“Unmasked: A 90 Day Journey For The Traumatized Heart”

Chico Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist Natalie Stromberg (natalierstromberg.com), with a Master’s degree in Psychology from Chico State, knows the reality of trauma. During a missions trip to Thailand for her church, she spoke with human trafficking survivors. “I encountered a familiar brokenness in their stories,” she writes, “one that mirrored my own wounds from years of silenced trauma, cycles of revictimization, and a childhood marked by sexual abuse.”

In “Unmasked: A 90 Day Journey For The Traumatized Heart” ($15.99 in paperback, independently published; also for Amazon Kindle), Stromberg has written a deeply insightful Christian devotional filled with compassion, gentleness, and love. Each short entry offers a reflection on a key Bible verse and a prayer for the day. Slowly, slowly, day by day, the reader is asked to “look beneath the masks that once kept you alive.”

She writes “to the wounded inner child who walked these ninety days with trembling hands and guarded hope—you did not walk alone.”

“Trauma,” Stromberg writes, “often convinces us that we are invisible, unheard, or unworthy of care. Yet God turns that lie on its head. He does not dismiss your wounds or rush you past your grief. He bends low, draws near, and honors the depth of your sorrow. His presence does not erase your past, but it redeems it, weaving even your most hidden anguish into His story of love and healing.”

Trauma, Stromberg says, lives in one’s mind, body, and spirit. In a personal reflection, she notes that “Therapy became a sacred place for me to gently challenge” the lies trauma tells. “The body remembers what the mind tries to forget. I discovered that healing required movement, breath, gentleness….” And her spirit—“the deepest place—needed permission to trust again. Scripture, prayer, and honest conversations with God reminded me that I was never abandoned, even when it felt that way. God met me not in perfection, but in presence.”

The book focuses on that deepest place. “The chains of trauma, shame, and fear do not have the final say—Jesus has set you free, and now,” she writes, “you walk in the unstoppable power of that freedom.” 

“Lilith And The Holey Man”

Sam Smith, computer programmer, finds himself at Museo del Prado in Madrid viewing Hieronymus Bosch’s extraordinary triptych, The Garden of Earthly Delights—“full of naked figures, fantastic creatures, and giant strawberries and birds which were symbols of sexuality, and imagery that has entertained and confounded viewers across five centuries.”

He notices a young woman on a nearby bench. “It was hard to ignore what was obviously very long red hair stacked atop her head like a malformed mound of cotton candy held together with a trio of chopsticks.” And, Sam adds, “I have an attraction—my friends say fatal—to red haired women.”

So begins the propulsive story of “Lilith And The Holey Man” ($13.99 in paperback, independently published; also for Amazon Kindle) by Chico writer/photographer Doug Keister, his forty-ninth book. It is love at first sight; a kind of lightning bolt hits them both, and soon the mysterious woman, whose name may be Lilith, is in Sam’s hotel room, lying atop him, as both experience transcendent sex.

Earlier, looking at the section of the Bosch painting depicting Hell, Lilith tells Sam, “I think human beings are full of holes. All of us…. I think a lot of people are afraid of loving someone then being rejected, so they fill their love hole with things like money and power and control…. And random sex.”

The two are drawn to the legend of Lilith from a medieval Jewish text called the Alphabet of Ben-Sira, where God creates Adam’s first wife, Lilith, not from his rib but from the dust of the earth, like Adam. The two are equal, but soon quarrel, and Lilith disappears. Legend makes her the “other,” Eve the subservient one.

Lilith leaves Sam’s room to attend to an errand, but never returns. What follows are alternating chapters as both Sam and Lilith attempt to find each other with little to go on. Years pass, but Keister has a lightning bolt or two left to throw. 

Afterward, the author chats with the reader, showing how Bosch’s painting may point to Lilith; opening up the legend all the way to Cheers; and how the holey in all of us might be filled.

“Midstream: A Life Remade In 50 Swims”

Sacramento writer Kate Washington (kawashington.com), who grew up in Chico, detailed in her book “Already Toast: Caregiving And Burnout In America” how suddenly, unexpectedly, she had to become the caregiver for her husband Brad, whom she married in 1999, after he faced aggressive lymphoma in 2014; in his mid-40s, he needed a stem-cell transplant. 

Now the rest of the story. Though Brad survived, the marriage did not. A year-and-a-half away from her 50th birthday, Washington writes that her life “felt constrained and constraining, dull and joyless, full of doing for others while neglecting myself.”

