Mental illness disrupts a Spanish family in New Mexico until a brave father steps forward

LAS VEGAS, N.M. — Sunbury Press has released Mela Suse Vigil Duran Carvalko’s memoir of her childhood titled Maybe Tomorrow.

About the Book:
A FAMILY THAT CONFRONTS THE FORCES OF MENTAL ILLNESS, AND LEARNS THAT NO BURDEN IS SO HEAVY AS TO DEFEAT AN ETERNAL LOVE.

Quite apart from other memoirs, the author captivates the reader’s attention, by painting a portrait of  mental illness through the eyes of a child.  As a child growing up during the 40s and 50s, in the rural Spanish farming communities of New Mexico/Colorado, she recounts her father’s courage and refusal to accept the finality of his wife’s mental illness,  and how he single-handedly raised four daughters, teaching them what it means to survive, drawing strength from the pride of self-worth, and the humility of self-reliance.

Excerpt:
I have come full circle to the land of my father’s birth, Rociada, New Mexico, where I breathe in the aspirations of my ancestors, where I hear the swish of their scythe against the wheat, their plough turning a stubborn, bounteous earth, where I see the rutted and hooved reliefs of wagons and beasts, burdens, which led directly to a remarkable life, one guided by a dream of an angel sitting on my shoulder, watching over me.

The screams frightened me beyond verbal description, but this fright was quickly supplanted by the even greater one of not knowing where I was going and what waited for me at the top. We climbed the metal grated stairs, each step causing vibrations that made me feel they would collapse at any moment. The higher we climbed, the louder the screams became. I was afraid to go on, but afraid of what was behind me. As we ascended, my heart beat faster with each step. I felt sick to my stomach wondering what evil waited for me, but I never complained, and did what was expected of me. By the age of three I had learned to control my emotions, and as I grew older, I found that self-control in the face of the unknown would help me survive.

As we neared the top, I could hear doors creak open in front of us and slam shut behind us. When we reached the final step, we came to a lobby with a long hallway. The door closings reverberated off the high ceiling and masonry walls; harsh lights overhead reflected off shiny, off-white, dirty-beige, and pea-green walls. The floors were covered with hard linoleum squares, worn, scuffed, and cracked, and though polished to a high sheen, every square was embedded with the dirt of half a century.

About the Author:
MELA SUŚE VIGIL DURAN CARVALKO has spent many years investigating the genealogy of Spanish families that settled in San Miguel/Mora counties, New Mexico. In addition to documenting her accounts of the life and times during the mid-twentieth century, she devotes time as an artist and musician. She studied art at Sacred Heart University and mentored under impressionist artist Albert Werner.  Currently she lives between New Mexico and the east coast with her husband, three cats and dog Leila.

Maybe Tomorrow
Authored by Mela Suse Vigil Duran Carvalko
List Price: $19.95
6″ x 9″ (15.24 x 22.86 cm)
Black & White on Cream paper
280 pages
Sunbury Press, Inc.
ISBN-13: 978-1620067079
ISBN-10: 1620067072
BISAC: Family & Relationships / Dysfunctional Families

Also available on Kindle

For more information, please see:
http://www.sunburypressstore.com/Maybe-Tomorrow-978162006…

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Cold case reopened in Alburquerque

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — Sunbury Press has released Dennis Herrick’s murder mystery novel A Brother’s Cold Case. The book had been previously self-published by the author.

About the Book:
When the murder of Andy Cornell’s brother is still unsolved after two and a half years, Andy enters Albuquerque’s hidden worlds of cartel violence, street people,  and Pueblo secrets to find justice.

He and Rick were inseparable as boys. So Andy is determined as a newspaper’s police reporter to help the cold-case unit find a breakthrough on the murder of his detective brother.

Andy’s ex-wife, a cold-case detective he once loved, a Pueblo tribal policeman, a college history professor, and a homeless drug informant seem unlikely allies. But they help Andy untangle conflicting details about his brother’s cold case.

To solve Rick’s murder, Andy must prove his own innocence when he becomes the suspect in the homicides of another man and a long-time reporter friend.

