Nuts! Our Backyard - Mark Wildermann

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Résumé :
Nuts! Our Backyard, A True Story, Mostly is a 20,000-word, 14-chapter story with 25 illustrations and 10 songs based on our rescue dog from the Bronx bringing a baby squirrel into our house on March 15, 2020 (the beginning of the pandemic). Story line -- Left homeless and alone to wander the streets of the Bronx, the sturdy, little Havanese Chow dog, Little Bear, faces the challenges of unfamiliar and sometimes unfriendly people, animals, and birds. In recognition of his destiny to help awaken the people and heal the Earth, he is knighted as Sir Little Bear by some strange, magical dog catchers and sent to Georgia and Mark's house in the suburbs. Sir Little Bear teams up with all the Critters and Birds in the backyard, and then he gets Rocky, aka The Rock, the Baby Squirrel into Georgia and Mark's house where they raise him until he's old enough to be on his own. Through Georgia's postings of Rocky's cute antics on social media, he becomes widely known and loved. The people awaken more to the Earth's environmental issues during the pandemic, which has exacerbated the division, isolation, confusion, and fear in the human community and has put the Earth itself at risk. All come together to heal in the end. ...

Biographie:
At the age of seventeen, Mark Wildermann left college to work on a freighter. He eventually returned to land and earned a B.A. in English, which qualified him to work as a high school special education teacher, real estate agent, baker, and truck driver. After taking some time to explore his career choices, he enjoyed a fine, long stint at a small liberal arts college where he wandered the grounds as a campus safety officer on weekends and tutored students in the writing center during the week. While there he earned an M.Ed. in mental health counseling, which led him to counseling adults and families. He presently tutors students of all ages in a great place just a few miles from our backyard in Connecticut, where he lives with his wife Georgia in a house that was once a boat that was hauled ashore in the 1880s. In between shipping out at seventeen and shipping in at seventy-one, along with other writings, he's published an article and written a stage play and an award-winning screenplay about the most famous woman in the nineteenth century, who drowned tragically at the age of forty in a shipwreck, just over the horizon from our backyard. You can often find him and Georgia in their backyard, with a bucket of nuts and seeds, watching Little Bear running around with the Critters and Birds.