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Susan Carnes grew up on a Wisconsin dairy farm on the south shore of Great Lake Superior, and already at age 10 could turn square corners with a tractor while cutting hay, gentle and race horses, play Rachmaninoff on the piano, and get some blue ribbons for her artwork at the fair. An avid skier and skater during the winter months, her best times were on the rivers, canoeing, fishing and swimming. She loved to read stories and direct plays. After a degree from Iowa State University, she married, taught school and earned two Master's Degrees while farming and raising three sons. Susan counseled in addiction programs, practiced art therapy and biofeedback in chronic pain centers, and later became a school counselor in Oregon. When she moved toward retirement in Washington State, Susan coordinated 4-H on 5 islands, went back to school, mastered stained glass techniques, continued hobbies of dancing and white water rafting, and then she got busy.
While spending winters in Mexico, Susan joined the Mazatlan Writers Group and wrote her first book, My Champion, about a 10 year old girl who didn't appreciate what she had. She illustrated it with 21 oil paintings and used her grandchildren as models. "Writing for me is like putting together pieces of my own life and making sense of it," Susan says. Her second book, The Way Back is about the struggles of a World War 1 vet to deal with PTSD forged in the trenches of France.
Reviewed by Rich Follett for Readers' Favorite
The Way Back: A Soldier’s Journey by S.K. Carnes tells the story of John Chapman, a World War I veteran with PTSD and a poet’s soul. He finds work as a farmhand with a dairy farming family who, in their own stalwart, beholden-to-no-one way, help him find the ‘way back’ to wellness and a happy life. The narrative is a kind of historical/poetic frame story, weaving together the lives of three generations of characters through the central prism of Chapman’s journal, found in a barn being torn down in present day Wisconsin and lovingly shared by the author as a tribute to Chapman.
The Way Back: A Soldier's Journey alternately features lush and lyrical narration, Chapman’s poems (copied from his journal), carefully researched historical and cultural references from World War I through the Great Depression and the dawning of World War II, and colloquial Wisconsin dialogue that is as heartwarming and educational as it is funny in that particularly wry Midwestern way that can only be depicted accurately by a native. S.K. Carnes is a gifted writer at the top of her game, capturing the images and episodes of an era and a heartland lifestyle that is rapidly vanishing from the American consciousness with a clarity and poetic vision that render the narrative unique and compelling. In an early glimpse of Chapman, Carnes describes her quiet hero as having “Muckelty-dun eyes rimmed in blue ... eyes of that color could steal your heart away.” Prose like that does not come along every day!
The Way Back: A Soldier’s Journey has something to please any reader - romance, history, adventure, drama, poetry, a quietly epic feel, a magnificently rendered landscape, and eclectic characters unlike any of the ‘ho-hum’ heroes of lesser fiction. Having once entered John Chapman’s world, readers will want to linger, holding close one of the most pure-of-heart and earnestly crafted narratives in recent memory.
