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          Descriptive Sentence for IT WAS JUST STORIES…                                    

          This memoir, IT WAS JUST STORIES, AND THEN EVERYTHING CHANGED, is a unique approach written as a collection of forty three short stories, poems, and song lyrics that began as the boy’s early childhood, juggled between tragedy and triumph, alcohol and abuse, makes it into college penniless, springs beyond graduation to embrace and teach on wide, diverse platforms, in a zoo, community centers, a college, jails, on mountain tops,  airports, churches, to the gifted and talented, high school drop-outs, rural adult farmers, at airports, then teaching stained glass classes at night, and will connect universal themes to people that they would want to read about.

In a backwater place, in an almost forgotten time, nestled in obscurity and barely one generation removed from the failures and remembrances of the Civil War, the descendants of that conflict have settled back into the wallows as dirt farmers, many destined to live and repeat the habits and mistakes of their kin.

Re-baptized with the dust and silt of bottom land farming, the Chandler family’s perspective on life is of gazing on a grey horizon. This outlook is temporarily brightened by the birth of a son in 1900, with two more hands to toil the unending labor of their marginally productive land in southern Indiana.

Can that brightness of spirit grow and renew? A simple faith of constant and enduring belief through helping others emerges and binds those farmers together with a common cause to persevere. Thus, begins a journey filled with wins and losses, truth and lies, theft and murder, charity, and redemption.

The West Bluff and surrounding swamps along the Sabine River between Texas and Louisiana have provided a modest but comfortable shelter and satisfactory sustenance for Dick Jackson and his Cajun sweetheart, Penny, in the years just after World War II. But lately, things have not seemed right. Trapping has become dangerous, as a fearful presence has crept its way into this region known as the Big Thicket. Dick has already lost two of his hunting dogs within days of each other under unusual circumstances, and the remaining dogs whine and pull at their chains. Four friends come from Georgia to join in the hunt for whatever it is, and Cajun folkways are employed to ward off this haint. But the challenges seem only to multiply.