The Past Not Taken

<p>We make history every day.  From one moment to the next our decisions-small and large-shape our future and as we travel along <em>that</em> path shape our past. How do we want it to read? Should we care? Or should we just get on with our lives and hope for the best? <em>The Past Not Taken</em> is three novellas that show that not all authorities are authoritative.</p><p><br></p><p><em>Two roads diverge in a yellow wood...</em></p><p>Two young people their lives stretching out ahead of them expect very different things out of life after college but their roads don't go that way. Curtis is a budding historian at a small university. Melanie is a friend-who-is-a-girl and she's in trouble. The kind of trouble that could get her father fired from the small straight-laced university. Melanie asks Curtis for help...sort of. Or did Curtis just offer? </p><p><br></p><p>In a small archive documents that could upend American history are found. Did Jefferson suggest that Washington was an ignorant bumpkin and that America bounded by the Constitution would fail?</p><p><br></p><p><em>The Past Not Taken</em> explores choices parenthood and responsibility and how history is written. Fair warning: it isn't <em>always</em> based on facts.</p><p><br></p><p><em>Two roads diverge in a yellow wood...</em></p><p>A young woman knocks on a stranger's door. Only she isn't entirely a stranger and she has nowhere else to go. Her story is inextricably linked with the family behind that door. But the institution that is their livelihood won't let her stay.</p><p><br></p><p>How authoritative are the documents that make up the basis of our history? Just because a document appears to be old and is in an archive does that make it proof of the past?</p><p><br></p><p><em>Daughter By Choice</em> <em>explores</em> how the past catches up to everyone. It also explores the nature of being a parent and how there's so many different kinds of families. It too speaks of how history is written and how the long-forgotten can become so important so fast.</p><p><br></p><p><em>Whereof what's past is prologue...</em></p><p>A man appears both known and unknown. He asks for little but that little means so much. He says a girl's future is in peril. And what he asks for can be simply devastating for everyone.</p><p><br></p><p>History likes to teach about turning points. 1776 is one for American history. But what if someone were to declare that <em>1619</em> was a more appropriate turning point and waves an archival document around to prove it? Is that document authentic? How do we know?</p><p><br></p><p><em>The Past and the Prologue</em> is a story of recurrence sources narratives what it is to be a parent and once again <em>how</em> history is written. </p><p><br></p><p>History is part legend part fact but mostly interpretation of those who have gone before us. We may <em>make</em> history but it's the authorities --the scribes and narrators of the future--who <em>write</em> it based on what we leave behind.</p>