Powder River, 1957

“The year my mother left us, my father found a dog along the highway just outside of Powder River.”

Thus opens the beginning of sixteen-year-old Matthew Christman’s account of his senior year. Reeling from his loss, Matthew struggles to make sense of the adult world into which he has been forced to enter prematurely. He faces other losses, foremost among them his innocence, as he tries to figure out the difference between being a man’s man, or a good man like his father.

The threat of death is ever present for Matthew as he learns the value of love and friendship in his journey to find his way in a world fraught with unpredictable challenges.

Mike Aleman was born and raised in Chicago but moved to Powder River, Wyoming, when he was 15 years old. He embraced the people of the West and the western way of life immediately and fully, and knows his life was enriched from his experience.

His writing tutorial came from thirty years of teaching high school students the country's best literature and, of course, from reading it from an early age.

Retired, Mike continues to read and write on a daily basis, amazed at the beauty and power of both poetry and prose.