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Dear Reader,
What an honor to feature today's guest columnist, author Sigmund Brouwer, the best-selling author of nearly thirty novels, with close to four million books in print. Based on his inspiration for Thief of Glory, which Sigmund wrote as a way to learn and honor the his parent's stories, especially of his father's boyhood in a Japanese concentration camp, Sigmund leads The Chapters of Our Lives memoir seminars across the United States and Canada. His father plays the fictional role of Jeremiah in the book trailer at www.thiefofglory.com
Sigmund is giving away ten copies of Thief of Glory to readers who email him with questions at sbrouwer@me.com. Sigmund also loves the chance to visit book clubs as a way to help boys and girls with cleft palates receive a new smile: www.thiefofglory.com/book-club-readers
Welcome author Sigmund Brouwer to the book clubs...
A few months back during a visit with my parents, my father blurted, "Itchy knee, sun she go."
He smiled at my confusion, then continued, "Rock she chi, hat chi, coo ju."
I knew this was not Dutch, his original language.
"Huh," he said. "It's still with me."
His triumphant smile faded. "After all these years, I can still count."
Then I understood.
In his memory, he was a boy again, counting in Japanese. Those same words were in the draft of my novel he had just finished reading, but I had not known how those words were pronounced. Ichi for one, ni for two, and so on.
During World War II, women and children in Japanese internment camps in the Dutch East Indies, now Indonesia, had to endure daily roll call--tenko--and remain bowed as they counted out those numbers until the soldiers were satisfied that no one had escaped camp. Often, a woman or child would faint in the intense heat and humidity; this indignity was minor in comparison to the other horrors of camp.
Willem, my father, was seven when Japanese Imperial forces invaded the island. His own father died during the building of the Burma Railway, something he would not discover until the war ended three years later, when my father and his mother and siblings would board a ship for Holland, their only possessions the clothes they wore.
My inspiration for the novel was to learn more about my father by learning about the events that had formed him. My research was a combination of reading accounts of other survivors and trying to cajole my father for memories. Along the way, I discovered by sharing with him what I'd learned, he would open up more and share his own stories.
It was a process that helped me understand a core truth, that to be human is to tell stories, and that telling stories is what makes us human. In short, we are our stories. We connect by telling others our stories, but it's through listening that we truly bond.
--Sigmund Brouwer
Send Sigmund an email at: sbrouwer@me.com
Thanks for reading with me. It's so good to read with friends.
Suzanne Beecher
Suzanne@DearReader.com
AUTHORBUZZ: DUNGEON GAMES (Fiction) by Lexi Blake
Dallas cop Derek Brighton and PI Karina Mills have been circling each other for years. They have chemistry, but they also have a difficult history between them. When a killer targets Karina, Derek knows the time has come to deal with the fact that the perfect woman might have been in front of him all along.
Go to: http://authorbuzz.com/dearreader click on DUNGEON GAMES to find out more about the book and the author, Lexi Blake. Send her an email, she'd love to hear from you.
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