TULE TOWN

A Memoir Of Hellraising Redemption

(COMING AUG. 15, 2023) Available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or your local bookstore

There are two ways to find Tule Town – a state of mind I entered when I entered the little farm town of Porterville in California’s Central Valley. The hard way is by following your broken heart, as I did at age 30, to a highway exit at Olive Avenue. Go into that restaurant across the street. If the salt and pepper shakers start talking, you’ve arrived.  Or, get lost in the pages of TULE TOWN and let me take you there on a 7-year journey through a world of curiously ordinary characters whose lives would enrich mine —characters like Chuck the poet laureate of outhouses, ol’ Willis who beat sense into him with a fry pan, and fence-post people who stood tall against flood, drought, and tragedy. I met them along the Tule River as he sought mystical trout, chased harrowing news, struggled with religion and alcohol, and found myself.

“A Voice Came Down The Mountain”

(COMING IN 2024)

How do you forget the woman you ran through a minefield to meet? Who was tall and beautiful and brave. Who lived on a volcano in Guatemala and for years stood with her child’s father as they led guerrillas into battle against her father’s army. Or is the better question: How do you remember Ana, who would die by an assassin’s knife, and Pancho, who lived to see their brave revolution melt away. They begged me to tell the world about them before I fled their camp. Thirty-five years later, this is the tale of how their lives – and mine – intertwined on a volcano, and what became of us when we left it behind.

“Afloat in Emerald City”

(COMING IN 2025)

Our family lived for 7 years on a boat in a marina filled with oddly wonderful people – a preacher, a dead man talking, the occasional prostitute, drunks, children, poor old folks, cops, drug users and sellers, dreamers, and a couple of bodies that floated up. It was the best neighborhood we ever had. They helped us build the boat, get married on Angel Island, and raise our kids. We helped them keep their boats and dreams afloat, bury their dead, and navigate a lifestyle that shifted with the tides. As we sailed away for the last time to a house with a dock, some followed in dinghies, trailing off behind as the story finally ended.