Louella Bryant

Louella Bryant has won numerous awards for her short stories and poems.  She is the author of two young-adult historical novels. The Black Bonnet, finalist for the Vermont Book Award, and Father By Blood, winner of the Silver Bay Children's Literature Award, and a picture book, Two Tracks in the Snow. Louella teaches creative writing in the Spalding University MFA in Writing program in Louisville and mentors young writers at the New England Young Writers Conference at Bread Loaf. 

While in Darkness There is Light

Louella Bryant

Release Date: September 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0976899396

Price: $16.00

EBook Price: $7.99

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DESCRIPTION

Winner of the 2008 Southwest Writers Nonfiction Award
Also nominated for the 2008 Library of Virginia Nonfiction Award and the Devil's Kitchen Nonfiction Award
During the Vietnam War, a group of American friends carved their own path by dropping out of college and traveling to Australia, where they established an agrarian commune called Rosebud Farm. The friends, fueled by idealism and family wealth, committed themselves to farming, fishing, taking great risks, and dealing with the consequences of their choices, among those consequences the tragic death of twenty-four-year-old Charlie Dean.

 

ADVANCE PRAISE

"As much a chronicle of a lost time and generation, Louella Bryant’s While in Darkness There is Light is a gripping portrait of a valiant yet troubled group of idealists, free spirits, and the scions of the American aristocracy trying to navigate a turbulent time. Told in unadorned yet compelling prose, Bryant brings the reader on a journey from the prep schools of the East Coast to a commune in Australia and the jungles of Laos, and in doing so, creates a story that trades not in nostalgia but in inspiration." —Robin Hemley, Director of the University of Iowa Nonfiction Writing Program
"A bittersweet coming-of-age story that wanders from Harvard Yard to the Australian outback to the jungles of Laos, While in Darkness There is Light recaptures some of what was most inspiring and some of what was most heartbreaking about America in the early 1970s. This book is both a celebration and an elegy; it filled me with an enduring sense of wonder and of loss." —George Howe Colt, author of The Big House, 2003 National Book Award nominee
"This riveting book held me from start to finish. It’s a wonderfully researched story of idealism, a portrait of an era, and a narrative of unusual force that takes us into unlikely, dark, beautiful places. Louella Bryant has done an admirable job here, summoning an era of remarkable dreams. I won’t forget this book for a long time, if ever." —Jay Parini, author of The Apprentice Lover


REVIEWS

"Bryant succeeds admirably. While in Darkness not only relates the urgency of early adulthood, but also captures the idealism, turbulence and uncertainty of the 1970s. For readers who lived through the era, it’s an echo of a time invigorating and heartbreaking. More importantly, the book manages a quiet sense of modern relevance." Addison Independent