too much.  We had heated arguments, and then for a long we didn’t speak.  Much later my parents and I got to be very close, and I’m deeply grateful for that.  Being retired from military life, Dad had changed dramatically.

I wanted to write about all this so I could sort out those powerful emotions that were still with me.  I hope Fighter Pilot’s Daughter strikes a chord with other military kids.  And I hope it gives readers in general a better understanding of what military kids go through.  When I tell people I grew up in an Army family, they often say Was it like “The Great Santini”?  It’s surprising how often people ask that.  The answer is no.  Santini was an abusive father, and while many soldier fathers are professionally familiar with violence, they don’t necessarily bring it home with them.  Pat Conroy, author of The Great Santini tells a great story, but as he says himself it’s his story, not a representative account of military family life.  His book is is one of the few that features a Marine Corps pilot, his wife and children as the central characters, so it often gets taken as a model of  military family life.

I hope readers of Fighter Pilot’s Daughter see that there are other ways of describing domestic life for service families.  Many of the biggest difficulties for spouses and children are built into the structures of everyday life in military environments.  I hope readers take from my book a sense of how complicated it is to maintain a healthy, optimistic family life when you’re  having to move all the time and when a parent has to spend long months away from home on deployments.  For all the good or ill the armed services might do for America, they can bear down hard on the lives of soldiers’ wives as kids.  And they can make make their lives wildly interesting, as I hope Fighter Pilot’s Daughter shows.

 __________  

Mary Lawlor is author of a memoir, Fighter Pilot’s Daughter: Growing Up in the Sixties and the Cold War (Bloomsbury 2015) and two books of cultural criticism, Recalling the Wild: Naturalism and the Closing of the American West (Rutgers UP 2000) and Public Native America (Rutgers UP 2006). She studied at the American University in Paris, the University of Maryland, and New York University. She divides her time between Easton, Pennsylvania and Gaucin, Spain. Her novel, The Translators, is set in 12th century Spain and fictionalizes the experiences of Robert of Ketton, first translator of the Koran into Latin. She hopes to see it out next year. In the meantime, she has started a second novel, The Women’s Hospital, set in 18th century Spain and inspired by the life story of an Irish woman whose family moved to Cádiz, escaping English oppression in their own country.

╰┈➤ You can visit her website at https://www.marylawlor.net/.

Connect with her on social media at:

╰┈➤ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mary.lawlor.186/ 

Straight From the Mouth of Memoirist Mary Lawlor

  

 Remembering the 60s and the Cold War for Fighter Pilot's Daughter 

By Mary Lawlor

Fighter Pilot’s Daughter was one of the most difficult projects I’ve ever undertaken. It was also probably the most important thing I’ve ever done for myself. Putting the book together was like a process of self-therapy: it had a powerful stabilizing effect that stays with me now. Part of this came with the clear account the research and the writing made of my family’s zigzagging past.

Like most military families, we moved a lot (fourteen times before I graduated from high school). And like other Army fathers, my Dad was away often. My mother and sisters and I would worry about his safety, especially when he was flying in war zones. He would write my mother fairly regularly for a while, then his communications would dwindle off under the weight of more pressing matters close at hand. This would leave us wondering how he was, and I often had nightmares of him being captured, imprisoned…

In spite of the fact that we missed him fiercely, Dad’s homecomings weren’t as easy as we expected them to be. Familiar as he was, his tall frame in the doorway and his blaring blue eyes with that far-away look were strange and frightening. After a while, we’d get used to him; but I wonder how long it would take him to get used to being home. He’d been in such a different, all-male world where violence reigned. At home, there were only women. My mother and sisters and I knew little about what he’d been through, not just because we were too young to know but because a lot of what he’d been up to was secret.

We never talked about any of this, so our house was a tense, uneasy place when Dad came home. Indigenous people in many parts of the world have rituals for bringing warriors home—practices aimed at diminishing the potency of trauma and other effects of prolonged exposure to violence. I guess we’re starting to see something like this in the debriefings and psychological attention given to soldiers and marines returning from war. But in the sixties there wasn’t anything like it. Dads just came home, still warriors, and now being asked not to be.

