The year is 1963, as social unrest, riots, and mayhem infect a troubled nation. In its midst, two under-age teenagers meet and fall in love. This is an improbable coming-of-age story about race, bigotry and hatred, and the destruction it brings to a tiny plantation town. It's the story of two adolescents from the darkest regions of the Old South, one black and one white, both finding love for the very first time, joining together with all the lust and fury of a nuclear bomb. It's a story of contrasts in the extreme, between rich and poor, north and south, those that have, and those that have not, a story concerning two families. From the northern and more prosperous region of Arkansas, an upper-middle-class white family, transplanted denizens of the Old South, find themselves caught in the civil rights movement of the early 1960's, taking sides against the populous of a small southern town, its roots planted deep within the traditions and grandeur of Dixie. Through a series of uncontrollable events, this white family experiences firsthand the painful repercussions of their actions, in attempting to do the "right thing" by breaking with century-old traditions of discrimination, segregation, and bigotry-putting truth into the notion that, "no good deed goes unpunished." On the flip side of the story, a poor black family of former sharecroppers, barely making it in the delta region of Arkansas' intensely segregated south, discovers that the coming of age for teenagers of any race is not an easy rite of passage and, in some instances, is virtually impossible to survive. The story culminates with an unexpected twist involving truth, family lineage, and the lethality of misplaced romance.
About the Author: R. Michael Walden is an award-winning architect whose career encompasses many different design disciplines, including architecture, interiors, graphics and CGI, the latter for both cinema and television. Michael has taught courses in drawing and sketching at UCLA's Extension for the Visual Arts and now, when time allows, he enjoys writing feature-length scripts, short stories and novels. A Summer's Sojourn is the second installment in a triptych of stories, all gothic, set deep in the south, and all taking place during the turbulent decades of the 1950s and 60s. He lives in Southern California with his wife and two children.