A Place to Rest - Miller, Tom

. .

Résumé :
A Place to Rest is a journey of discovery through the rapidly changing landscape of the post-World War II American South as viewed from the perspective of best friends, Mildred Morgan and Janet Bell. The pair grew up together in rural Grover's Fork, Alabama, and remained inseparable through college, despite having little in common. Mildred is the classic wallflower-soft-spoken, malleable, and emotionally fraught. Janet is outspoken, iconoclastic, and highly ambitious. After college, the two part ways. Mildred returns to Grover's Fork, where she becomes a high school librarian. Living at home and socially adrift, she marries a fellow teacher and starts a family. Her carefully constructed safe harbor is shaken by the mysterious disappearance of her husband, and she turns to her young son, James, for emotional ballast and meaning. Janet lands a job as a reporter for the Montgomery Observer and settles in the state capital where she covers the Civil Rights movement as a Pulitzer-Prize-winning journalist. Even as her professional career flourishes, she remains vaguely unsatisfied. Despite their geographical separation and different paths, both are buffeted by the winds of change sweeping through the South in the 1950s. Sharing their hopes and fears, dreams and nightmares, triumphs and tragedies in a vivid and unsparing correspondence, Mildred and Janet continue to navigate a journey to find meaning and hope in an indifferent world.

Biographie:
A modern Renaissance man, Tom Miller's media career has spanned six decades as a producer, director, art director, and philosopher bringing energy, originality and creativity to all he touches. After graduating from Carleton College with a B.A. in art with distinction in 1957, he attended the Cinema School at USC in Los Angeles, where he wrote, produced and directed one of the first student theatrical films ever made at the school. That set the tone for his subsequent work with the famous designer, Saul Bass, as a cameraman experimenting with innovative creative mixes for live action sequences for major film titles. His love of metaphysics, mystical Christianity and his search for self-realization next led him to join the staff of the Summit Lighthouse in 1964 as an art director working with his gurus, Mark and Elizabeth Prophet. In those years he attempted to thin the veil between heaven and earth with graphic arts, videos and musical compositions. David Tame in his book, The Secret Power of Music, hailed Tom as a unique composer [who] has brought forth several tone poems which truly deserve to be called New Age music. Following those 18 years, he partnered with Douglas Kenyon, publisher of Atlantis Rising magazine, where Tom created numerous artistic covers on many unique and dynamic topics. And together they created three major documentaries dealing with such special subjects as Atlantis and clean energy. Also, early in the revolution from film to digital video, Tom pioneered the use of personal computers to develop broadcast quality animation and won some awards in the process. International travel to sacred sites has taken him to every continent where he chronicled his journey through the eye of his camera. In 2010 he lived in Taiwan with his wife for a year creating mini travel documentaries and absorbing the essential elements of traditional and modern Chinese culture. To this day, Tom continues to work long hours creating art, music, and video in his home studio in addition to writing his memoirs chronicling his years with the spiritual leaders, Mark and Elizabeth Prophet.