The story of Fighter Pilot’s Daughter had to have a plot—not just the order of our moves but the dramas that accompanied them. It was difficult enough getting all my father’s military records so I could see the the crazy chain of our moves from one place to another. It was even harder to go back into memories that reawakened painful feelings of confusion and anxiety that came with being new all the time. All those scenes where I was a stranger and everybody else belonged still stung.

Making a story out my family life meant describing my parents, sisters, and myself as if we were characters. I had to give physical portraits, convey personalities and make us say things. The truth had to be the first priority, but the truth can be messy. These portraits had to be shaped so readers could make sense of who I was talking about. I think human character is, in the end, more complex than any literary character. Picturing human beings in their ordinary rawness is very difficult. A reader needs a writer to give their literary characters more specific shape and continuity than most of us usually have—features that allow a reader to recognize a person from one page to the next. In memoirs and biographies, those shapes and continuities have to be made from real materials—the habits and speech styles and surprising ticks of real human beings. So my family members and me ended up appearing in the book in more definitive shape than we actually had. Still, these descriptions adhered to the truth of my memory as much as I could make them.

Writing Fighter Pilot’s Daughter gave me a chance to air the ragged feelings still running in my brain and heart from those days long ago. Some of these feelings had to do with the work my father did. As a teenager, I had a hard time understanding how I felt or should feel about the things he did as a warrior. When I went away to college, I drifted from my parents and made friends with people in left political groups and the anti-Vietnam War movement. In Paris, in May of 1968, I participated in demonstrations against, among other things, the war my father was fighting At the time, he was posted outside Saigon. When I saw him again, the tension between us was almost too much. We had heated arguments, and then for a long we didn’t speak. Much later my parents and I got to be very close, and I’m deeply grateful for that. Being retired from military life, Dad had changed dramatically.

I wanted to write about all this so I could sort out those powerful emotions that were still with me. I hope Fighter Pilot’s Daughter strikes a chord with other military kids. And I hope it gives readers in general a better understanding of what military kids go through. When I tell people I grew up in an Army family, they often say Was it like “The Great Santini”? It’s surprising how often people ask that. The answer is no. Santini was an abusive father, and while many soldier fathers are professionally familiar with violence, they don’t necessarily bring it home with them. Pat Conroy, author of The Great Santini tells a great story, but as he says himself it’s his story, not a representative account of military family life. His book is is one of the few that features a Marine Corps pilot, his wife and children as the central characters, so it often gets taken as a model of military family life.

I hope readers of Fighter Pilot’s Daughter see that there are other ways of describing domestic life for service families. Many of the biggest difficulties for spouses and children are built into the structures of everyday life in military environments. I hope readers take from my book a sense of how complicated it is to maintain a healthy, optimistic family life when you’re having to move all the time and when a parent has to spend long months away from home on deployments. For all the good or ill the armed services might do for America, they can bear down hard on the lives of soldiers’ wives as kids. And they can make make their lives wildly interesting, as I hope Fighter Pilot’s Daughter shows.

_____________________

Mary Lawlor is author of Fighter Pilot’s Daughter (Rowman & Littlefield 2013, paper 2015), Public Native America (Rutgers Univ. Press 2006), and Recalling the Wild (Rutgers Univ. Press, 2000). Her short stories and essays have appeared in Big Bridge and Politics/Letters. She studied the American University in Paris and earned a Ph.D. from New York University. She divides her time between an old farmhouse in Easton, Pennsylvania, and a cabin in the mountains of southern Spain.

You can visit her website at https://www.marylawlor.net/ or connect with her on Twitter or Facebook.

Straight From the Mouth of Memoirist Terese Luikens

 

The Inspiration Behind A Heart's Journey to Forgiveness

By Terese Luikens

The Inspiration Behind A Heart's Journey to Forgiveness

I was thirteen when my father ended his life by suicide. Back in the 1970s, suicide was not a topic families openly talked about and for that reason, my mother’s explanation to me about my father’s death went like this;

“Your father is dead.”

“How?”

“His heart just stopped.”

Her explanation for his death left me with a load of suspicion and finding out the truth became paramount to me. As the sixth of seven kids, I knew from experience that the older siblings always knew more than me. But, if I asked an older sister for the truth, I knew she would tell me. Indeed she did, yet her honesty left me reeling in confusion. 

