About Morgan’s Pasture

“ARSON SUICIDE IN THE SIERRAS—THREE DEAD”

“The headline screams up at me from the concrete stoop and at first I can’t bring myself to pick up the paper. It’s insane, but I feel if I leave it there, what I fear to be true will remain just that, a fear.”

Child psychologist Will Border retreats to the summer of his thirteenth year after a traumatic event forces him to reexamine childhood events and the choices he made in becoming a man. A period piece set in 1950s rural America, Morgan’s Pasture guides young adult readers in examining their own roles in life as they develop into loners, followers, or even reluctant leaders like Will. With one eye on child psychology and the other on plain common sense, Morgan’s Pasture offers a unique perspective on the growth of a boy and the longing of a man for a mythic peaceful pasture, not as a place to live, but as a reason to.

About the Author

Employed from the age of twelve, Wallace J. Swenson swept floors and cleaned pool hall spittoons during his rural Idaho boyhood, and was a meteorologist and computer systems specialist during his twenty years in the U.S. Air Force. He supervised a 911 center for a few years and then designed, built, and managed an Emergency Operations Center at a nuclear testing facility for another half-dozen years. An award-winning poet, novelist, and short-story writer, he lives and works where he grew up. Morgan’s Pasture is Swenson’s first published novel.