9780578895918_

I am a retired Lutheran pastor who was born and raised in Mahnomen, Minnesota, a small town on the White Earth Indian Reservation.

Both of my parents grew up on family farms in Minnesota, and their first language was Norwegian. I believe my father would have been happy to make his living as a farmer, if he hadnt lost his legs in the Normandy Region of France, driving a tank during WWII.

With a 6th grade country school education, and two heavy wooden legs, my dad put on a suit, white shirt and tie and made his living as an insurance salesman.

My mother was a talented artist and homemaker who was on a diet for forty plus years, and yet she excelled in comforting her husband and two boys at mealtimes.

I am a past President of Screenwriters Workshop, a non-profit organization devoted to the professional development of independent screenwriters. I have also taught screenwriting and sold and/or optioned several screenplays. My poems have been published in a number of literary magazines; and my photographs are available for viewing and purchasing through Fine Art America. My non-fiction book, This Side of Paradise: The Religious World of Elijah Muhammad, was published in 2012 (XULON PRESS). My academic degrees include a B.A. in Religious Studies from Concordia College in Moorhead, Minnesota, and an M.A. in Islamic Studies and a Master of Divinity degree from Luther Seminary in St. Paul, MN.

The Suicides of Pastor Donnie Goodwin and the Chapel on the Hill is not an autobiographical novel; and yet it wouldnt be what it is if I had not grown up with a great love of the land, of family farms, small towns, country churches and ordinary people who struggle with the faith that endures, and with a God whose ways are mysterious and often hard to swallow. Sometimes the struggle is lost, and many are unable to find their way back home.

Pastor Donnie Goodwin had been living with suicide for over forty years, and he was sick and tired of it. Not only had his own life been damaged by suicide, but it was spreading throughout the country as if it had become a cure-all for the curse of the human condition.

Almost worse than suicide, however, was the story that many people tell themselves and others when they say (not knowing what else to say), Well, at least now theyve gone to a better place.

The time had come to stop sugar coating the comfort food that he had served to his congregation every Sunday for many years. And so it was, on a cold day in January, at Epiphany Hills Lutheran Church in rural New Oslo, Minnesota, that the old pastor told his congregation, with all the vigor of his much younger rabble-rousing years, that suicide does not bring to an end a poor souls suffering. Rather, its an act that extends ones suffering into eternity -- and its almost guaranteed to destroy the lives of loved ones who are left behind. He didnt say a word about the death of his father and his younger brother, Randy, who had both died in the old barn on the Goodwin family farm, twenty years apart. Those things he could talk about later, if anyone were so inclined. But when he left the church on that Sunday in January, he knew that he had set loose a shstorm among the old faithful, and a heavy price would have to be paid, no doubt. Donnie didnt know, however, that he had just preached his final sermon, nor that both he and his mother, Gloria would be dead within a few days. Nor could the old man have known that his beautiful, enigmatic, alcoholic, and agnostic wife, Kimberly would be the last Goodwin standing, and that she would build a chapel on the hill where the old barn once stood, until it burned to the ground with her beloved Donnie in it.

(*_*)9780578895918_

I am a retired Lutheran pastor who was born and raised in Mahnomen, Minnesota, a small town on the White Earth Indian Reservation.

With a 6th grade country school education, and two heavy wooden legs, my dad put on a suit, white shirt and tie and made his living as an insurance salesman.

My mother was a talented artist and homemaker who was on a diet for forty plus years, and yet she excelled in comforting her husband and two boys at mealtimes.

Almost worse than suicide, however, was the story that many people tell themselves and others when they say (not knowing what else to say), "Well, at least now theyve gone to a better place."

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Curtis J. Tilleraas