Even though my siblings and I shared the same tragedy, we did not share our grief. We didn’t know how to comfort each other, let alone talk about a topic no one else wanted to talk about. 

None of the adults in our lives came to our aid. No one showed or told us that it was okay to be sad, that confusion was normal and that we might even feel angry.  In essence, we were left to ourselves to sort through our emotions and find our own way to survive. 

After I married and became a mom it seemed like the right time to begin understanding the grief I’d never understood, to face what I’d only tried to ignore and to put some order to the chaos in my mind. 

As a result, I began journaling and talking with a few trusted friends. Over the years, I began to understand some of the events that led to my father’s death by suicide, my mother’s silence and my inability to grieve.  

Finally, I gained enough courage to join a writer’s group and began sharing my story in small bits and pieces. With their encouragement, I finally wrote the whole story and with their help polished it and sent if off to Redemption Press. 

Redemption Press is a publishing company that offers independent publishing services with the project management style of a traditional publisher.

 

_____________________

 

 

Terese Luikens has been married for forty-four years to the same man, although she is on her third wedding ring, having lost one and worn out another. She lives in Sandpoint, Idaho, enjoys being mother to three grown sons and grandmother to her much-loved grandchildren. She is the author of A Heart’s Journey to Forgiveness, a Memoir of her inspiring journey of emotional healing from her father’s suicide. She facilitates retreats and workshops focusing on forgiveness, and publishes her own blog, Why Bother? 

You can visit her website at www.tereseluikens.com.

 

 

Straight From the Mouth of Keith Sykes

 

 

 10 Things You Might Not Know About Keith Sykes

By Keith Sykes

1. I am the youngest of 8. 

2. I served 20 years in the United States Army.

3. I lived for a year in Sinai, Egypt.

4. I am a cancer survivor. 

5. I swam with sharks on the great barrier reef in Belize.

6. I lost my father at the age of 11.

7. I lost my mother at the age of 20. 

8. I have been cancer-free since February 2022. 

9. I love nature and the outdoors.

10. I have a passion for photography.

 _____________________

 

Keith Sykes grew up in New Orleans, Louisiana with his 7 siblings; he is the youngest of 8. Keith attended Xavier University of Louisiana where he studied Computer Information Systems and Graphic Design. He lost both parents by the age of 20 and joined the United States Army in 1990 where he completed 20 years of active military service. He continues to serve as a Department of Defense civilian where he works as a Health Systems Specialist at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. He is a freelance writer, photographer and event planner and is heavily involved in the community. Keith is a cancer survivor as of February 2022 and attributes his positive attitude in dealing with the condition to his mother Violet who succumbed to cancer in January 1990. He loves exploring nature and traveling. Some of his most memorable trips have been to Egypt, Belize, and Cuba.

You can visit his website at https://kasykes.com/ or connect with him at Facebook at www.facebook.com/ikreate4u.

Purchase Information for Being Present

https://amzn.to/3jWFLpw

Straight from the Mouth of Memoirist Marilea C. Rabasa

Putting pen to paper is a journey that leads many of us to unexpected levels of self-discovery, full of delights, surprises, and sometimes, dismay. Often I feel confused or I want answers to a particular problem that is getting in my way. And when I write about it, the mud often sinks to the bottom and I can see things more clearly. Writing becomes a clarification process.

Sometimes I start a piece, and by the time I’ve finished it, I’ve answered some questions. And oftentimes I change my mind about some preconceived notions I had been unsure about. Writing down my thoughts is a way to shine a light on things that had been hidden—things that perhaps, upon writing about it, become ready to see the daylight.

In Lillian Hellman’s wonderful collection of remembrances she wrote in 1973, Pentimento, she points out how artists sometimes paint over what they had painted before. They changed their minds; they “repented.” It’s sort of like, as she said when she described the term “pentimento,” so too in literature, she adds, “my old conception, replaced by a later choice, is a way of seeing, and then seeing again.

