Jim Stallings and iUniverse Publishing officially announced today the release of his seventh published book, a volume of haiku poetry, Dispatches from Tumbleweed.
A long-absent traveler's return from the snowy north-lands to sunny San Antonio, the capital of South Texas and Northern Mexico, inspires Dispatches from Tumbleweed. This "rolling stone" poet and his wife settle in a San Antonio urban barrio he whimsically nicknames Tumbleweed and through eighty-four prismatic haiku records his first year's impressions for amigos left behind throughout America.In the generation the couple has been away, San Antonio, named for the patron saint of lost things and souls, has exploded into a large complex urban circle absorbing the new but holding onto the old. Here contemporary residents regardless of origin can find and celebrate the fiesta of their true selves and their common humanity.
Dispatches from Tumbleweeds looks at life in the border region of San Antonio and South Texas through the prism of the Japanese haiku and finds nature transcending and unifying our conflicting human dualities. The haiku is a Japanese poetic form made of seventeen syllables, usually unrhymed, and arranged in three lines of 5, 7 and 5 syllables. Traditionally the haiku focuses on direct perceptions of nature; here the poetic field notes incorporate the psychological readjustments of people on the move as well as natural history insights of South Texas.
The author Jim Stallings has long had a fascination with the beauties and ruggedness of Texas natural and cultural history. He grew up in a military family and first lived here in the late 1950s at Randolph AFB when his father was learning to fly refuelers for SAC bombers during the Cold War. During his college years in the Sixties he visited South Texas many times to see his fianceé and later wife, Laurie Steinmeyer; her father Dr. George Steinmeyer taught American history at Texas A&I in Kingsville (home of the King Ranch). The family made numerous trips to San Antonio and to the Border towns along the Rio Grande.
In the Seventies Jim, his wife Laurie, and daughter Kathryn returned for a period of anthropological fieldwork based out of San Antonio that lasted from 1978-1981. Their research focused on residential treatment of multi-ethnic, displaced children. San Antonio held a population of about 750,000 people when Jim and his family moved to Boston in 1981 to continue research on residential care of children. Today it has nearly doubled that population a great burst of economic growth.
In 2005 Jim and Laurie moved back to San Antonio after almost twenty-five years in the Boston area. They were now home-based editors for a publishing company and able to work remotely from San Antonio. They came back for the sun, the life style and the multi-ethnic pleasures of this crossroads city and region.
Jim Stallings is an anthropologist, writer and editor. His other books include Tales for Commuters & Other Time Travelers; Hunters in the Fog: War Diary to Screenplay; Neon Nirvana: A Romance of the New Age; the New England mystery, Devil's Hopper; the detective mystery novel The Latest Bloodshed about the Deep South's drug wars and social conflicts; and an escape suspense novel about the Grand Canyon, Getting To Know You. See his website: http://www.jimstallings.com for more on his bio, philosophy, other works and contact info.