Thomas Sullivan

Several of my colleagues have written on the specifics of teaching, and I thought I’d address the soul-searching panic that can befall anyone who suddenly finds themselves called upon to give a speech, teach, or advise. Doesn’t matter whether it’s a single person asking you for advice or a trumped-up forum in which the local library has decided you should entertain the patrons at their monthly soiree, the pitfalls are the same. It can come as a shock when you realize that something you’ve done has settled a mantle of presumed wisdom on you – wisdom you don’t have. You may decide to hide, fake laryngitis, or – if you are one of those confident but lonely types – tell your life story…again. If the request comes at you enough times, however, guilt is likely to turn you inside out searching for messages and honest value in your life.

And if you’re kicking around the scene at the pro level, you will face this. The first time you are introduced with shameless adjectives to a friendly audience, you may get a little intoxicated with the attention. But you know, the reality is that YOU are not being adulated and this isn’t perfect justice arriving on Earth for you as you and your mother always knew it would. This is people who are interested in something you represent, and they are willing to give you a hearing. They want to know what you have to say. And you do have something to say. At a minimum, the route you took in your own idiosyncratic life is a path that may offer clues to others. If you have a little pizzazz or can abstract your own “This is what I did” story into abstract components, all the better. And if you can actually start to analyze your audience and customize what you say to who they are – in other words give them the attention you want – you really will come off acquitted in the eyes of God. I don’t care which religious or non-religious handle you give God, or what non de plume, for that matter, there is a survival imperative for all of us to leave the world better than we found it. That’s your own personal ledger, and it can be accomplished in quiet and anonymous ways, but hey, you’re a writer. You already went “splash.” So ride that wave ashore and try not to drown any sand castles.

It may happen spontaneously, so trust yourself to be spontaneous. Scripted works less well. I’m not saying you won’t fall into buzzwords or repeating whole tracts verbatim. If you are called upon to teach enough times, you will. The most important thing, though, is to remember that you are first of all a student. You have to keep learning and adapting to everything around you. You have to value what there is to learn from others, even if it’s simply from observing them. Everyone is a teacher because they are part of life. If you don’t remember that, you WILL become irrelevant, and your irrelevancy will be all you have to teach: dead, static moments that were true for you at one point in your existence but quite possibly no longer are.

Contrary to what you might think, I’m an extremely private person who has lived virtually alone his entire life. I grew used to showing different aspects of myself in different settings, and never my total self to anyone – incredibly, I never let my guard down until this past year when I met someone so natural to me that it just happened. So I didn’t know who to be in front of a large audience. Used to bother me that I’d see a lot of the same people showing up for my stump speeches before widely disparate (or was it desperate) groups. I knew damn well I was saying some of the same things, word for word, same zingers. But kind listeners always swore that it was different, and one time someone told me, “…you’re different.” That stuck with me. I still don’t know exactly what that means, but I’ve come to trust it a little. I think people tune into energy (or lack of same) as well as optimism, and as long as you’re you, energy and optimism will convey as much as specific words. Yeah, I have up days and down. And every day I yearn for solitude, or something shared only with a soulmate, but if you focus on the audience – SINCERELY – you will come up to the task. They will motivate you. So even if you are repeating humongous sermons word for word, those will likely resonate, if you repeat them from the heart and not the head. And if you are focused on the individuals listening, what you say will vary, because you will adapt to them.

The more speaking you do, the easier it gets. In fact, you may find it becomes almost a reflex. Not didactic exactly, but more enthusiastic, sort of cajoling, purposeful though not taking itself too seriously. It can intimidate the hell out of you, if it catches you by surprise. You are holding forth one on one somewhere in public – a ski rental room, a restaurant, waiting in a doctor’s office – and suddenly you realize others are listening, people passing through are staying, or there might be just a hint of theater-like concentration. Either they are thinking, “Who does this asshole think he is?” or they are finding what you say more interesting than the Ranger Rick magazine they are reading while waiting for the sawbones to see them. Take it in stride. Remember, it’s not about you. Not unless you get carried away with yourself. In which case, everyone will know soon enough. So do your thing. Don’t be afraid to give. If you have no value, you’ll have no audience. And if you do have an audience, keep an objective distance from it.

