Serpents in Eden
by
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Dear Ms. Dubner,
It has been a while. Know you’re busy as ever. Me
too on trying to get this to you in form. It is hard but better than what you
looked at last. I promised you. You’ve been too good to me I dan’t know why.
And excuse this wrting but this typewriter’s piece of crap until I get the IBM.
Ij’m working day and night and some odd jobs too to stay on top. Too tired to
pay attention right now. Sorry.
I still think I can have this completed second?
Draft before year’s end at latest. It will need some help (like my letter) but
i promisedto you that it would be worth the effort. It is the truth and don’t
let them call it fiction! But please bear with me. It’s a story of a lifetime.
Someone will believe it. Things that went on.
This letter isn’t the way I speak or write a story.
Its two in morning a.m. I’m tired. Have to be up early to work. Other stuff
going on I’ll tell you later, when I get a chance, fingers crossed, to submit
again. Ticklish situation and don’t mean funny.
Once again, please forgive errors but I’m out of
time. I’m thanking you advance for your patience and consideration, just a
little more time.
Yours faithfully,
Brendan O. Hamill
p.s. I ran out of white correction ribbon for all
the mistakes. I should’ve rewritten in ink but you are looking for 'substance’
you said, so maybe this will squeek by. I want my son to read this one day. He
might need it. b.h.
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About the Book
A gripping, sometimes stark, in-your-face portrayal, wed to an equally rich tapestry of sight, sound, emotions, compelling dialogue. A landscape peopled by the brave, disaffected, dispossessed, self-satisfied, dissolute and scared, but most of them in search and none escaping their fate in the midst of transformation. A bracing commentary, as well, on racial and social injustice, intolerance, religious and political, the resonance of the ‘60s, the civil-rights movement, partly told by way of an unfolding, riveting narrative in the excerpted words of a ‘7Os manuscript discovered as Adele Dubner, Manhattan literary agent, clears out her office for retirement to her Catskill getaway. And the manuscript's protagonists, a Tennessee family, whose belief in fairness and equality, has caused much grief and loss through generations.
A trip south to find her “long lost” writer and the
ending of his story, and a chance to visit her old Vassar roommate, have Adele
Dubner and Sean Hamill, hot on the trail of answers to the “who” and “why” of
his father/ writer's death nearly three decades ago.
A contemporary tale of redemption partially rendered
and realized through the insidious destruction wrought on individuals and
family by addiction--its toll and claim on soul and society, then and now. In-between these book covers, the past never
£alls away all the way. In fact, it's all the future some may possess.
About the Author
The author, an unwitting, but self-styled “doubter at large” resides in an “ex-barn by a pond” in Tennessee and ponders a “shrinking world spinning just out of reach.” A public education, then a “rich kid’s” prep school in the Rockies, a year at a Quaker college in Indiana, and a “few more places” to get a “piece of paper” that, well, “prepared me for little,” though, admittedly, he was probably was “unpreparable” much of that time. His jobs ranged from “extreme menial to extremely questionable.” He loves music, fishing, and “being near water, watching nature ...nature nature disappear. Thinking too much goes with the territory.” Writing? “If I have to.” Hope, in general? “I hope.” Answers? .'When you quit looking.” Favorite quote: “It's not so much that things are as they are, but that they are at all.” --Wittgenstein Plans? “I wanna go trout fishing again, soon, and travel some while I'm at it”