Jack's Alive

Something came down through the trees, cutting a path to the ground, coming straight for them.

Jack Kamping has spent his whole life burying people. Not from accidents. From things that came out of the woods, and from men who were never held to account.

Nobody ever believed him. So at fifty-seven he wrote it all down, called it fiction, and set up a camera in a tent in the Michigan woods. Two million people are watching him drink and swat mosquitoes. One of them asks if the flannel is a fashion statement. Forty years old, Jack tells them, and the best protection there is against mosquitoes and nosy squirrels.

Not one of them knows it's true.

He isn't out here to promote a book. He came back for the thing that started it, and he brought a crossbow.

Jerry Leake is an Associate Professor of Percussion at Berklee College of Music and the New England Conservatory. He leads the world-rock-fusion octet Cubist that performs compositions from his acclaimed 2010 debut CD. Jerry recently released his third Cubist CD, Prominence, where African songs and melodies are woven into contemporary designs. He is a founding member of the world-music ensemble Natraj and performs with Club d'Elf and the Agbekor Society. Jerry has written eight widely used texts on North and South Indian, West African, Latin American percussion, and rhythm theory. He is former president of the Massachusetts PAS Chapter, and was a presenter of his "Harmonic Time" method at a 2011 TEDx Seminar in Cambridge, MA. He has also written over 30 articles for PAS magazine. Sand and Ceremony is his debut novel.