Scott A. Winkler - Author
AUTHOR - TEACHER - SCHOLAR
SCOTT A. WINKLER
Welcome--I'm happy you're here! Whether you're new to my work or have been following me for some time, you'll find something here that you'll enjoy and want to share.
The Meadow was released by Peregrino Press in 2018 in hardcover, trade paperback, and ebook editions. You can order your hardcover or trade paperback edition through any bookstore served by Ingram Distribution (and that's practically every brick-and-mortar bookstore in the United States) or online through Amazon or Barnes & Noble.
The audiobook was released on June 8, 2018, by Beacon Publishing, and you can get your audiobook edition directly from Beacon Publishing, through Amazon, or on Audible.
“Scott Winkler’s The Meadow is an earnest and searching examination of what it means to love, to serve, to be a good father and a better son. It’s a lesson in how to live—and, unquestionably, how to write.” - Liam Callanan, Author of Paris by the Book and The Cloud Atlas.
"This Vietnam War era coming-of-age novel reminds us that there was more to America in the late 1960s than the coastal counterculture. Walt Neumann is torn between his dreams of becoming a college-educated writer and his rugged, taciturn father's demands that his sons carry on his legacy of military service. Not your typical rebel, Walt deeply honors his family's traditions of hard manual labor and service to the place they call home but grows to understand that the traumatic stories locked inside the stolid 'Greatest Generation' veterans may be preventing an entire nation from learning from its errors. Beautiful writing and sensitive character portraits make this meditative novel a good opener for blue- and red-state Americans to start understanding each other." - Jendi Reiter, author of Two Natures and Bullies in Love.
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"The voice is so clear and well-grounded in The Meadow that it's hard not to read the novel as a personal memoir. It hits just about every theme I hold most dear: fathers/sons, sibling rivalries, Vets and moral injury, separating Warriors from the Wars, the unbearable middle ground of mothers, the rich Meg/Walt relationship. Wonderful!" Frederick Marx, director of Hoop Dreams and founder of Warrior Films
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My raison d'etre...
Why I write
Stories save lives. I've long known this on a subconscious level, but it wasn't until I read Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried--and his story "The Lives of the Dead," in particular--that I realized the immensity of their potential. O'Brien "saves" the lives, albeit in fictional form, of men with whom he'd served in Vietnam through the stories in this timeless book, but in that particular story, O'Brien also saves the life of Linda, a nine year-old girl who dies of brain cancer--and he saves the life of Timmy as well, preserving the "everness" evident in the eyes of his nine year-old self looking back from a photograph at the forty-three year-old writer.
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Call them magic. Call them literary slight of hand. Call them what you will, but stories do save lives. Not physical bodies, but souls. Essence. Memories. They illuminate the extraordinary in the seemingly ordinary, and they provide readers with hope: hope that they can overcome the obstacles in their lives; hope that they can comport themselves with dignity, wisdom, grace, even heroism; hope that something taken away from the story, be it large or small, can make a difference in their lives.
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If my writing can do this for even one of my readers, I'll have succeeded. The act of writing may be solitary, but reading is communal--you and I both bring something to the table, and in the chemistry of that transaction, magic can happen. Lives can be saved.
"The thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others might then dream along with you, and in this way memory and imagination and language combine to make spirits in the head. There is the illusion of aliveness."
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Tim O'Brien, "The Lives of the Dead"
Let's Talk!
Writing itself is a solitary practice--but we do it to share with others. Thanks for having allowed me to share my work with you! Feel free to send me a note, even if it's a quick "hello"; I'd love to hear from you!
