McNutt Street Books Releases Patchwork Love

True family is a patchwork…of love’s surprising shapes.

Patchwork Love — A story about a man, a dog, and the two lost children who help everyone find their way.

Famous author Merit Brown moved to a secluded cabin in the woods after suffering tragic loss. Susie is the collie who showed up on his porch, badly injured. His only companion, she contentedly wears the patch he made for her damaged eye as they walk the path to the creek every morning before Merit quietly settles down to write.

Until the morning they find two abandoned children – a girl huddled by the creek bank who won’t speak, and a little boy hidden under bushes in the water and the mud, unconscious and nearly dead.

Suddenly Merit and Susie are back in the world of cruelties, and kindnesses. As they help Jonathan and Trish on a desperate search for home, the people of the southern mountain town of Wake Robin reach out, discovering within themselves the true meaning of family.

Burton paints powerful portraits of the good, and the bad, in a vivid novel that has the horror and suspense of a kidnapping, a rape, a murder, a suicide. But at its shining heart is a story of empowerment.

Patchwork Love radiates with warmth, hope, and what it means to find your brave. Courage – that’s the most important thing.

Linda Lou Burton Bio

I shall be telling this with a sigh somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference. Robert Frost, The Path Not Taken

Linda Lou Burton is a fearless explorer, always on the lookout for new adventures, new friends, and new stories. In her travels from the Arctic Circle to Antarctica, she photographed the Midnight Sun on the first day of summer at each end of the Earth – in the same year! She also crossed the Andes in a taxi, conversed eye-to-eye with penguins on their rocky turf, tracked polar bears (in a Hummer with a guide, of course), and had a quick breakfast at the northernmost McDonalds in the world.

In her two-year Journey Across America (2012-2013) with her traveling cats Alex the Crabby Tabby, and big black Jack, aka El Grande Lovebug, she lived in the capital cities in all 50 states, connecting with thousands as she gained an insider’s perspective on how people feel about “home,” wherever that might be.

Born in Jasper, Alabama and newly settled in Arkansas with blue-eyed Katy cat, Burton claims two more places as “home.”

“During twenty years of living alongside the Tennessee River in Chattanooga I raised three sons, earned a BS in Psychology from the University of Tennessee and taught there, owned a publications business, wrote a column for The Chattanooga Times, and authored Chattanooga Great Places and other travel guidebooks.

I lived in Seattle, with snow-capped Mt Rainier in view just to the south, for almost a quarter century, where I studied both Communications and History at the University of Washington and worked there, operated The Golden Apple B&B, and welcomed eleven amazing grandchildren into my life.

I came to Arkansas because my brother found a journal kept by our third great-grandfather William Irwin, who led a party on an ill-fated attempt to emigrate from Alabama to Texas in 1849. Their journey sadly ended here in wooded graves, but my new Arkansas home – a historic house smack dab between two universities — feels to me like a good place to dig more deeply into history, to reflect and spin the stories out.”

Burton now chairs Capital Cities USA, a nonprofit dedicated to humanities education, and invites students, teachers, researchers, and everyone interested in learning about the United States to visit the Capital Cities website.

www.capitalcitiesusa.org

Burton’s next travel adventure involves visiting world capitals– beginning with the northernmost capital in the world, Reykjavik, Iceland, and the southernmost, Wellington, New Zealand.

Her next writing project is a social studies book for children – Bobby’s Absolutely Amazing Adventures in the Capital Cities.

Patchwork Love is her first novel, available now at Amazon.com in both paperback and ebook format, to be followed by a fictionalized account of the Irwin journey that ended so tragically in Arkansas in 1849 with ten deaths, based on journals and letters kept through the ages. The focus will be on the survivors — two pregnant women, a four-year-old girl, and a slave named Penny.

Watch for all releases on the McNutt Street Books website and at Amazon.com.

www.amazon.com/author/lindalouburton.com

It’s Not Horseshoes

Linda Burton posting from Arkadelphia, Arkansas – Patchwork Love, by Linda Lou Burton. It isn’t horseshoes. It is a beautiful story about a man, a dog, and the two lost children who help everyone find their way. Famous author Merit Brown is the man, Susie is the collie dog with the eye patch, and Jonathan and Trish are the two lost children. It’s a story about courage, about finding your true family and finding your brave. It’s a story with heart, wrapped in mystery, filled with characters you will care about, and more than a few twists and turns. It’s a great read, with an expressive cover, no matter which capital city you live in!

