Free Passage

What price does war exact for freedom? This is war through the eyes of survivors amidst bloodied fields of victims.
Set during the Civil War, "Free Passage" tells interlinked stories of men, young women & children, whose lives are torn apart by War. Each of them flies
in the face of adversity & each triumphs, though in a very
different way. It begins with the tragedy of the Maguire twins
& introduces Girl, a deaf slave, who finds forbidden love
with a good man, her owner's son, only to have War wrench
them apart. She flees to seek freedom for herself & her
child in Canada. Migrant tinker, Herr Schmidt, seeks across
the war torn States to find his missing daughter, Mina,

finding instead a runaway slave & an orphaned boy caring for
his little brother. The War makes a man of the boy before his
time. Mina escapes her captors & lives by her wits, finding
her way to safety & a future she could once only dream.

EXCERPT, "Girl's Story," Wordgathering, Australia, Dec 2014 & no.71, 2015 Kaleidoscope, USA