There is a downside to this, I should tell you. It may drain you and – curiously – leave you lonely. Hmm. I should probably stop right here and draw the curtain. Consider this the advanced footnotes the author should have thrown away. But I’ve pondered long and hard as to why I always feel alone after I climb down from a soapbox. Of course, the answer may be as simple as, “Well, dummy, you DID stand on a soapbox – how was the air up there?” But even when the reaction is effusively kind, I feel that way. Maybe it’s an individual thing, but I want to believe it’s because I’m doing it for the right reasons. If I’m pedaling myself, my ego, it never works. Lots of experience with pedaling my ego. But if I’m truly trying to give, I forget myself, and in the aftermath I feel like I wasn’t there. This is absolutely the most valuable thing that could happen to you if you want to honestl
y give – forget yourself, do not be there. But you may pay that price afterward, as I do. Maybe that’s because the ego comes rushing back, all your little fantasies of personal acceptance and fulfillment. Or maybe it’s because you’ve just parsed yourself out, played the prostitute, and now you’re faced with the hard fact that no one knows what you’re really like. That’s what you need a soulmate for. Someone interested in and capable of understanding the unique you. God help the audience if they have to play that role. We’ve all sat through captive classes run by such needy souls, have we not? An audience can give you the delusion that you have recouped the frustrations and compromises of an incomplete life. So maybe that’s the touchstone as far as knowing if you did a good job speaking, i.e., if you don’t feel just a tad lonely and isolated afterward, you were probably wallowing in the rapport instead of the needs of the audience. I’ll take that limitation. I think a lot of entertainers get lost in the interaction. The audience becomes their soulmate. But it only lasts as long as the cameras role, the disks spin, or the footlights remain on. Then they go looking for themselves and are disappointed. It’s a lonely world.

Which brings me full circle to the point I tried to make about remaining a student. I don’t want to reach a destination. Soon after we become adults, most of us seem to anchor on a plateau inside ourselves where life doesn’t expand, and there we resign our futures to the slow ravages of time. It’s as if we get tired of looking for answers and just grab up whatever is in our lives at the moment, declaring, “I’m there.” I guess that’s security for some, but not for me. My security is in not running out of momentum or directions. And I don’t need to move very far to find both. I just have to continue to explore the world wherever I am – rather thoroughly. The universe truly is in a grain of sand. An audience is part of that. It is not a reward conferred upon you, not something permanent, not as meaningful or satisfying as a soulmate. It is more like a resting point, a place to pause and reflect for perspective. So is writing, for that matter. Actual living stops when the words pour out of you. Words are a summation of what you do and know – the long shadows and bright reflections of everything you see and explore. Have you lived today? Open a window and get some air, or come outside and breathe!

Thanks for reading. Your thoughts are welcome, your attention valued. My web site is below. If you’d like to see more of my writing, please check out the free sample chapter from my latest novel, THE WATER WOLF. And if you’d like to receive the monthly newsletter, ask to be added to the list at: mn333mn@earthlink.net

Thomas “Sully” Sullivan
http://www.thomassullivanauthor.com/

Rites of passage almost always take away innocence, but it’s what you replace the innocence with that reckons the true cost…or net gain. This is the third, and I think final, column I’m posting about the urban settings that shaped me as a writer. It started when Dave Niall Wilson blogged this response to one of my many “nature” raves:

“You can’t write about life if you live out in the woods…unless you’re Sully or Thoreau…but it would be interesting (just for perspective) to see a similar piece sometime about someone lost on the inner streets of somewhere, gray walls, too much traffic, alleys and backwaters of civilization.”

He was quite right to cite the meaninglessness of one setting without the perspective of the other. And neither Thoreau nor I (thank you very much for that august company) can derive meaning in a vacuum. Thoreau’s writings tell us what drove him to nature, and I guess mine testify to the fact that nature is a simplification and an equity line of truth for me against the mortgages of civilization. So I tried to give Davey what he asked for, and the memories just compounded until I had to make it three columns. And still other memories are bubbling up in blood and ether and ambrosia. It all fits the general format I’ve styled as my “Cannibal Essays,” so maybe I’ll revisit the theme down the road, but for now let me acknowledge the humbling outpouring of email received here and some equally generous blog threads, and let me also tie up loose ends that many people have asked about.

