Returning
Medium has updated a feature so that stories with the potential to earn are able to be added to publications. I’m happy to participate again, to continue to sort stories so that those with relevance to the book Rekindled are in the publication assigned to it, called About Rekindled.
Some claim summer is a season for reading, and that might be true for me if I had stayed in the Phoenix area where heat makes indoor air conditioning a safety measure, not a luxury. However, when traveling, the outdoors, new people and old friends abound and there is little time to read. Somehow I always manage to come home with more books in my “to read” list than I left with. The blog posts from this summer’s trip are and will be published at bookfun.org, in their magazine. July’s article is on page 44. While you may have to sign up to reach it, the magazine is free — and there are giveaways every month. Meantime, I’m finishing Russell F. Weigley’s A Great Civil War.
I found Dr. Weighley’s book on the library shelves of the Shiloh Chenault Bed & Breakfast, and liked it well enough to buy myself one so I could finish it. I’ve never been a civil war student, that was always dad’s job. Living in the Northeast the revolutionary war felt closer, even if was longer ago. Valley Forge, not Gettysburg, called to me. So, I got dad a copy as well — partly for selfish reasons. I’ll be interested in his review. The pages about the Shiloh battles, nearby, were the first part I examined.
When we went to the museum of the Battle of Corinth, other civil war overview books were on the shelves. These books seemed more political, written as modern commentaries using the civil war as h’ordevure. Dr. Weighley is different. He has been interested in getting inside the heads of people on both sides from page one, searching for what they saw and the viewpoint from which they would have seen it.
The opportunity to examine both sides was one aspect that attracted me to the story of Roger Williams and led me to write Rekindled. Roger Williams and his antagonist John Cotton both have original writings readily available, if effort is required to understand the style and what they meant with the words they wrote. Their debate was carried out in letters, essays and books, as they rarely encountered each other face to face.