So why am I talking about horseshoes? I’m talking about precision. The rules of horseshoes seem simple enough – you simply stand back a prescribed number of feet and throw a horseshoe at a stake. No horse is involved, no racquet, no ball, no net. And scoring, well, scoring is interesting.The closest shoe to the stake gets 1 point. If you have two shoes closer than any of your opponent’s, you get 2 points.

Notice the word “closest” in there. Just getting close gets you points. Even getting closer than your opponent counts for something! Perhaps you’ve heard the phrase “close doesn’t count except in horseshoes.” Let me tell you friend, it doesn’t count in printing a book cover either.

How does a person design a perfect book cover? » read more

Down The Rabbit Hole

Linda Burton posting from Arkadelphia, Arkansas – Remember Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll? Alice was having a perfectly pleasant afternoon when suddenly a rabbit with a pocket-watch went scurrying by. And Alice was struck with the notion of following him, jumping straight down into a rabbit hole. And falling, and falling, and falling. Breathless, and wide-eyed though. The adventure of her life!

“It’s no use going back to yesterday,” Alice said at the end of it. “I was a different person then.”

So Miss Alice, I know just what you mean. I’ve been perfectly happy writing non-fiction for more than fifty years. A pleasant occupation, taking me all over the world and meeting all kinds of wonderful people. Like all the great people in all 50 of our great capital cities. History. Scenery. Adventure. I have loved every minute of the research, the documentation, the “telling what I saw, and experienced.”

I’ve been a great reader too, starting back at the age of eight when I first read Little Women by Louisa May Alcott. That’s when I realized that someone actually wrote books – they didn’t just bloom like daisies on a library shelf. I knew my calling then. I wanted to be a Jo! But practical considerations guided my choices – after all, my father was an accountant, so right there you can see what turned me toward learning shorthand, and typing, and various secretarial skills. “Job security.”

Eventually though, even in the middle of raising a family, I managed to get a publications business going, doing newsletters for large corporations, and writing marketing materials for them as well. I taught college freshmen basic composition skills, I taught engineers how to write reports, and I taught businessmen how to write a good business letter. “Pursuant to” is SO not cool. That was cool.

I went on to write travel guidebooks – Chattanooga Great Places was the first. It took a year to do all the research, and pull it together. Yes, I ate in all 150 restaurants I reviewed. Yes, I went to every museum, and tourist attraction, and shopping mall. It was Chattanooga’s very first honest-to-goodness guidebook! I wrote a weekly column for The Chattanooga Times as well, focusing on travel. And since 2012, I have written at least half a million words for Capital Cities USA, living in 50 different states, sleeping in all those different beds.

But I have never written fiction. Until NOW. Until I jumped down the rabbit hole and wrote Patchwork Love.

And I feel a little bit like Alice. There is no going back to yesterday. I am hooked. The process of creating something from pure thin air makes a person reach SO DEEP, and SO HIGH, that nothing will ever be the same again. I had no idea what Louisa, and all my revered author-friends, were really all about, before this. Mark Twain was more than a very funny, and very crotchety, man. He saw something nobody else could see, and took the time to write it down, so maybe we could see it too. » read more

It’s A Wonderful Life

Linda Burton posting from Arkadelphia, Arkansas – You can’t have Christmas without Jimmy Stewart. That boyish enthusiasm, that earnest face, and then sweet Clarence in the picture too. Clarence with his old-fashioned underwear, and, alas, no wings. Plus Donna Reed – were actresses really that beautiful back then? It’s A Wonderful Life, directed by Frank Capra, released December 20, 1946, seventy years ago. A love story of the sweetest kind, dancing by the light of the moon. An unexpected tragedy, father dies, a scary depression begins, a war. And then, a Christmas Eve crisis – the bank examiner is there and $8,000 has mysteriously disappeared. Jimmy Stewart, aka George Bailey, considers suicide, worth more dead than he is alive, he believes. A heavenly intervention, Clarence comes, shows George what the world would be like without him – much worse, of course – Zuzu’s petals back in his pocket then, the whole town shows up at the Bailey home, cash in hand to help, Clarence gets his wings, and that’s when we get our tissues out, and cry. Auld Lang Syne is playing in the background music there, it’s almost time for New Year’s resolutions, so you have to think, what would the world be like if I hadn’t been born? Better, or worse?

