Chris McClelland, multiple award-winning short story writer and novelist

This summer I have been working on two book projects concurrently.  One is the upcoming novel you all are already getting familiar with through my earlier posts on this blog.  The other I have not spoken publically of before now.  That second project is a small book of poetry, a chapbook if you will, of poems mostly on the theme of my moving out West from the East coast and all the changes those things have worked deeply inside me.  The title of the poetry book is Come West: Secular and Sacred Poems, and it has a kind of "Cowboy Poet" flavor to it in many places. One published work that has already been on the internet is a poem that first appeared in The Beatnik Cowboy last year.  It is called "Hot Sand" and the poem below is just as it first appeared in Beatnik Cowboy last August. Hot Sand   The gusts blast like furnace-fire In this desert land, And never does the heat seem more oppressive Than now, An oven-blast and a scorched-earth policy. Such an arid ...

  The Battle of Gallipoli   Mid-way through the First World War, the Allies found themselves fighting the Germans and Turks in a part of Turkey called Gallipoli.  There was a movie version devoted to this battle that was released in the early 1980s and it starred a very young Mel Gibson.  In fact, it was his break-out role around the same time as Mad Max was released.  The movie was the story of two young men, both excellent athletes, sprinters, in fact.  As I was a sprinter in the pool the first time I saw this movie (See my collection Swimming Among the Olympians, or look me up at the SwimSwam website:   https://swimswam.com/swimming- among-the-olympians-a-memoir/   ), I particularly related to the themes of boyhood friendship and fellow athletes going to war. As I remember, Gibson’s character and the other young man were two of the best sprinters in Australia at the time, and naturally, the commanders pick one of them to be a “runner” for ...

Hey Readers! Here is some background information on the "Lost Battalion" the unit that the fictional Hyrum Fratelli fights in during World War I.  This is the backdrop for the first section of my new novel:  Contrition .   https://www.theworldwar.org/learn/about-wwi/hells-half-acre-true-story-lost-battalion-robert-laplander

An excerpt from my future novel, Contrition Wartime London swirled with misty fog, grim and surreal, ghastly, a place for the dead and near dead to nestle in dark corners and shadows.   The city was what it looked like: a sepulcher town of ghosts and spirits, a haunted place.   A bleak, desolate place, devoid of vigor and covered from corner to corner with a torpor of the dead, newly dead and dead in spirit for time unmeasured.  Those not dead and haunting the city were ambulatory and horribly disabled.  Nearly all the men in the streets carried with them limbs maimed like those of ill-used toy soldiers and those who weren’t maimed seemed chastened and empty-eyed.  An unnatural amount of young women were dressed in black, heavy-lidded with blood-shot eyes, and by this stage in the war, in the late summer of 1918, the whole city seemed to be suffering from severe melancholia and exhaustion.   Everyone would simply whisper to no one in particul...