“Khaki Man” just disappeared [http://storytellersunplugged.com/thomassullivan/2006/12/16/thomas-sullivan-khaki-man-the-peanut-butter-players/]. I’ve never confirmed what happened to him. Never tried after a few forays into the Cass Corridor. The fire at the halfway house may be the merciless end to his story, but the dance he performed with that soul-wounded woman is untouchable in eternity. The “bully” at the Lawndale Hotel also vanished after the incident with the mirror [http://storytellersunplugged.com/thomassullivan/2007/01/16/thomas-sullivan-empty-boxes-i-have-worn/]. The nameless do that. I never saw him again. The slamming of his door was the final sound I heard from him as well, and that perhaps is the most significant thing. That silence from his sealed room was almost more awful than the abuse until I finally left the Lawndale. I regret that I probably drove him deeper into shame and pain. The hard truth of all our lives is that we can’t make everything right, and that we just have to keep faith with the realities within ourselves and not miss the next chance to deliver. There are a few things unredeemed or unfulfilled I’ve continued to look for in life, and I will not let them pass if they cross my radar again. If. You don’t get many moments of truth, or people who represent it. And when they come, they will likely challenge everything you think you knew and be inconvenient as hell.

But that’s what a writer (or any person with a whole soul) is supposed to do, isn’t it? Find the moments of truth or the people who represent it. They cover the spectrum of human attributes, and if you are an idealist you may see a Grail once, or never, but you’d better remember it, if you do, because it may become the measure of everything in your world. By that Grail you may know the value of what you spent your time chasing. I’m not writing about the minor logistics of wins and losses in your life, imperfections of corruptible things, flaws and compromises of daily living. I mean the things on the white altar of your soul: the passions that make you optimum, and without which you only exist. They may come as tests of your strength. Or they may require you to keep faith with who you are. Those moments of truth. A writer polishes mirrors until they reflect what he/she has found. What have you found? What are you looking for?

If you’re like me, it’s all pretty accidental, and maybe you wake up when the moments of truth happen by and maybe you don’t. A couple of times I did wake up. Khaki Man showed me where beauty is, the bully of the Lawndale taught me compassion. God only knows what I’ve missed. I remember learning about pride, though. Phony and real. The phony was at a top-of-the-game moment during my long slide from a quest to hold the world record in the 200-meter long course breastroke. I didn’t know it then, but I had already failed at that, because I would never get closer than I had been. I also didn’t know that the record didn’t matter. It was the pursuit that mattered.

Wow. Do you know, I’ve never admitted that before?

Anyway, it was an awards banquet for a small college swim team. We were second at the nationals that year, and I was team captain, and there were bucketfuls of lobster Newberg at the banquet. I even got to introduce the President of the United States…on tape for our little ceremonies. Young studs congratulating ourselves. The only things that kept us from beating our chests were the stickpins in our silk ties. But you know, it’s okay once in a while to recognize success, and this was that time.

The setting was a hallowed club in an old gray building downtown. We went outside just before it started and stood on the red carpet under the arrival canopy, talking like the macho jocks we were. Into that he came, a street guy, gaunt, shabby, a little wobbly. He moved quickly enough to suggest he was also sober, and the feverish hope in his bloodshot eyes seemed to say that he didn’t want to be. So there we were, dressed to the nines and nowhere to go, and he was bearing down on us like we were an oasis. His voice squeaked with dryness, but he spoke with surprising elegance. We were all fine young gentlemen, he said, very fine in our fine new clothes. And after a few aching moments, he mumbled as humbly as you have ever heard: “Could any of you fine young gentlemen spare a little change?”

Everyone was suddenly very busy with body language, studying patent leather stiletto shoes, rotating ever so slightly on a heel, as if to lean out of the way of the question. No one wanted to be made a fool of. But he wasn’t leaving, and when he made eye contact with me, all I could think
of was that my buddies were watching to see what I would do. I know I turned him down with dispassion, though I don’t remember whether it was barbed or just polite. Nothing I hadn’t done before or since.

Except that the banquet room was slightly below street level, and you could look up through the tall lancet windows and see the hunched figures in the cold looking down like condemning angels. Okay, I’ve tried to be honest about who I am in these essays. I am not driven by charitable reflexes. In fact, misplaced compassion is more often crippling than kind, to my way of thinking. I believe in the strength of every individual, in human potential, and I am cynical toward leaders who empower themselves through dependencies or misguided guilt or who lock masses of people into their own weaknesses for the benefit of a few who are truly needy. The victim mentality is the most destructive mindset you can inflict on a person or a society. It should be reserved as a weapon of war to undermine one’s enemies. I don’t know how anyone can achieve anything, including self-respect, without empowering themselves as individuals to pursue the best life with whatever means they have. Just wanted you to know.