I watch the movie every Christmas season, it’s a tradition, and a good reminder to review the year just past, and make a course correction, if necessary. This year, I got a writer’s curiosity, who wrote this story, and why? A little research took me on a crooked path. It began with a man named Philip Van Doren Stern (1900-1984), an author, editor and Civil War historian. Philip wrote 40 books, mostly about the Civil War, and he was an editor at Simon & Schuster, and at Alfred A Knopf. As the story goes, Philip woke up one morning in February 1938 with an idea in mind, inspired by Dickens 1843 A Christmas Carol. His idea wound up as a 4,000-word story he named The Greatest Gift. He began writing it in 1939, but didn’t finish until 1943 (writers sometimes get blocked that way). And then, no one would publish it. So what does a writer do under those circumstances? He printed 200 copies himself and sent them out as Christmas cards! That was December 1943 (follow these dates). » read more

Cultivate Your Garden

Linda Burton posting from Arkadelphia, Arkansas – Remember high school literature and the French author Voltaire (1694-1778)? He wrote Candide (published 1759), a satire about optimism, his characters adventuring against a worldwide backdrop of horrible disasters and bad fortune. The conclusion measures the “plundering of kings” against the peaceful life of those who simply stay at home and “cultivate their garden.” Here’s a paragraph or two: …news was spread abroad that two viziers of the bench and the mufti had just been strangled at Constantinople, and several of their friends impaled. This catastrophe made a great noise for some hours. Pangloss, Candide, and Martin, as they were returning… met with a good-looking old man, who was taking the air at his door, under an alcove formed of the boughs of orange-trees. Pangloss…asked him what was the name of the mufti who was lately strangled. “I cannot tell,” answered the good old man… “I am entirely ignorant of the event you speak of; I presume that in general such as are concerned in public affairs sometimes come to a miserable end…but…I am contented with sending thither the produce of my garden, which I cultivate with my own hands.”

The old man invites them into his house, where his four children proceed to serve them sherbet, candied citrons, pineapples, pistachio nuts, and Mocha coffee, unadulterated, the story goes, “with the bad coffee of …the American islands.” “You must certainly have a vast estate,” said Candide to the Turk; who replied, “I have no more than twenty acres of ground, the whole of which I cultivate myself with the help of my children; and our labor keeps off from us three great evils—idleness, vice, and want.”
» read more

Says Baby Girl

Linda Burton posting from Arkadelphia, Arkansas – Caroline Randall Williams is a poet. Her debut book of poetry, Lucy Negro Redux, came out in 2015. And so did her amazing cookbook/family history masterpiece Soul Food Love, written in collaboration with her mother, Alice Randall. Caroline is a Harvard grad, a teacher, and maybe the prettiest and most engaging person I’ve met in quite a while. The picture above I took after her lecture at Mosaic Templars Cultural Center in Little Rock this month; we’d finally gotten her downstairs to the gift shop so we could buy her book, and chat. “Will you be at the Cornbread Festival tomorrow?” I asked, an annual event in Little Rock’s evolving and historic South Main area, SoMa. “No, I’ll be cooking at the Smithsonian with my mother. We’re demonstrating one of the recipes in our book at the Food History Festival.” “Name dropper!” I laughed. “The Smithsonian! Which one?” Double answer: the National Museum of American History; the recipe Peanut Chicken Stew. The Museum’s weekend celebration, dubbed “Politics on Your Plate,” was all about the past, present, and future of food and community in America, and Soul Food Love was a perfect fit. Food history, inseparable from family; identified with love, in whatever kinds of ways we live; a record of the way we come to know the world. Let’s talk about the book. » read more

The Animal Fair

Linda Burton posting from Arkadelphia, Arkansas – I went to the animal fair. The birds and the beasts were there. Also the hand-sewn quilts and home-canned preserves and commercial funnel cakes and merry go rounds brought in for the week and traveling hawkers enticing you to try it all. Nothing more exciting than a county fair in September! Yet despite the allure of fried goods and haunted houses and the attraction of the more peaceful Arts and Crafts Building my favorite thing is and always has been the animal barns. I mean, sheer happiness! You can’t walk past those bunny cages without twitching your own cute nose, bunny like. And what looks happier than a pig stretched out belly up, totally content to be fat. Then there are the smiling young folks, with heifers they have raised from Day 1, and brought to show. Dedicated young folks; I’m talking about the FFA. From their website I learned there are 629,327 student members of the Future Farmers of America aged 12-21 in 7,757 local FFA chapters in all 50 states, Puerto Rico, and the US Virgin Islands. Wow! And interestingly, while 73% live in rural and farm areas, 27% live in urban and suburban areas. The focus is “leadership, personal growth and career success training through agricultural education.” More information from the FFA website: » read more

