Spirit Falls/Ledokhod: Russian-English Duo-Language (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781515283959)

Townsend comes from a long line--father, grandfathers and great-grandfathers--of American and pre-American soldiers. Slavic on his mother's, deep-south redneck on the father's side, his parents managed money poorly and told stories well. Spare, pithy, lasting the duration of a Pall Mall cigarette, the tales were to entertain while teaching. No one is completely useless, he was told. He can always serve as a bad example. He learned this lesson--storytellers are treasured, liars are vexing and both are so often one and the same. The craft is shared; only the objectives differ. His stories and novels arise from family history, fables and stories told around the kitchen table as well as his own experiences in America's late 20th century ambiguous wars, deceptions and counter-deceptions. By background and training, he his well qualified to narrate this tale. Big-hearted and big-mouthed Slavic visitors at his family's isolated 1950s Wisconsin farmhouse taught storytelling and deception. They told big stories about their new Cadillac, Depression-era poverty, and ungrateful children. Now and then they hinted at that which they escaped--starvation, massacre, war, genocide--tragedies impressed upon a child's mind by a momentary silence, a shake of the head, a wife's anxious glance. It was not just the WWII veteran who lacked words to articulate unspeakable horror. They seemed fairy tales on a land where disasters were more immediate--a July storm levels the oat field, a lightening strike kills half the milking cows, there is no car to take a girl to the prom. Fluent in Russian and German with a combat vocabulary in French, Townsend is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin (BA and Georgetown University (MA) with a Certifikat from the Freies Universitat Berlin. Since leaving the intelligence business, he has turned his attention to writing stories and essays, an early passion waylaid by life and work. Townsend and his wife, Patrice Naparstek, have lived comfortably most anywhere--Rovinj, Croatia; Dresden, Germany; Dubai, UAE; Boulder, Colorado; Madison, Wisconsin--returning periodically to his family farm in northern Wisconsin to breathe deeply.