It was warm in the banquet room and I was glutted with lobster Newberg when I looked up and saw him staring down at me again. His eyes were dull, and I could make up something rather more profound than what I saw, but the truth is he just didn’t get it. My time, his time – different moments of truth, and maybe he had my moment once, and maybe I’ll have his. He just looked empty. You shouldn’t ever be that empty. You should know where you are in life. You should understand. Why didn’t he understand?

And that was the moment I understood. It didn’t matter whether it made sense to give another hungry alcoholic a buck or two. This was about me, and whether I was going to go through life missing the individuals, and I haven’t a clue how many times I failed that test before, but suddenly I wasn’t going to fail it again.

He was gone, of course, before I could get outside, and going to the corner didn’t bring him back, and driving in that neighborhood purely circumstantially a couple of times over the next few weeks didn’t rematerialize him either. I think if I had found him, I wouldn’t be remembering this. But I didn’t find him. Like Khaki Man, he is another phantom of the streets who taught me something I needed to know in order to call myself a writer, a student of the human condition.

So that was phony pride. And the whole thing got replayed again a few years later when I thought I had the street scene down to clichés. But you just can’t come at people – individuals – like you know anything just because you’ve seen others like them. When you stop being the student, you stop learning. I was about to learn real pride.

It was Washington D.C., and I was just entering a government building – I dunno, maybe the National Gallery. And there was one of those still lifes, a ragged black man perched on the top step while the crowds flowed up and down. Rail thin, burning eyes in a body that was ashes. He didn’t have his hand out, nor did I read a con in those eyes. He just looked like he was taking a break from life, from caring, from trying. Maybe that’s why I stuck out a bill as I reached the top step. No big show, I just wanted him to take it. But he didn’t. I paused. And when we had definite eye contact, I got the challenge. What the hell, I didn’t want to humiliate him. Looking back, I can see how stupid the thing I did next was, but I knew damn well he was desperately hungry, and there was a wire trash basket next to him with McDonald’s bags and plastic cups to the brim. It occurred to me that he might have been picking through it, or waiting for someone to lob a half-eaten quarter-pounder onto the pile. So I tucked the bill into the mouth of a bag sitting on top. That was all. He saw me do it, but I didn’t look directly at him again.

I was inside and distracted long enough to forget the whole thing until I came out maybe half an hour later. When my glance caught the empty step, I remembered. And there was the wire basket, and I don’t know why I had to look – whether it was to prove I had understood his pride and knew it limits, or perhaps a disquieting suspicion that I had not. Well, you already know what I’m going to tell you. Because the bill was right where I had left it.

I’ve never doubted the desire for dignity and independence in another human being since, however oppressed, beaten down, corrupted, or enslaved by false notions that desire may be.

Moments of truth. To be a writer is to learn as much as you can about human nature. I hope you find your moments when they find you.

If you’d like to get my free monthly newsletter, drop me your email address at mn333mn@earthlink.net. And if you like my writing, and would like to read a sample chapter of my latest novel, THE WATER WOLF, check it out at the my web site link below. Thanks for reading. Your thoughts are welcome, your attention valued.

Thomas “Sully” Sullivan
www.thomassullivanauthor.com

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Guess this qualifies as one of my Cannibal Essays, because I’m going to tell you about three living people who were collected, dissected, digested and eventually resurrected in fiction. I’m also trying to respond to David Niall Wilson, who posted the following comment on a column of mine [http://storytellersunplugged.com/thomassullivan/2006/10/16/thomas-sullivan-agent-bingo-the-cannibal-snowman/]:

“You can’t write about life if you live out in the woods…unless you’re Sully or Thoreau…but it would be interesting (just for perspective) to see a similar piece sometime about someone lost on the inner streets of somewhere, gray walls, too much traffic, alleys and backwaters of civilization.”

