The Green Path

by Steven Clark

"Birds have nests, men have ancestors..."
So says Ngo, a writer of children's books, a man crippled from a war wound in his native Vietnam. In 1981, he and three people in central Missouri are haunted by visions of their past that swirl amidst a pacific, staid college town surrounded by waves of cornfields. Ngo's best friend is Judith Vogel, a teacher who is in stasis after the oppression she saw in Guatemala.
Judith loses herself visiting an abandoned cemetery, many of whose graves are those of German settlers massacred by Confederate guerrillas in the last autumn of the Civil War. Judith befriends Concepcion, a Guatemalan piano student who has come to Missouri to study music...study which helps fight off traumatic nightmares Concepcion has about a massacre she witnessed in her country; a memory that becomes a struggle between her Mayan birth and the potential to be healed by music.
Jonathan Amesbury runs the small-town college newspaper while he decides whether to return to London or save his family's decaying mansion. His ancestor was the officer who led the massacre of the Germans, and he enlists an uneasy Judith to discover the secret of Concepcion's angst. This determined, haunted quartet interact in their struggle to find closure from war.

This is an Amazon reprint of the original 2012 novel.

289 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2012

About the author

When did I begin telling stories? Probably when I was a child and, late at night before the blue TV screen (I was born in 1952, so this was in the fifties), Mother was tired of telling me stories so I told her my own as ice tinkled in our tea glasses, and she lay back on the sofa to listen, pillows and blankets nestled around her. She slept on the sofa a lot. it was a tepid marriage.
Before I set pen to paper, a lot of things happened. I did the kid thing. I got an education, went to college for awhile, joined the army and went to Germany. I finished my B.A. at the University of Missouri-St. Louis in 1980, and became, as a bilious old man said to me one night in the shadows of a Civil War re-enactment, another goddamned English major who thinks he's a writer. I was always an avid reader, but I read more. I observed. Examined. I worked for a couple of police departments, became a cubicle guy (bleeah!), was in the National Guard, went to grad school but came to my senses and quit, then began writing...and rewriting, getting rejected, and writing again.
Samuel Johnson said the purpose of literature is to entertain and teach. I try to do both, but my big task is to keep you interested so you'll keep turning the page or scroll down.
I'm eclectic. I've written short stories, novels, plays, screenplays, memoirs. In 1985 my play The Love Season won a national award. My stories have appeared in Black Oak Presents, Mozark Press, UMSL Litmag, and a story of mine won honorable mention in a Glimmertrain contest. My adaptation of the 1799 gothic novel Edgar Huntly was a finalist in the 2012 St. Louis Cinemaspoke screenwriting contest. In 2014, my screenplay Searching for Jesse was a finalist in the Missouri Stories contest, earning me an internship with three pros from Hollywood. I do what I must to keep you turning the page, and to enjoy the worlds I've built with my words. Give me a try. Like Rick said in Casablanca, this could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship