Some of you probably noticed that I missed my regular deadline last Monday. To those who did notice, and to all readers of this blog, I apologize.
This book is a very big deal for me for
several reasons. First of all, after a forty-six-year career in which I have
earned my living exclusively from the written word—as a journalist, editor,
researcher, translator and ghostwriter (creating numerous works that bear other
writers’ names)—this is my very first published book under my own by-line.
It won’t be my last. I am enjoying finally
being at a stage in life in which I’m no longer bound by the future and can do
as I wish until my shadow sets me free. What I want—what I’ve always wanted—is to
write books. And that’s precisely what I plan to do for as long as I’m around.
Second, this book tells the story of
someone who is surely among the most unique and interesting figures ever to inhabit
my home town, Wapakoneta, Ohio. This is not his biography, although anyone
reading it will learn a great deal about his life and work, but rather, it is a
memoir of how I came to know him and my personal impressions of his highly
creative life and his clearly humanitarian qualities. But it is also a portrait
of an eccentric, a curmudgeon, a man who is as private as he is sociable, an
artist whose life’s work (quite apart from his writing, because he is also a
colleague of mine) has been his singular masterpiece.
And third, it also recounts the friendship
that he and I share and a few adventures that we’ve shared as well. As a bonus,
The Rock Garden additionally includes Jim’s revealing research regarding
an officially unsolved murder mystery from our mutual hometown’s past, which
has intrigued several generations of Wapakoneta history buffs.
More specifically, The Rock Garden is an anthology of non-fiction stories about Jim Bowsher and his extraordinary rock garden, the centerpiece of which is the Temple of Tolerance. This book also describes Jim's stunningly eccentric home, a veritable museum of eclectic objects and artifacts, with the connecting thread linking them all being that there is an amazing story behind each and every one.
The Rock Garden
reads like a series of compelling short stories, all of which paint a portrait
of a unique and captivating man and of the strange and haunting world that he
has built around him in small-town Ohio.
The cover art and some of the interior
pictures are the work of local photographer and artist Mary Jo Knoch. Mary Jo
is enormously talented. Some of her photographic subjects include people, rural
settings, nature and unusual scenes and places. She is a life-long resident of
rural Ohio, and, indeed, of Auglaize County, of which Wapakoneta is the county
seat,
The book, for the moment, is being
distributed exclusively through the Amazon Bookstore site and is being sold in
both print and e-book format. The links for both are:
https://www.amazon.com/Rock-Garden-Other-Stories/dp/B09M516KF1/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=
My thanks as always for reading and following
me. I’m really anxious to get your feedback.
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