...Amid the Chaos

In the spring of 2011, my husband got a new job – a fulltime one with benefits. Yeah! But that meant that he wouldn’t be able to take off for a summer vacation. We had already made plans and it wasn’t until the week before that I cancelled our reservations and sought out something for myself to do that week. Just like the Green LakeChristian Writers Conference, I had known for years that the town just up the road from us held a School of the Arts each summer. This weeklong school offers courses in photography, painting, other visual arts, and writing. I had always thought about attending but it never worked out.

Low and behold the week I was off in July 2011 was the week in which the UW-Madison was hosting the annual School of the Arts in Rhinelander. I gave them a call and signed up for a class in marketing your writing.

There were not one but two other participants from my home town. One of them, Mark Gaedtke, had been writing a weekly column for our paper for years. I think that I knew he was working on compiling those columns into a book, but it wasn’t until that workshop that I really learned much about it.

Needless to say, when Mark’s book came out a few months back, I downloaded it onto my Kindle as soon as I was able. My husband fed my reading fix by buying the paperback version a few weeks later.

“Harold's Boys: Observations,Opinions, and Outright Lies from Amid the Chaos” is a wonderful book. It shares the many adventures and misadventures of growing up in rural America during a time when kids truly were innocent and naive, when kids had lots of siblings and one mom and one dad. I suppose I am biased, as this book is based in the town where I too grew up, but I think that anyone who was a kid during the sixties and seventies could relate to the many stores shared in this book. And it was all good clean fun. 

“Harold’s Boy” is available on line at both Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble .