In August of 2023 my dear friend Nina Wolpe and I became published authors of our jointly written book, Two Faces, a story of two ten-year olds, one a white girl, the other a Japanese boy. It tells of two friends who encounter a world of hurt following the bombing of Pearl Harbor by Japanese naval forces. The girl stands up for and defends her friend as he deals with racial prejudice. When his family is forcibly evacuated to a concentration camp in Colorado because they look like the enemy, they stay in touch through letters written back and forth. Their families undergo very different life experiences, but they learn from each other’s struggles and their relationship deepens for it.

Two Faces was published by Mission Point Press out of Traverse City, Michigan under the editorship of Anne Gertiser Stanton. After completing the writing of Two Faces, I then turned to another writing effort that involves a review some forty-one short stories I had written nearly fifty years ago when I was working for a social service agency in the San Francisco Bay Area.

At the time I came under severe stress as the result of abusive treatment by several supervisory staff, treatment they perpetrated with all staff, so I wasn’t alone in this mistreatment. In the writing of these stories I found a soothing remedy to the stress I was under. I gave myself the task of writing a short story, 3-4 pages in length with a beginning, a middle, and an ending. My themes generally involved some evil characters who were met by a protagonist who with an assistant of some magical powers defends against and pummels and batters the evildoers to my personal benefit and inner healing. The writing served as a non-chemical treatment of a stressful emotional situation for me.

My current writing project is an anthology of twenty-four of the original forty-one stories that I’ve set in two sections of twelve stories each. My working title for this effort is “Meanderings of a Bent Mind: Journeys of an Introvert.”

These stories have a variety of themes and prominent characters, with very different story-telling styles. Some are stories of a fantastical nature with speaking animals, while others are action adventures; some have themes of conflicts needing resolution, while others are what I think of as time-slips where unlikely events separated by time and space occur in tandem. All stretch the imagination in various ways, some with endings that stretch credibility, and this is part of what I hope gives them their charm. I am now in the midst of working with editors at Mission Point Press with developmental and promotional target dates in the next six months, with sights on a publication date in November of 2025.