What Others Are Saying:
“A Brother’s Cold Case is timely and compelling. This story of a reporter’s search to connect a series of unexplained deaths before he becomes the next victim could have been ripped from newspaper headlines. Complete with a harrowing Sandia Mountain ambush, a life-threatening fire, and a long-surviving Pueblo Indian community with closely held secrets, this mystery will keep you up at night. Dennis Herrick’s new book is a good tale well told.” —Anne Hillerman, author of Spider Woman’s Daughter and Rock With Wings

Excerpt:
Taking another swig caused him to look up. That’s when he realized the man had turned to walk toward him.

“Beat it,” he ordered the man.

The man continued walking toward him. Rick slid off the picnic table bench and rose to his feet. He didn’t want to be sitting if it came to fighting for his booze.

The man stopped on the other side of the table. He wore dark clothes and stared at Rick from under the bill of a baseball cap pulled low over his eyes. His right arm extended toward Rick.

“What the hell you want?” Rick shook his doubled-up fists as a warning. “I told you to go away, you sonuvabitch. I mean it.”

The man seemed to smile as he stepped into a pool of light. Or was it a sneer? “Hello, Rick.”

Rick blinked. Another former cop? Not familiar. Who is this guy, Rick thought, and how does he know my name?

Rick grabbed his bottle and backed up a step. Now illumination from a park lamp glimmered on the steel pistol in the man’s right hand. A long sound suppressor extended from the barrel. With the table separating them, Rick couldn’t try to move closer and grab the gun as he’d been trained at the police academy years ago. Under the best of circumstances, that was hard to pull off anyway. Still, Rick thought, with the bourbon reassuring his brain of all things possible, maybe he could do it.

He moved sideways around the table to get closer. “Put the gun down,” he said as he took a step toward the man. He almost lost his balance, stepping sideways like that. “Put it away and just leave. We’ll pretend this never happened.”

Rick could see the man’s teeth gleam in the indirect light.

A rush, Rick thought. I’ll throw the bottle at him and rush him.

Rick was a split second from jumping at the man when his world ended.

About the Author:
Dennis Herrick writes mostly about the American Southwest, focusing on the Pueblo natives for his short stories, magazine articles, and his historical novel, Winter of the Metal People.

A Michigan native, he worked for and around newspapers all of his adult life as a daily newspaper reporter, a chief of staff handling press relations for a congressman, a weekly newspaper publisher and editor, a newspaper broker, and finally a full-time lecturer on journalism at the University of New Mexico.

He is a winner of the Tony Hillerman Mystery Contest and the Society of Southwestern Authors Contest.

He and his wife, Beatrice, have been married since 1967. They live along the west bank of the Rio Grande between Albuquerque and Santa Fe.

A Brother’s Cold Case
Authored by Dennis Herrick
List Price: $16.95
6″ x 9″ (15.24 x 22.86 cm)
Black & White on Cream paper
258 pages
Sunbury Press, Inc.
ISBN-13: 978-1620064795
ISBN-10: 1620064790
BISAC: Fiction / Mystery & Detective / Police Procedural

Also available on Kindle
For more information, please see:
http://www.sunburypressstore.com/A-Brothers-Cold-Case-978…

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Winter of the Metal People reviewed at the Historical Novel Society

Winter of the Metal People

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Despite the fact that so many public buildings, parks, and monuments throughout what is today America’s Southwest bear the name “Coronado,” Francisco Vásquez de Coronado’s 1540 expedition into that area was anything but successful. Searching for the fabled Seven Cities of Gold as far east as modern-day Kansas, Coronado’s expedition of Spanish conquistadores and their Aztec allies ran into the Puebloan tribes. Although the Spanish government had policies demanding the humane treatment of Indians throughout New Spain, Coronado’s foundering expedition treated the Puebloans ruthlessly in order to obtain food, clothing, and shelter. As a result, Coronado’s men became embroiled in a two-year-long war that eventually ended with the Spanish withdrawal back into Mexico; it would be almost fifty years before they returned.

