Dear Friends,
My new book, Annals of the Dear Unknown, a creative historical verse-tale, is now available for purchase at Amazon and Kelsay Books.
I look forward to hearing your comments on this unusual departure from my previous collections of lyric poetry.
I'll be reading and signing the book on September 18 at Nathan Denison House in Forty Fort, Pennsylvania, and hope that you'll consider attending the event.
To give you a sense of the background for my writing this book, below is the Author's Note, which appears at the beginning of the book:
Author’s Note
Rose’s people came from Connecticut.
That vague description of my great-grandmother, Rose Munson Chandler, as well as a sepia-toned family portrait of Rose sitting alongside her husband, Benjamin Chandler and their three sons, were all I knew as a child of my Munson family history. Like the protagonist in Thomas Campbell’s poem, Gertrude of Wyoming, I often thought about my “dear unknown” ancestors who had emigrated from Europe to Connecticut, and from there to Pennsylvania.
It wasn’t until the death of my father several years ago, when I took possession of an old tome titled The Munson Record, that the Munson ancestry came alive for me. In tracing my lineage, generation through generation, back to Captain Thomas Munson who, along with other Pilgrims, sailed to America in 1634, I came across the story of Rose’s great-great-grandfather, Obadiah (“Diah”) Munson, his wife Rachel Tyler Munson, and their twelve children.
I discovered that I was a descendant of one of those children, Walter Munson, who, with his older brother, Wilmot and other siblings, was part of a frantic departure from the town of Westmoreland at the time of the Battle of Wyoming in Wyoming Valley, Pennsylvania.
During this exodus, known as the Great Runaway, over two thousand frontier settlers were forced to abandon their farms, taking narrow Indian paths and rudimentary roads over mountains and through dense forest areas known as The Great Swamp and The Shades of Death as they made their way to safety hundreds of miles away. Others escaped in canoes and rafts, desperately paddling and poling downstream on the Susquehanna River to Fort Augusta and beyond.
The history of Wyoming Valley, Pennsylvania in the years prior to and during the Yankee-Pennamite Wars and the American Revolution is complex on many levels. It is not the purpose of this book to re-litigate the legal concept and cultural notion concerning the proprietary right of soil. It will not question the wisdom—or lack thereof—of the military decision made on July 3, 1778, nor will it dwell on or dispute conflicting, exaggerated and debunked accounts of the battle’s aftermath.
Rather, Annals of the Dear Unknown is simply an honest and plainly-told tale, written by someone who, in the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson in his essay History, has hoped to “attain and maintain that lofty sight where facts yield their secret sense, and poetry and annals are alike.”
—Catherine Chandler