Many times I’ve written stories that ended up nowhere I had intended. I thought I wanted to write about one thing, but ended up writing about something else. Sometimes another story is unearthed in the process. It’s a real excavation process, as we mine our depths often coming out so much richer in self-knowledge than we were in the beginning.

About the Author

Marilea C. Rabasa is a retired high school teacher who moved west from Virginia eleven years ago. Before that, she traveled around the world with her former husband in the Foreign Service. She has been published in a variety of publications. Writing as Maggie C. Romero, Rabasa won the International Book Award, was named a finalist in both the New Mexico-Arizona Book Awards and the USA Best Book Awards, and earned an honorable mention in The Great Southwest Book Festival, for her 2014 release, A Mother’s Story: Angie Doesn’t Live Here Anymore.  She lived in Albuquerque, New Mexico, for a number of years and now resides in Camano Island, Washington. Visit her online at:  www.recoveryofthespirit.com 

About the Book

Addiction is a stealth predator. Unrecognized, it will grow and flourish. Unchecked, it destroys.

Marilea grew up in post-WWII Massachusetts in a family that lived comfortably and offered her every advantage. But there were closely guarded family secrets. Alcoholism reached back through several generations, and it was not openly discussed. Shame and stigma perpetuated the silence. Marilea became part of this ongoing tragedy.

Her story opens with the death of her mother. Though not an alcoholic, it is her inability to cope with the dysfunction in her life that sets her daughter up for a multitude of problems.

We follow Marilea from an unhappy childhood, to her life overseas in the diplomatic service, to now, living on an island in Puget Sound. What happens in the intervening years is a compelling tale of travel, motherhood, addiction, and heartbreaking loss. The constant thread throughout this story is the many faces and forms of addiction, stalking her like an obsessed lover, and with similar rewards. What, if anything, will free her of the masks she has worn all her life?

Read Marilea’s inspiring recovery story and learn how she wrestles with the demons that have plagued her.

Find out more HERE. 

Straight from the Mouth of Brooks Eason, Author of 'Fortunate Son - the Story of Baby Boy Francis'

Brooks Eason loves stories, reading and writing them, hearing and telling them. He also loves music, dogs, and campfires as well as his family and friends. His latest book is Fortunate Son - the Story of Baby Boy Francis.

Brooks has practiced law in Jackson, Mississippi, for more than 35 years but has resolved to trade in writing briefs for writing books. He lives with his wife Carrie and their two elderly rescue dogs, Buster and Maddie, and an adopted stray cat they named Count Rostov for the central character in A Gentleman in Moscow, the novel by Amor Towles. In their spare time, Brooks and Carrie host house concerts, grow tomatoes, and dance in the kitchen. Brooks, who has three children and four grandchildren, is also the author of Travels with Bobby - Hiking in the Mountains of the American West about hiking trips with his best friend. Visit Brooks online at www.brookseason.com. WordCrafts Press is an independent publishing company headquartered in Nashville, Tennessee. Visit WordCrafts online at www.wordcrafts.net.

Questionnaire:

Thanks for letting us interrogate you!  Can you give us a go-for-the-gut answer as to why you wanted to be an author?

I love books and writing and wanted to see if I could write one. I also thought it would be way cool to have my name on a book and to have people tell me they liked what I wrote. I was right. 

Tell us (we won’t tell promise!) is it all it’s cracked up to be?  I mean what are the perks and what are the demands?

There are perks? Nobody told me about the perks. But there are two: the satisfaction of knowing I’ve done my best and the response of people who appreciate my work. Plus people think it’s cool when they find out I’m an author. The biggest demand has been finding time to write while I had a full-time day job. But that’s not a demand anymore. I have only a part-time job now, and soon I’ll retire and won’t have any job at all. I also won’t have any excuse.

Which route did you take – traditional or self-published – and can you give us the nitty gritty low down on what’s that like?

I self-published my first book because I was too impatient to wait until I could get a publishing deal. It was a good experience, but I found there were limitations, including the fact that it’s hard to get a review of a self-published book published. I chose a small, independent publisher this time, WordCrafts Press in Nashville, and I’ve been very pleased. The financial arrangement is better, and I’ve gotten more assistance.

Tell us for real what your family feels about you spending so much time getting your book written, polished, edited, formatted, published, what have you?