Herrick fully enters the minds of his historical Spanish and Puebloan characters, showing the cultural and religious differences between the two cultures that would inevitably lead to the first Indian war. There is a saying that history belongs to the victors, so while much of the Spanish story is based upon historical written documents, the author had to imagine the Puebloans’ story. But his research is well founded, and what results is a balanced novel that expresses the worldviews of both sides and relates it in an exciting and interesting manner. This novel is highly recommended for those interested in the history of the American southwest and its native peoples.

Details

Publisher
Sunbury

Published
2013

Period
Colonial America

Century
16th Century

Price
(US) $16.95

ISBN
(US) 9781620062371

Format
Paperback

Pages
252

Review

Appeared in
HNR Issue 67 (February 2014)

Reviewed by
John Kachuba

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Dennis Herrick’s novel “Winter of the Metal People” recounts the Tiguex War

MECHANICSBURG, Pa. — Sunbury Press has released author Dennis Herrick’s novel “Winter of the Metal People – The Untold Story of America’s First Indian War.”

About the Book:
The first named war between the Europeans and the Native Americans was the nearly forgotten Tiguex War, which Spaniards and their Mexican Indian allies fought in 1540-42 against the Pueblo Indians along the Rio Grande, between present-day Albuquerque and Santa Fe in New Mexico.

This historical novel “Winter of the Metal People” presents the first account of the war written from the Puebloan point of view. It follows a young Pueblo warrior who reluctantly takes leadership of his people in a time of crisis, overcoming self-doubt to lead Puebloans in successful guerilla warfare against the Spaniards.

Praise for “Winter of the Metal People” and Dennis Herrick:
“A riveting historical novel of immense scholarship and insight. Dennis Herrick makes the story of the first American Indians in the West to face the military might of European forces as vivid and real as if Coronado’s expedition had ridden out of Mexico yesterday. Winter of the Metal People will forever influence your perception of the stunning landscapes and rich cultures of the Southwest.”
—Margaret Coel, author of Killing Custer

“In Winter of the Metal People Dennis Herrick, journalist and award-winning writer of fiction, offers us a consummately humane novel of the first encounters between Pueblo peoples of the Southwest and a European, African, and Native American expedition led by Francisco Vázquez de Coronado in the early 1540s. Herrick skillfully brings the Native side of those encounters into vivid focus. We are brought to imagine the complexity and variety of Pueblo reactions as they struggle to come to grips with the foreign presence and how it violently impacts their lives and traditions.”
—Richard Flint, Historian, Author of No Settlement, No Conquest: A History of the Coronado Entrada

“A vivid historical novel that brings to life the epic winter of 1540-41 as Spanish and Pueblo Indian worlds first collided. Herrick’s narrative—driven by extant annals of the Coronado expedition, recent archaeological research, and Pueblo accounts—is the closest we will ever get to standing on a hill above an ancient Pueblo community and witnessing the gritty reality of history. It is a masterful eye opener.”
—David E. Stuart, Professor of Anthropology, University of New Mexico
Author of Prehistoric New Mexico, Anasazi America, and The Ancient Southwest

“With Winter of the Metal People Dennis Herrick has peeled back the familiar to expose the fascinating. As he alternates viewpoints between Spanish conquistadors and the first Americans they found in thriving pueblos, Herrick provides essential reading for anyone who would understand the collision of cultures that defines so much of what see all around us today.”
Jim Belshaw, Author of Trickster in the Front Yard and Closing the Chart

Winter of the Metal People: The Untold Story of America’s First Indian War
Authored by Dennis Herrick
List Price: $16.95
6″ x 9″ (15.24 x 22.86 cm)
Black & White on Cream paper
252 pages
Sunbury Press, Inc.
ISBN-13: 978-1620062371
ISBN-10: 1620062372
BISAC: Fiction / Historical

For more information, please see:
http://www.sunburypressstore.com/Winter-of-the-Metal-Peop…

Soon to be available on Kindle, Nook, Sony Reader & Kobo

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