Speaking From the Heart

White Tree Shining

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         In 1976 I wrote my first full length novel about the American West from the Native American point of view about a spiritually and physically wounded gun hawk seeking revenge and a young Indian man tricked into leaving his family and home by a corrupt Medicine Man, Raven, in the hopes of destroying him, but who finds instead a life unlike anything he would have known in his sickness decimated but proud tribe. I carried the manuscript with me in the trunk of my car until it was vandalized and lost when I first arrived in Spokane in 1996. The closest I could bring myself to rewriting the deeply personal story was to include bits of it that I remembered when I wrote "Shoshone`, The Story of Grace" with the promise that 'some day' I would find the courage to rewrite the story that's lived inside me since.

        I have just completed "September Strawberries" and "Spring Rayne" and missed the freedom and the people I met in the books, and as I woke at 3 an this morning, the 30th of January, 2009, I realized the two stories, Paul McWhorter's Western Life Books  and Stand's Alone, were impossibly different-and impossible not to tell both of them. So...Here goes....