No Quitting Allowed

Linda Burton posting from Arkadelphia, Arkansas – A lady by the name of Doris Haddock (1910-2010) walked all the way across America in her 90^th year. Doris, aka “Granny D” began her walk in Pasadena, California on January 2, 1999, and stood on the steps of the National Capitol on February 29, 2000. She kept a diary, just as I wrote Posts during my Journey Across America. Her book “Walking Across America in My 90^th Year,” written with the assistance of Dennis Burke and a foreword by Bill Moyers, was published by Villard Books, a division of Random House, in 2001. This retired shoe-factory worker from New Hampshire and great-grandmother of twelve walked for a cause: national campaign finance reform. Along the way she gave speeches, collected signatures on petitions, and listened to the world around her. She followed her heart. I am pleased that I was able to hear Granny D speak about her trek, and her beliefs, during the book tour that brought her to Seattle; I met her and have an autographed copy of her book. Go Granny D we all said to this petite lady in the huge hat, standing before us that night. Granny D was a feisty thing, an ordinary citizen who chose to become an outspoken activist. Wikpedia has a page about her, if you care to read more; according to it, she was arrested in the National Capitol in April 2000 for reading aloud from The Declaration of Independence! She entered a plea of “guilty” and made a statement to the court that “I was reading from the Declaration of Independence to make the point that we must declare our independence from the corrupting bonds of big money in our election campaigns.” She was sentenced to time served, and a $10 fee. Granny D ran for a US Senate seat at the age of 94, and continued lobbying for campaign finance reform all the way to her 100^th year, with praises from President Jimmy Carter and Senator John McCain.

Another “author at 91” that I was fortunate enough to know personally was Virginia Wing Power (1906-1997); her book was “Ginny’s Chairs” (BookTree Press, 1998). This amazing woman was born in historic Bulloch Hall in Roswell, Georgia; the house is now on the National Historic Register, a pre-Civil War home and also the birthplace of Mittie Bulloch, mother of Teddy Roosevelt. Theodore Roosevelt Sr and Mittie were married in the elegant dining room in 1853; Ginny stood in the same spot for her wedding to George Power in 1928. Bulloch Hall is open to the public today as a museum; “Ginny’s Chairs” is still for sale in the bookstore there; it offers a ringside seat to the changing times of the twentieth century. » read more

E Pluribus Unum

Linda Burton posting from Arkadelphia, Arkansas – Got a US Passport? Look at the front of it. Got a one-dollar bill? Look at the back of it. Fish a dime out of your change bowl and look on the backside of that too. Look for this Latin phrase: E Pluribus Unum. Sometimes you’ll find the words embedded in the banner of the Great Seal, sometimes, due to available space I suppose, just printed straight across or curved around the edges. Do you know the meaning of these words? And how this phrase came to be an everyday, ordinary part of the American scene? First, let’s translate: E Pluribus Unum, in English form, means “out of many, one.” When Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson and John Adams got together back in 1776 to create an official seal for a brand-new country, they settled on the obvious basics for the design: different people from different places, now together. Their initial sketch had a shield in the middle, composed of many smaller shields; look closely to see six symbols – a rose (England), thistle (Scotland), harp (Ireland), fleur-de-lis (France), lion (Holland), and eagle (Germany), which they described as “the countries from which these states have been peopled.” Now look around the edges of the shield to see the initials of the “thirteen independent states of America.”

They submitted their idea to Congress on August 20, 1776, but it was not approved; in true group-think fashion it took several more committees before a final design was approved in
1782, one with the now-familiar American eagle in the center; the eagle carries a banner in its beak bearing that original phrase, E Pluribus Unum. You’ll notice a lot of thirteens on the seal – 13 stars, 13 stripes, 13 arrows in the eagle’s talon. And did you catch – there are 13 letters in E Pluribus Unum! I doubt Ben and Thom and John were thinking about that when they suggested the phrase; it seems to have been a recurring theme from the time of classic writers and organized systems of government. » read more