My wife Carrie and I are empty-nesters, so it’s just her. She hasn’t complained so far and has been very supportive. She even typed part of the manuscript. I’m a two-finger typist, which is a problem when you’re writing a book that’s nearly 80,000 words long. I would ask her how she feels about the whole thing, but she’s out running errands.

Do your pets actually get their food on time or do they have to wait until you type just one more word?

Our pets get everything they want and they get it when they want it because Carrie gives it to them. She makes eggs and bacon for the dogs on weekends. She even puts cheese in the eggs.

Are your plants actually still alive?

The plants are fine because Carrie waters them. I’ve bestowed a title on her: World’s Best Wife. We met on eHarmony nearly ten years ago. I highly recommend eHarmony or a similar service. It’s low risk and potentially life-changing reward. I guess I changed the subject, didn't I?

In writing your book, how did you deal with the phone ringing, your family needing dinner or your boss calling you saying you’re late?

I don’t have a boss and Carrie nearly always cooks dinner, so there’s just the phone, and I don’t think it was much of a problem. It’s easy to crank back up after interruptions because I can see the last thing I wrote, though occasionally I send myself emails with ideas and read them later and can’t figure out what I meant.

What was the craziest or insane thing that happened to you in the book publishing process?

Nothing crazy or insane has happened yet. I decided a small, independent publisher made sense. Another author recommended WordCrafts, I completed the submission, Mike Parker, who’s the head guy, emailed me the next day and said he would love to publish my book, and we signed a contract the day after that. Not typical, I know. I hope some other author who’s had a difficult time doesn’t read this and burn our house down. If he's tempted, I hope he thinks twice because of Carrie, our dogs, and our crazy cat named Count Rostov.

How about the social networks?  Which ones do you believe help and which ones do you wish you could avoid?

I do Facebook only. My posts about the book seem to have generated a lot of interest. We’ll see. I'm told I should do Instagram and I may.

Book sales.  Don’t you just love them (or lack of?)?  How are you making the sales happen for you?

My book is just now being released and I’m just getting started, but I’ll do a number of readings/signings. They’re fun even if they’re not lucrative. I’ve been invited to do an event at an Irish pub in the Bronx. Going from MS to NY will be a big loser money-wise even if I sell a whole lot of books, but I’ve never been to an Irish pub in the Bronx. I think I’m gonna go for it.

What is one thing you’d like to jump on the rooftop and scream about?

I’ll stick to writing in this answer so as not to offend anybody and will say bad grammar. I'm ok with offending people who use bad grammar. I’m a purist, a grammar nerd, a nerd's nerd, and bad writing and grammar drive me up the wall. I read briefs drafted by young lawyers, and I wonder how they got through high school, much less college and law school. They can't even get their subjects and their verbs to agree.

Okay, too much sugar for you today!  Here’s a nice cup of Chamomile tea and come on over and sit under the cabana and watch the waves roll in.  Now…can you tell us what you love about being a published author and how all those things above doesn’t matter because it’s all part of the whole scheme of things and you wouldn’t have it any other way?

After you’ve sweated and fretted over choosing just the right word, whether to set off a phrase with commas or dashes, how to end a chapter, and thousands of other decisions you have to make, and after you've completed a draft and then revised it, revised it again, then revised it one more time, and then decided to revise it one last time, but it wasn’t the last time because you thought you could make it just a little bit better by going through it yet again, after you’ve done all that and you finally see the final product and what started out as just an idea is now a book, and it’s your book, and it's got a cover with your name on it and everything, and people actually want to read it, well, there’s nothing cooler than that.

Straight from the Mouth of Nonfiction Author Robert Wideman

"Publishing is a Nightmare" 

         Six years ago I decided I wanted to write a book about my experience in North Vietnam as a Prisoner of War. I did this because I wanted something on paper for my two sons and six grandchildren. Four years later I had only written 100 pages. At 71 years of age, I realized I might not live long enough to finish my book. I decided I needed help in writing and publishing a book, so I contacted Graham Communications in Denver, Colorado. Mark Graham introduced me to Cara Lopez Lee. Cara finished my book in two years and did a great job.

