Getting Past Point No Point: Nine Short Stories with Meaning

In my mind, real stories have a beginning, a middle and an end. Most importantly, in a real story, something happens that changes the lives of one or more people in the story. A piece may be beautifully written but if it doesn’t have those elements, it’s not really a story, it’s a description of a situation. In this book I have tried to give you real stories.

These stories, and the people in them are all fiction, but there are autobiographical elements in some of them because I’m a firm believer in the idea that we write best what we know to be true emotionally.

“Maybe Love Doesn’t Have To Be Translated” is related to the fact that my wife and I adopted both of our daughters as babies. They were born in the U.S. and our experience of adoption was not so dramatic as this story. I do know how it felt when Kris and I twice stood in an agency office and had a baby carried in the door and presented to us. It was emotional, and it was amazing how quickly each baby girl became our child in every sense of the word.

“If There Are Eagles” reflects my experience during the eight and a half years I served as pastor of Episcopal congregations on the reservation of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe, Sicangu Lakota Oyate, in South Dakota. The Lakota people brought their own spiritual awareness and sensitivity into the church and found ways to express it through the church’s forms of worship and practice. It will, I hope, be a chapter in a novel which is only partially finished.

About “Getting Past Point No Point” I’ll simply say while the story is fiction, I did make such a trip as a drummer in the Seattle Pipe Band in 1951.