The Grace of a Summer's Day

The Grace of a Summer’s Day is a rites-of-passage, coming of age novel, at once funny, romantic, adventuresome, and gripping.  It tells the story of Teague Rover who, between his junior and senior year in college, finds summer employment as, first, a swimming pool lifeguard and then, to his surprise, the student minister of a small Baptist mission in a poor rural neighborhood.  He is pulled in one direction by the sensuous world of scantily clad female flesh at the pool and in the other by his sincere, albeit bumbling, attempts to serve the spiritual needs of his humble congregation.  He also finds himself repeatedly in difficult, hilarious, awkward, and ridiculous situations until finally he must escape the dangerous threats at the pool of an irate truck driver husband and a tyrannical professional wrestler father, both of whom seek revenge on him by doing him serious harm, and from, at church, his embarrassment dismissal by the self-appointed leader of the congregation.  All this is compounded by his troubles with the law.  He finally falls into the protective hands of Dusty who wisely guides him out of his troubles and into a new level of awareness and relationships.

Tony Stafford was born in Belmont, North Carolina.  He received a BA from Wake Forest University with a major in Philosophy with minors in English and Latin, an MA from the University of Texas at El Paso in English with a thesis on the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, and a PhD in English from Louisiana State University with a dissertation on Shakespeare.  He has published numerous scholarly articles on Shakespeare, Renaissance Poems, and modern British and American playwrights such as Shaw and Mamet.  He has also read numerous plays produced from Los Angeles to Denver, Houston, and Washington, D.C., among others.