A Moment of Sky!: Poetry with Space to Write (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780993337048)

Dementia couldn't have been further from my mind when I arrived in Britain at the backend of the Vietnam War. I worked at a London insane asylum. The dismay I witnessed being with the ladies in tilt-back chairs (described in the Introduction to Freedom from Trauma in Dementia: a caregiving guide), and our struggle to free them, set me on a course of clinical education. Considering my career in the United Kingdom, I see how warm-heartedness strengthens our innate ability to overcome personal calamity and how this influences the narratives each of my three books, not least the poetry writing in book, A Moment of Sky! Poetry with Space to Write. I was born and bred in the Corn Belt of America. Life was rooted in old fashioned rural values like goodwill towards others and the well-being of people who are vulnerable and disadvantaged. During the seminal decades of the Civil Rights and American Indian Movements, I received a Wall Street Journal Scholarship during the Vietnam War years and became a journalist -- which gave rise to writing Freedom from Trauma in America, the novel about a young man struggling with whatever it takes to be a writer when you lose heart in your country. My aim in writing books is to convey how people are able from within themselves to respond thoughtfully, rather than being driven by automatic-pilot-gut-reactions in the midst of distress. After all is said and done, after a doctorate degree, being a professor and head of a British university teaching department and director of a dementia services development centre, I find in publishing my dementia casework, the novel about turmoil in Midwestern America, and the poetry of my time, that there is a calming and reassuring power in writing, and reading, with all the flashes of color, rhythm, scenery, dialogue, and the intense cerebral quality of reverential release from growing irritated by the likes of red lights, traffic jams - delays to perpetual rushing here and there.