He was referring to my penchant for using nature as story content. I answered then that most of what I know about people was learned from slumming angels and tarnished philosophers down on their luck in just such concrete jungles. Could dress up my boyhood pedigree a little by telling you about the exiled European prince who used to take me to the circus, and about how Evita used to pat me on the head at embassy functions in Buenos Aires, and a raft of other delights and intrigues in exotic and opulent places, but before and after the dozen countries I grew up in, there was Detroit. I was born in the inner city. We lived in one of its most notorious neighborhoods – Fullerton between 12th and 14th streets. And though I simply thought of it as my safe and secure “home” at the time (and still believe it was), I was cracked over the forehead with a pistol at age 7, saw my first murder at age 9 (committed with a railroad spike by a kid three years younger than me), and coal dust and alleys still have the power to fill me with nostalgia. And David is right, there is more living close to the bone and honesty in those environs than almost anywhere else. Desperate living sometimes, but should a writer — or anyone who wants to know life for that matter — miss that?

And yet you will miss it, even if you grow up there, unless you discover the individual lives with all their range of good and evil, beauty and ugliness, strength and weakness. You must see it as it is, not in the politically correct terms of a social agenda. If you strip it of its societal issues, you have a chance of discovering the timeless truths of human nature. If you choose to see it only through the trendy prism of your times, you may be relevant for the moment, but you will miss the absolutes, the universals, the ephemeral qualities of life, which are always subject to interpretation and have nothing to do with physical, academic, media-driven, social, religious or political circumstances at any given moment. Of course, if you are a journalist, then trendy and relevant may be what you are after. But if you want enduring truths, you must see things as a child. A writer for all times sees things as a child. An informed cosmic view has a great deal in common with not being over-informed by the present.

I think I got that much as a child and that it is one of the reasons I turn to nature for truth I can trust. The relativeness of my boyhood home on Fullerton was an early object lesson. How could we have been poor? I was happy, secure, and life was full of adventure and promise that had only to do with freedom and imagination. We had no car, no TV, and our single rug was tracked threadbare, but no one told me we lacked for anything. We had refrigeration, central heating, indoor plumbing. The king of late 18th century France had none of those amenities, and yet he was king. State of mind. If you go to the Louvre Museum, you will see King Louis 16th’s ornate carriage with the hole in the seat that allowed him to relieve himself in transit. Must have been quite the sign of wealth and privilege at the time (and hell for companions of the road). Status is subjective and relative. You can see yourself as a “have” or a “have not” pretty much at will and make a case for it. It can be said that America was discovered because of rotten meat. When Columbus bumped ashore he was looking for a shortcut to the West Indies for the spice trade, because spoiled food in an age without refrigeration made spices worth more than gold. I say I was lucky to be poor in 20th-century Detroit where cold cuts stayed cold in the ‘fridge.

Not many years after going out into the world, I revisited my former neighborhood and found it blighted. Same houses, but nothing was painted, refreshed, maintained. It was not the kind of poverty you see in Suweto, or the patina of despair in the tunnels under Bucharest, but for the first time my boyhood castle looked poor to me. I wondered if the people inside thought they were poor. Perhaps they had never been to the Louvre and seen King Louis 16^th’s ornate carriage or thought about the relative nature of being a “have not.” I have not been to the Louvre either, but as a child I saw a picture of that carriage in a magazine. A few years later my boyhood home was burned to the ground in the Detroit riots.

Now, I’m not telling you this to disparage definitions of poverty, but only to loosen you up to the open-minded view I got of certain down-and-outers later in my life and what they taught me. Like all people, they were beautiful and tended to live up or down to whatever expectations surrounded them, and if it was the latter, they still found their moments of redemption in subtle ways that “successful” (whatever that means) people never know.

Take khaki man.

Scene shift. I am taking you back to when I am a parent and my seven-year-old son is an actor in a children’s troupe called Peanut Butter Players. Owing to the consummate skill of Joanne Lamun, the woman behind PBP, the child actors are quite good and many will go on to film and Broadway, like Best-Actress Tony award winner Sutton Foster. We are performing outside today at Detroit’s New Center, and I am setting up props and being my usual irreverent self along with my irreverent buddy, the colorful piano player and musical director C. J. Nodus. The urban plateau where we have chosen to perform, surrounded by tall buildings, is treacherous with gritty gusts that threaten to blow over our flats. A number of homeless people are wandering about, and one of them – a tall scarecrow of a man in khaki pants with white hair flowing in the wind – is dispensing Broadway advice to the young performers, who are already Detroit’s media children. Joanne is nervous. “What’s his story?” she asks me about khaki man. She is not being paranoid. We have been beset by at least one stalker previously, and
we seem to be plagued by itinerant carnival workers, one of whom is there at each of our dozens of performances. Another of our young actresses has received fan letters, ostensibly from a 15-year-old boy, whose OCF return address turned out to be Ohio Correctional Facility. But there is something about khaki man. He is not focused on anyone, as if for him the play has already begun and he is the star, delivering his lines to the wind. I check him out for a while and return to Joanne. “That’s me twenty years from now,” I say. She gives me a funny look and we drift apart. The show must go on.

