Silent Farm (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780989951630)

I have found that the best novels grow out of one's real-life experience. My first novel was about the Vietnamese people that I knew and loved during the war in SE Asia. I'm a native of North Carolina and my second novel is about an artist who lives in a remote village in the NC Mountains. His one desire is to reunite with his estranged daughter who is hiding somewhere in the mountains surrounding their farm. The novel brings out the special bond between fathers and daughters. Being of Scottish ancestry, my third novel was set in the same mountains but was about a woman who was appointed by her family as the medicine woman for the clan - a typical practice in those days for Scottish families who settled the Appalachian Mountains. When one of her patients dies in childbirth, the medicine woman is left to raise the newborn baby boy into manhood in spite of the fact that she knows nothing about raising a child in the remote mountains, and the local sheriff has declared her a witch. My latest book is historical fiction and takes place in Chapel Hill North Carolina. It involves the growth of the communist party between 1946 through 1956, and it illustrates how the smartest and most well-intentioned people are drawn unwittingly into things they could never have imagined.