So she “hatched the idea for what I came to call the 50 Dunks Project. My plan was to get in fifty different natural bodies of water before turning fifty in October 2022…. However I got in the water, I hoped it might dissolve my midlife stagnation.” The liberation process is told in “Midstream: A Life Remade In 50 Swims” ($27.95 in hardcover from Beacon Press; also for Amazon Kindle).

Both Kate and Brad were PhD’s with English degrees and they had two daughters. Kate was devastated when her mother died by suicide, and Brad’s new job meant Kate had to take on childcare responsibilities. And Brad’s cancer did not so much as change everything, but revealed a dark truth: “Our tendrils were diverging well before Brad was sick, with separate interests and the pull of careers, but afterward it was like we were strangers.”

During the Dunk Project (and counseling) it became clear the marriage wouldn’t survive. All 50 swims are listed, though only some key encounters with the freeing waters are given in the chapters. Dunks include Salmon Hole in Upper Bidwell Park; Bear Hole; One Mile; Butte Creek. “I had become embodied again,” she writes, “after years of alienation.”

With great insight, Washington confronts “my fears and dissatisfaction with myself and my choices.”

Kate Washington is Nancy Wiegman’s guest on Nancy’s Bookshelf on Northstate Public Radio, mynspr.org, Wednesday, July 15 at 10:00 a.m., repeated Sunday, July 19 at 8:00 p.m. The Bookstore in downtown Chico will be holding a creekside book launch party and author signing July 23; contact the store for details. 

“Race To Resurrection: A WWII Historical Thriller”

Northstate author Doug Aiken “started writing in his sixties…. His father served in WWII and while he returned home, he died a few short months later,” leaving Aiken, according to an author’s note, with “a ghost for a parent and a lifetime of unanswered questions.” So, over almost a decade, he imagined the fragments of history he had about his father showed not a mythical hero but rather a complicated man far removed from myth.

The invasion of Normandy in June 1944 did not end the war in Europe, yet D-Day was a turning of the tide toward an Allied victory. Aiken imagines a young man, Lieutenant Henry Anderson, contributing his part in a super-secret operation beginning in 1943. He abandoned his pregnant wife for the good of the cause and, decades after the war, returned to Wisconsin under the strangest of circumstances to introduce his son, now grown, to the father he never knew.

The story is told in “Race To Resurrection: A WWII Historical Thriller” ($14.99 in paperback from RO Publishing; also for Amazon Kindle). Germany’s V-2 rocket program at Peenemünde, being developed by scientists including Wernher von Braun, threatens the Allies with destruction. Security at the facility is overseen by SS-Oberführer Wolfgang Korbach and, it turns out, Henry Anderson, who speaks fluent German taught him by his grandmother, looks exactly like Korbach.

The plan is Mission Impossible audacious: Spend weeks training Anderson to “become” Korbach, matching all his little behavioral quirks, and then, since Korbach was recovering from shrapnel wounds at a facility in Portugal, switch him out, so that the Korbach that returned to Peenemünde was really Anderson. Against all odds, it works. Though Korbach is a notorious womanizer, Anderson vows to remain true to his wife and son, though she had been told he had been killed. Yet all bets are off when he meets 23-year-old French national co-worker Angelique Dubois.

The ethical quandary will hold readers spellbound in this mesmerizing tale which, 45 years later, will see Henry, and Wolf, show up in Wisconsin at Henry’s grandson’s wedding, each claiming to be the real Henry. 

Full of surprises, Aiken has written an unputdownable tale.

“Ode To Hemingway: Three Stories And Ten Poems”

Ernest Hemingway, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954, made his literary debut in 1923 with “Three Stories And Ten Poems.” He was unable to accept the Prize in person after surviving “two plane crashes in two days in the elephant country of Uganda,” resulting in a concussion from which he never recovered.

Retired Chico State business professor Curt DeBerg (curtdeberg.com) has spent decades on Hemingway’s trail, visiting the writer’s haunts around the world, detailing his many demons. Now living in Hendaye, France, DeBerg, 70, suffered his own plane crash in 2016: “I was pulled from the wreckage with a leg that would never fully heal.”

Rather than a memoir of the crash, DeBerg has crafted what he calls “a ledger of survival,” an homage to his favorite writer. “Ode To Hemingway: Three Stories And Ten Poems” (available in Amazon Kindle format from Paul Adrian Books), with sketches by Tony Ridgway, expresses not disillusionment with a world war (as Hemingway did), but rather with “the polarization of modern political rifts and the slow, grinding recovery of the body.”

