ABOUT THE FEATURED AUTHOR:
From the author’s website:
“I am a Timberwolf Pup. The daughter of a highly decorated World War II combat sergeant and a veteran of a war fought at home. Trained to be successful, secretive, and loyal, I earned a BA in English Literature at UC Berkeley, where my love of writing and reading began.
Since then, I’ve spent lots of time in writing groups, workshops, and coaching college-bound students. And I’ve witnessed the transformational power of storytelling in many lives, including my own. But we need safe places to be heard and felt so that we can dig down and unearth our deeper truths, which is why I started teaching. This is the type of storytelling that keeps me hooked on writing.
I spent over twenty years in the publishing industry, marketing and selling other people’s beautiful books, and now I have one of my own. My debut memoir, Little Avalanches (Regalo Press March 2024), winner of the Rubery Book Award for 2024 Nonfiction Book of the Year, is available in bookstores. I’ve made Portland, Oregon, my home. It’s where I live and write and play outside.”
ABOUT BECKY’S BOOK: Little Avalanches
A daughter’s quest for truth. A soldier’s fight for survival. Their shared search for understanding.
Little Avalanches is a gorgeously written memoir of breathtaking scope that propels readers from the beaches of California in the early ‘70s to the battlefields of World War II.
As a young girl, Becky is forced to hide from phantom Nazis, subjected to dental procedures without pain medication, and torn from her mother again and again. Growing up in the shadow of her father’s PTSD, she wants to know what is wrong but knows not to ask.
Her father won’t talk about being a Timberwolf, a unit of specially trained night fighters that went into combat first and experienced a 300 percent casualty rate. He returns home with thirteen medals, including a Silver Star, and becomes a doctor and well-respected member of the community, but is haunted by his past.
Seeing only his explosive and often dangerous personality, Becky distances herself from the man she wants to love. Yet on the eve of his ninetieth birthday, when Becky looks at the vulnerable man he’s become, something shifts, and she asks about the war. He breaks seventy years of silence, offering an unfiltered account of war without glory and revealing the extent of the trauma he’s endured. She spends the next several years interviewing, researching, and ultimately understanding the demons she inherited.
Because his story is incomplete without hers, and hers is inconceivable without his, Ellis offers both, as well as their year-long aching conversation marked by moments of redeeming grace. With compassionate, unflinching writing, Little Avalanches reminds us that we are profoundly shaped by the secrets we keep and forever changed by the stories we share.
AUTHOR VISITS:
Author visits with Becky are available via Adventures by the Book.