As a gentle rain from heaven brings forth the ghost-like Indian Pipe in clumps and individual stems from the decayed organic material of the forest floor, so too, does John Sherman bring forth from memory, words, and the lifeless, dry paper fragments of his basement, the vivid green of his working life, its groups, and individuals, as they react with Sherman's youth, his upbringing, and his own romance of illusions. Work -- A Memoir is a story spanning a thirty-four year odyssey of one man's journey into and within the most successful business enterprise the world had, at the time, ever...

A Love Affair With Flowers Fair is a book of 365 poems, mostly sonnets, culled from over 500 poems, and organized by assigning each to an appropriate day of the year. Organized in monthly groups, readers will recognize natural themes -- such as wildflowers, the seasons, plants, and birds -- within the month appropriate to their inspiration and genesis. The forest and shores of Lake Michigan, and Bass Lake, north of Pentwater, Michigan, together with the nine mile path along Lake Michigan between Hyde Park and Chicago's downtown, are the locales. The words of one early reader who expressed...

The inspiration to write "Black friends" came to me while auditing Professor Julie Saville's class: History 28201: 'The U. S. Civil War and Reconstruction, 1846-1898, ' taught at the University of Chicago during the winter quarter of 2011. To be sure, I was aware of the 2011 sesquicentennial marking the beginning of the Civil War, and I have since been further motivated by reading Salman Rusdie's non-fiction piece 'The New Empire within Britain' from his book of essays and criticism "Imaginary Homelands," but "Black Friends" was completed long before I began reading Rushdie. As I read the...

'Dawn' is a philosophical narrative exploring multiple meanings of the word as those meanings are set against case studies of life experiences together with philosophical views, the latter ranging from Aristotle and Montaigne through Kierkegaard, Kant, Nicholas Berdyaev, Gabriel Marcel, James Conant, and John McDowell. While the dawning of a new day begins the odyssey and is never completely absent, the dawn as a metaphor for 'upbringing' and its effects over time becomes even more central as that tale progresses toward Aristotle's and John McDowell's integration of 'upbringing' in their...

Western Michigan Tales of Mystery and Adventure is a collection of ten stories geographically set in Western Michigan along the Lake Michigan shoreline between Pentwater and Ludington, Michigan. Using history and the further plot elements of love, treasure, gold, silver, jewels, and both 19th and 20th century settings, many take place at Bass Lake, Pentwater, Michigan.

Forms of Life narrates a journey that ranges from early 2,000 B. C. E. to the mid-fifties C. E. to Renaissance and modern Florence, Italy, nineteenth and twentieth century Michigan, and on to modern times. To span those times and locations, three interwoven story-threads alternate back and forth across time, resulting in a braided strand which amounts to a collective intellectual quest or odyssey by virtue of entering the worlds of philosophy, history, biography, anthropology, religion, politics, cultural studies, mythology, poetry, cosmogony, and other fields. The resulting moasic within...

Follow the adventures of the author and his fictional pseudonym, John Sherman, as they encounter the perils of Grammar School, High School, Princeton University, the United States Navy, and many other future environments ranging from Michigan, Illinois, California, France, the Mediterranean, Africa, and the High Seas. Through prose, poetry, plays, essays, dialogues, letters, a journal, monologues, orders, and fictional excerpts, those times are brought to life once again as the inner thoughts, reflections, humorous incidents, absurdities, and challenges of life are explored; all this while...

There is no greater joy than listening to your friends of many years as they bring these fourteen bundles of words to life for a laughing audience of their fellow play readers. The goal of this collection is to extend those feelings beyond the Midway Play Readers of Hyde Park, a group formed in 1946 But focusing once more on these concentrated literary efforts have provided a further, more intimate, emotion that is way out of proportion to their size. This aspect is captured by Vladimir Nabokov in a short essay he wrote, "On A Book Entitled Lolita," in November 1956. The preparation of this...