The stories are very short, dark, death imbued. In an Interlude DeBerg defends his love of Hemingway’s writing, despite what critics might say (“Don’t let others tell you what should make you happy”). The poems (with explanatory notes) evoke emotional moments in DeBerg’s life, like when his brother, who he felt “small” around, showed up for him after his plane crash, which “changed something between us.” 

“Then the sky fell./ The plane went down in a Polish field./ The twisting carnage of the cockpit/ Broke the bones but hardened the spirit./ And you were there….”

In 2021, DeBerg “discovered that a Franciscan sister had preserved a copy of ‘The Old Man and the Sea’ bearing what are believed to be the last words Hemingway ever wrote—a personal inscription to the nun who cared for him in his final months.” DeBerg carried the book to the Nobel Prize Museum in Stockholm “and spoke at the ceremony” covered by the New York Times.

Two lives, intertwined, but with a significant difference. DeBerg’s “Ode” refuses to follow the way of despair.

“Tell The Chickens It’s Time For Bed”

“Grandma Nancy” (Nancy Pattison) has deep roots locally. She grew up in Chico and writes me that her father Bill worked with Sierra Gold Nurseries and her mother Maggie worked at Chico State Student Government. Nancy graduated Pleasant Valley High School in 1973. 

Now living in Talent, Oregon she has written “The Norse Prophecy Series” under the name Anna Pattison and, for kids, “Grandma Nancy’s Red Barn” coloring book and the picture book “Tell The Chickens It’s Time For Bed” ($13 in softcover from Berkano Books LLC), whimsically illustrated by Gwendolyn Janke, whose muted colors suggest the sun is going down.

The book uses the idea that all sorts of animals “who bring eggs into the world” need time to rest. In just a few bold words on each page, Pattison aims to snare young readers (or listeners) with the rhythm of the words, over and over, helping them see that night is approaching for them as well. They can act like all these other curious creatures and welcome sleep. 

“Tell the chickens it’s time for bed,” the book’s first page begins, with the second continuing: “they laid their eggs, now they can lay their heads” (flip to the next two pages) “Dow-Ow-Own Upon their feather beds.”

Sure enough, the full-page drawing shows a simple bed with a chicken roosting on top, obviously snoozing, with a few feathers (okay, a lot of feathers) wafting in the air. Colors are in the darker shades. You can see the moon and stars.

Next, the salmon, “having laid their roe” can now lay their heads “Dow-Ow-Own Upon their water beds.” The full page water bed never looked so inviting.

Then follow the bees, the seahorse, the cobras, the chameleon, the toucan” and—well, the kids: “Tell the children it’s time for bed. They’ve played today, now they can lay their heads “Dow-Ow-Own Upon their night-time beds.” (The little beds under the big tent seem quite cozy.)

There’s also a translation of the first four pages into musical notation, written by Nancy Chew, arranged by Chuan Choy, encouraging children to go “Dow-Ow-Own” into bed. All in all, an egg-celent idea, pairing giggles with bedtime. 

 

“The Psychic On The Jury: A Mel Walker Story”

When I met Sacramento-based writer and software engineer Brian C.E. Buhl at the Paradise Chocolate Festival, I figured he’d already know my name—not because of my fame as a columnist (ahem), but for his chronicling of a group of psychics called The Society of Supernatural Investigations—maybe he was one of them. If so, he held that fact close to his vest. Actually, upon further investigation, the group turned out to be fictional, emanating from Buhl’s novel called “The Repossessed Ghost.”

A key character from that novel is central to “The Psychic On The Jury: A Mel Walker Story” ($5.99 in paperback from Water Dragon Publishing; also for Amazon Kindle). Mel (short for Melchizedek) is a psychic, one who can see the past (unlike another psychic he meets who can see the future—with devastating consequences, but that’s looking ahead). 

When Walker gets a jury summons to appear in a Sacramento courtroom, “I spent the weekend worrying about it…. Serving on the jury itself isn’t such a big deal, but I had run-ins with the law. I had been a ‘person of interest’ in a murder, which I think is just a fancy way of them saying I was the suspect. What if showing up brought all those legal headaches back to the surface?”

That doesn’t happen but maybe something worse does. Walker is seated, Juror Number One, in a capital murder case. “They had me, a psychic that can talk to ghosts, sitting as a juror in a murder case. Incredible…. If they had the murder weapon and they let me touch it, I could pull a vision from it and tell them not only who the murderer was, but what they were thinking as they were doing it.”

One David Gomez is charged with stabbing his best friend to death after an argument. Long story short (the book is really a long short story), Mel can “see” who actually did it (not Gomez) but can he convince the jury? And what about the actual perp, who is in the courtroom? What will happen?

There’s not a ghost of a chance I’m going to tell you.