Short Stories, Tall Tales, and Surprise Endings: An Armchair Map for Vicarious Adventure

(Hardback)

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For those who enjoy a good yarn, a large dose of humor, a wide selection of offerings, and telling illustrations, this gathering of tales is written for your pleasure, diversion, and entertainment. The illustrations, themselves, will invite you into each story and leave you with an image for recollection. Common threads of humor, telling psyches, poignant moments, and crescendo endings tie these tales together.This is a collection of widely varied stories written over many decades. One,written over sixty years ago, resulted in the unsolicited induction of the author into a series of creative writing courses. Lost, but re-written and re-named, it presents itself as "Apparition." Another was published in "The Atlantic Salmon Journal" in decades past, and now is offered for your armchair visit to Labrador, considered by many to be the last frontier in North America; it is named "Bad Luck Henry." There are a few stories based on the author's encounters with a most unusual and unforgettable individual in Maine whose father was a Maine woodsman raconteur and mother was a one time New York City Rockette. He, himself, was an accomplished story teller. You will find him as Lionel in three of the renditions. Some of the players in the stories spoke little but made major impressions, such as seen with a bear in Yellowstone, a llama from Patagonia, and the Ay Ay Ma Ma bird in the Amazon. There is a good deal of whimsy thrown into many of the stories; nonetheless there are offerings that will leave you sharing heartbeats and tears with characters. For the reader interested in health care, there is a tale called, "Concussion," so named and copyrighted before the later, more famously named version. In it, you will find a protagonist driven by personal issues, blocked by political ploys, and befuddled by the play of the participants; it is a story offering another direction for health care.So, travel from the Nile to the Amazon, join the English gentry at the southern tip of South America, see yourself on the sea with pirates of yesteryear, pick up a fly rod, or put on some snow shoes all easily done while sitting in an armchair imagining yourself on a literary safari.

Author Bio

Born at the end of the great depression, and having a Bostonian psychiatrist father and a Ute mother who put Blake in cowboy boots at age two, it was only natural that he usurp the genes for sense of humor, the love of the great outdoors, and a profound appreciation for the importance of the psyche.Both parents were artistic, therefore Blake, realizing that he charged less than anyone else, succumbed and hired himself to illustrate this book.After the usual adolescent diversions and misadventures, Blake settled down to serious work in college where he majored in psychology while trying to satisfy a variety of other interests and fulfilling pre-med requirements. In college, Blake wrote a story, the Brute. That story led to his unsolicited induction in further courses in creative writing. That story was lost, but was re-written some sixty five years later and named, Apparition. It is one of the tales offered in this collection. He was inducted into Phi Kappa Phi, an honor society, proving that anyone can do it. He then went on to the Faculty of Medicine, at McGill University where he was president of Alpha Omega Alpha, the honor society there. Fortuitously twice honored, he went on to post graduate training in general medicine and neuro-psychiatry - later to meld these disciplines as a family doctor in a small New England town. He taught for a half dozen medical schools, each awarding him with titles rather than money. He held board certifications and re-certifications which gave him further unpronounceable initials after his name.Blake has previously published in scientific and clinical medicine journals where you will find no evidence of his sense of humor. He has published fiction in short story and novel form.