The Phoenix Sparrow: A Fable

by I.M. Tillerman

Overview

A brother and sister were inseparable in childhood on a South Dakota farm in the '50's when the untimely and tragic death of the sister tears them apart. But the sister soon returns from death to try to save her brother's life, and in the most unexpected way...

Product Details

BN ID:	2940043331304
Publisher:	SynergEbooks
Publication date:	08/10/2009
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

In 1944, I was born in South Dakota in my great-grandmother’s house. Most of my childhood was spent living on farms near Sioux Falls.

In the early 1970’s, after graduating from Augustana and Purdue, I was hired as a full-time English Instructor at a college in a suburb of Chicago and for twenty-nine years taught Composition and Literature there as a Professor in the English Department. I took early retirement and since then have been a serious author, having written six novels: The Phoenix Sparrow: A Fable, a tale of reincarnation; The Herbert Trilogy, a group of young adult fantasy/soft science fiction books, centering on an antique grandfather clock that is also a time machine; Teufel-Hunden: “Devil-Dogs,” an autobiographical novel about Marine Corps Boot Camp in 1962; and a novella, Not Look Back: A Memoir, a fictional retrospective about life on a South Dakota farm in the 1950’s.

In the early ‘60’s, while I was in the Marines, I married my high school sweetheart, and we had a daughter, who now has two children, my nifty grandkids. After my first wife died tragically, I later remarried. My wife and I have two teenage daughters.

The most profound literary influences on me as a writer are the very authors whom I taught to college students for three decades: Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, Fitzgerald, and Tennessee Williams. The two strongest literary influences on me, however, are the sublime poet, Emily Dickinson, and Hemingway, who wrote: “A writer should be of his great probity as a priest of God. He is either honest or not…, and after one piece of dishonest writing, he is never the same again” (Amen, Papa).