What follows is the introduction to a new book, in my hands for the first time just today and available through Amazon and Barnes and Noble (although it's likely those places haven't seen one yet.

In the intro what I wanted to do was explain why I believed that this book deserved to see the light of day. I thought it would be helpful for my folks to read when and where and how any of these stories their son write came to have their being--"where in the world did you get that idea?" they might have asked. But didn't.

I'm thinking that introducing the genesis of these stories would help them understand the stories, just as well as the writer I wanted to become.

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They’ve been gone for a decade, which means there’s no chance at all of their seeing or reading this book. But, in a way, this disrobed collection of my stories is meant for them, for my parents.

Two of the stories are set in a cemetery, where the residents have more life than we’ve determined is there beneath the ground. Maybe ten years ago or so, I worked on Up the Hill, a collection of stories set in a graveyard. While haunting cemeteries myself, I developed a penchant for seeing things not supposedly there. If, for a time, you bend your mind and spirit to believe in something, it’s amazing how far down that road you can travel before you look back, if you do.

My parents are gone, but I can’t help thinking that they’re still somewhere behind me, even as I sit here in the desk chair, an entire day’s travel from the ground where their earthly remains lie interred. It’s as if they’re here; they don’t communicate with me directly, but that doesn’t mean I don’t hear their voices, and it also doesn’t mean their seats in the heavenly Mormon Tabernacle Choir, where I imagine they abide in the spirit world, won’t allow them occasional glimpses of this one. I can’t imagine they aren’t interested in the lives of their loved ones, and I always will be one of those.

My first novel, Home Free, featured a tough Dutch immigrant father whose stain of sin, years before, would not willingly resign the place it ranged in his soul. Wim Pietenpol had his prototypes, but none of them bore even the slightest resemblance to my own father.

Years after the publication of that novel, my mother told me—Dad had already passed away—that he really disliked that book because he was sure when others read Home Free, they’d come to believe somehow that Calvin Schaap, the writer’s father, was Wim’s prototype. Nothing could be farther from the truth.

Honestly, it had never dawned on me that he might see himself in that story. My dad was not judgmental or ornery, not given to bouts of darkness created by the shadows of some great guilt-inducing event. He never once thought of his son as a means by which he could crawl into the good graces of a hard-core Calvinist God, as Wim has.

Ever since then I’ve wondered—and asked myself—whether my dad (and my mother) ever really understood the premise of fiction, the teasing nature of imaginative art. Neither of them was a reader; if they spent any time between the covers of a book, that book would be meditations of some sort--and orthodox, to be sure.

Both of them went to school after their high school years, mid-Depression. Mom went to County Normal for a year to prepare to be a teacher, Dad to a Milwaukee technical school, where he learned to be a draftsman. They may have read Shakespeare in high school, other English poetry maybe, but most literature in the curriculum, especially in little burgs without proud literary traditions, in all likelihood didn’t include Hemingway and Faulkner and Fitzgerald or other contemporaries, despite those writers’ prominence as proven members of an American culture that was increasingly well-read.

When, years later, my parents dropped me off at college, they were quite sure they were saying goodbye to a son who would smilingly find a job at some high school someday thereafter and become a coach--baseball or basketball, a son who was an athlete, a nice kid who would make a good teacher somewhere down the line.

They might have guessed I could become a Democrat, but they would have had no suspicion of their son becoming a writer.

For them this book was created, even though I can’t be sure their fingers will ever turn its pages. I’d like to try to explain the son who didn’t return from college, who somehow left their expectations behind in order to dream up stories that appeared very often to have nothing at all to do with their lives.

They were wrong about that, as I will try to show in telling them—and you—the stories that gave life to the stories I wrote.

I’d like them to understand.