I’m continuing to work with Wise Ink Media on the final version of When Once Destroyed so it’s ready to submit to a printer. This week, we finished making sure the blurbs and the foreward look right to the people who contributed them. I owe them more thanks than I know how to express.
I am eagerly anticipating the opportunity to talk more directly about the book. I expect its release in fewer than 10 weeks. It will have been almost five years since this process began with a 3:00 A.M. wake-up suggestion from my best angel that I ought to tell my grandson about my dad.
Last week Judy helped me prepare for an appearance on WNIT’s Dinner and a Book by directing my preparation of the Elwood, Indiana “Swiss Steak,” which I’ll be making on the show. There’s a little unexpectedness story in the book about it, given that “swiss steak” means different things to different people. Our friend Bill Gitlin was telling me about his mother’s swiss steak when he suggested that the making of the Elwood version would be a better choice for the show than what I had planned, Judy’s Meatloaf-in-the-Shape-of-a-Fish. Vern liked it.
Also, in order that when the time comes I might talk about the book, the Jewish Federation of St. Joseph Valley is making time and space available for me, WVPE’s Morning Edition local host Kent Fulmer and The Sauce producer Karl Smith have contacted me, and there’s been interest expressed by Brain Lair Books and WSBT-TV’s Home Town Living. A reporter from the Kokomo Tribune asked me for a ”when-you-are-done” reminder when I contacted him two years ago for information about an article he’d written on the impact of the Upper Wabash Valley Flood Control Project on Peru, Indiana. I also have an informal invitation from the Wabash County Museum to speak there when it’s done. Here I am now, almost done.
I’d certainly like to visit my New Prairie High School community home and to return to Somerset for a Lion’s Club meeting because that’s where I first started to talk to people about Dad and the community four years ago. Our friend Mel Brown initiated that visit at a time when I was only looking at old newspaper articles on-line using the keywords “Vern Shroyer” and “Somerset.”
“You need to talk to people,” Mel said to me in August 2021, with perhaps a firmer idea than I had on where I was headed in all of this.
Along with Judy, other people who encouraged me in my pursuit include her brother Peter Firestein, author of Crisis of Character, and Stephen Fredman, University of Notre Dame English professor emeritus and author of Poet's Prose: The Crisis in American Verse. In no place was my confidence building as great as in my association with April Lidinsky and Ken Smith at WVPE’s Michiana Chronicles writer’s forum. My audition piece for that back in 2015 was about looking for Somerset.
You, too, the subscribers to this newsletter, and especially those with financial support, are contributors. So are all the people who said, “I’d like to read that,” when I described to them what I was doing. It’s exhilarating for me that I’m on the verge of sharing my story.
Great work!