Later, when the set is struck and loaded to travel, I stroll across the street to a parking lot set up with chairs. A rock ‘n roll band, The Larados, with a big honking T-sax, has drawn me like a moth to a flame. Maybe 50 people are scattered among a thousand chairs, so I sit down behind them in the parking lot. Pay attention, please. I am about to change. The writer in me is still trying hard to glimpse something beneath the cynicism of the encounter with khaki man, and perhaps it takes something external to get beyond that context and into the humanity I mentioned earlier.

Because suddenly there is khaki man.

He sashays in from stage right between the band on the platform and the chairs and grabs up one of the street people sitting in the front row. She is gaudily dressed, perhaps 200 pounds. She could be 25 years of age or 35. She looks the latter, but dances as if she is the former. Maybe it is because of khaki man. He has his left arm around her, canting her slightly backwards, creating the illusion that she is light as a swan. He whirls her, stutter-stepping. Her head lolls back in the bright sunlight. Face glistening, beginning to drool, one eyelid half closed, you know then that she is mentally handicapped. But there is also pure unadulterated joy in that face. She has lipstick smeared around her lips, and so she still thinks of herself as a woman. And so does khaki man…

Not so the four teenagers sitting a dozen rows in front of me who have noticed the rictus of her expression. They point and hoot like chimps in the wild. I was one of them once, maybe just a few minutes ago, but I am seeing through khaki man’s eyes now. The second impression I had of him returns: that he speaks to the wind, dances in the past, perhaps lives in the future or in a timeless place of his own invention. All of us who regard ourselves as “normal” have shunned him or viewed him with suspicion, and, therefore, we are missing something. He cannot be indicted by the present.

I am not trying to tell you that he wasn’t a shooter, an alchi, or a person who by choice drops off the rail we all cling to; I am only saying that at that moment it didn’t matter. Give him the worst of your judgment. I gave him the worst of mine. But whatever the sins of that poor bastard, he redeemed at least a few of them when he expounded on things thespian or swept up an object of derision and found grace and beauty dancing in his arms. And sitting a few feet away, I felt him enlarge my soul.

Khaki man helped awaken me to the complexity of human beings. A writer, or any seeker of truth, cannot afford to build walls. If you want to see all the way to the horizon, you should go outside your walls, and that is an inherently risky business. Most writers – maybe most people – view walls as protection when as often as not they are imprisonment. In our best moments, we expand to a certain point and set new walls and then live within those limitations. I don’t like limits. And you know, I’m a really cautious guy. Seriously. I am cautious. It’s just that I’ve discovered that most walls, like risk, are more smoke than fire. I am a writer.

There is a postscript about khaki man. A year after that show there was a fire in a halfway house near New Center. Some people died. Several times after that I found myself driving through the Cass Corridor, New Center, and other areas of the city where rootless people drifted. I never saw khaki man or his dance partner again. And I stopped looking when I began to fear the worst. Still, they are vivid in my memory. I can hear the music, I can see them dancing, and that makes them entirely possible in eternity. There. I have written them down for you. They are yours.

And I have writ enough for this month. Not going to be able to finish with the other two people I mentioned today, so this is now officially Part 1. More next time. May I wish you the cheeriest of holidays and a grand new year? Thanks to the dozens of people who suggested Dragon NaturallySpeaking as a solution to my carp ‘n’ tuna surgery aftermath. I’m using it. It just may keep my new novel, THE WATER WOLF, from dying of neglect, now that I can promote again. As a paperback release timed to be a stocking stuffer, it’s been frustrating not to be able to pitch that. It should have pretty broad appeal, being a global quest into ancient mythologies that keys off of an unusual romance. If you’d like to read a free sample chapter, my web site is below.

Thanks for reading. Your thoughts are welcome, your attention valued.

Thomas “Sully” Sullivan

www.thomassullivanauthor.com