I titled this book because of my fascination with the original threshold of the house I inherited from my grandmother. Originally the boundary between inside and outside, that old threshold was a double 2×10 block of yellow pine. By the time I began writing, the top half had worn down in the middle to expose the second layer of the sandwich. Since I think our families represent the threshold we cross into our “grown-up” lives, the block of wood  symbolized to me those families with their hidden–sometimes surprisingly exposed–layers.

When Grandma Hazel was about 97 or 98, it occurred to me that I ought to do something about preserving the stories she’d been telling me practically since my birth. Grandma had clear recall of seven generations of family–three back, three forward, and her own. The resulting 30 hours of interviews became the core of this book. Using genealogical research done by my Aunt Nina, her daughter, I traced the family back to colonial times and that’s when I began finding more priceless story gems. In the end, I wrote stories spanning nine generations, from 1751 to 1993, Monroe County, West Virginia, to Webster County, Nebraska. Click here to read the introductory chapter.

Threshold earned the award for Outstanding Thesis in the College of Fine Arts and Humanities at the University of Nebraska-Kearney. This review by Robert Luscher, author of In John Updike: A Study of the Short Fiction among other titles,served as the book’s nomination letter. The linked review by Professor Emeritus Charles Peek was  published in the Nebraska Center For the Book Newsletter, page e, Linda Hasselstrom, author of Windbreak: A Woman Rancher on the Northern Plains, wrote a review that appeared on the Amazon.com book page.

Threshold: A Memoir is currently available free throughout the month of July, in ebook form, during the Smashwords summer sale. You will also find it in ebook and paperback format at Amazon and Barnes and Noble as well as most online ebook sellers.

The War Back Home  This excerpt aired on radio station KZUM. It came out of a couple of days reading microfilm at the home town library in Blue Hill. Click here for the podcast.

If you like to browse your book before you buy it, and you live in Nebraska, you can ask for Threshold at any of these retailers: the Bookworm and Our Bookstore in Omaha; Francie and Finch in Lincoln; The Sequel in Kearney; and A to Z Bargain Books in North Platte as well as a number of Nebraska libraries.