         Now it was time to create and publish my book. Colin Graham at Graham Publishing Group published my book. He designed the front and back covers as well as the interior for the paperback and kindle editions. He did a very nice job as well.

Then it came time to distribute my book. We started with IngramSpark. What a disaster? Amazon took 55% of the retail price off the top. The printer (Ingramspark?)  then charged $6.44 for each copy. That left me 74 cents per book as profit. That was a 5% profit for each book. I thought that was outrageous, because you typically receive a10% profit from traditional publishers. The whole idea of self-publishing is to make more than the 10% received from traditional publishers.

         When I started this journey friends told me that they went to traditional publishers but did not make any money. They self published and did much better. Mark Graham said if I went to a traditional publisher they would ask me for a marketing plan. I would respond, “Yes, where is my marketing plan. You guys get 90% of the profit.” They will then say, “You don’t understand. Where is your marketing plan?” Someone told me that a marketing plane would cost $30,000. Mark said that it will cost $5.00 to print each book, and I can sell each book for $15.00. That is true if you buy the books at wholesale and then sell them on your own. However, if you go thru Amazon or Barnes and Noble, they get 55% off the top and that takes your profit. Kindle is better. With Kindle, I receive 60% of the retail price.

         I replaced Ingramspark with Createspace, and now I receive $4.25 for each book sold on Amazon. Createspce only deals with Amazon, however, so I had to keep IngrahamSpark for Barnes and Noble and all the other retail outlets.

         I learned that the publishing industry is designed for the benefit of printers, distributors, and book publishers. The publishing business is definitely not set up for the benefit of authors.

 ////////////////////////////////////////////

 Title: UNEXPECTED PRISONER: Memoir of a Vietnam Prisoner of War

Genre: Memoir

Author: Robert Wideman

Website: www.robertwideman.com        

Publisher: Graham Publishing Group

Find on Amazon

About the Book:  

When Unexpected Prisoner opens, it’s May 6, 1967 and 23-year-old Lieutenant Robert Wideman is flying a Navy A-4 Skyhawk over Vietnam.  At 23, Wideman had already served three and a half years in the Navy—and was only 27 combat days away from heading home to America. But on that cloudless day in May, on a routine bombing run, Wideman’s plane crashed and he fell into enemy hands. Captured and held for six years as a Prisoner of War in Vietnam, Wideman endured the kind of pain that makes people question humanity.  Physical torture, however, was not the biggest challenge he was forced to withstand.  In his candid memoir, Unexpected Prisoner, Wideman details the raw, unvarnished tale of how he came to understand the truth behind Jean-Paul Sartre’s words: “Hell is other people.”

A gripping, first-person account that chronicles the six-year period Wideman spent in captivity as a POW, Unexpected Prisoner plunges readers deep into the heart of one of the most protracted, deadliest conflicts in American history:  the Vietnam War. Wideman, along with acclaimed memoirist Cara Lopez Lee, has crafted a story that is exquisitely engaging, richly detailed, and wholly captivating.  Unexpectedly candid and vibrantly vivid, this moving memoir chronicles a POW’s struggle with enemies and comrades, Vietnamese interrogators and American commanders, lost dreams, and ultimately, himself.

With its eye-opening look at a soldier’s life before, during and after captivity, Unexpected Prisoner presents a uniquely human perspective on war and on conflicts both external and internal. An exceptional story exceptionally well-told, Unexpected Prisoner is a powerful, poignant, often provocative tale about struggle, survival, hope, and redemption.

About the Author:  

Robert Wideman was born in Montreal, grew up in East Aurora, New York, and has dual U.S./Canadian citizenship. During the Vietnam War, he flew 134 missions for the U.S. Navy and spent six years as a prisoner of war. Wideman earned a master’s degree in finance from the Naval Postgraduate School. After retiring from the Navy, he graduated from the University of Florida College of Law, practiced law in Florida and Mississippi, and became a flight instructor. Robert Wideman holds a commercial pilot’s license with an instrument rating, belongs to Veterans Plaza of Northern Colorado, and lives in Ft. Collins near his two sons and six grandchildren.

Connect with the author on the web: Facebook / Twitter / LinkedIn