John Van Devender

My last job required a lot of travel in the US and Canada. One motel room is much like another and nobody wanted to face an early night of that so after work we would adjourn to a saloon. The old guys all knew each other’s histories but I was the new guy so I told funny coming-of-age stories about the small coal town where I grew up and one night somebody said, “You ought to write that up.” That’s how I found out I was a story-teller. I collected these bar-room tales into five books about my home town, which I call the Minersburg stories. These books are THE LONG RIFLE, THE GUNPOWDER PROMISE, ROLLER DERBY GIRLS, SEEKING WILLA SUE and THE BALSA HINDENBURG. One thing for sure: today’s kids do not have nearly as much fun as we did growing up in the late Fifties, what with hitching rides on coal trains, riding bikes on the highway at night, backyard pirate ships, building home-made cannons, science projects involving massive amounts of explosive hydrogen gas, racing state cops in a souped-up hot-rod, not to mention indulging in any number of fistfights. Few of us had scruples about playing by the rules. If it felt right, we went ahead and did it, even if the ceiling fell on us later.

Next to my fondness for Minersburg is an attraction for Britain and the knights of the Round Table. I am convinced the tale is backwards. In my novel GWENUVAR, the main character is a two-fisted Pictish princess who becomes queen by her own hand. She is handy with a short sword, has the “gift” of the battle rage and is expert with the javelin. The rage allows her to trigger the stone circles called fairy rings when she or her friends need urgent healing. Artor is her not-very-bright consort, a robber knight who plunders abbeys to maintain his army. GWENUVAR is available now. A follow-on book, GWENUVAR, QUEEN is also available as our heroine progresses from princess to queen of Pictland in a series of battles and a personal duel with King Ryan of Gorre, a giant ten feet tall. In this tale, Gwenuvar acquires an enchanted sword with a perverse mind of its own. The sword has the power to control time and space. It can speak but it has a bad habit of killing its owners. A third book, GWENUVAR, HIGH QUEEN is in preparation.

There can be no Round Table without Merlin, but in my tale he is much more than a simple wizard and a lot more interesting. THE BOOK OF MERLIN and the SECOND BOOK OF MERLIN detail his romps through the ancient world as he interacts with such historical figures as Pelagius, Hypatia, Saint Patrick, Drust who nearly turned Britain into Pictland, Vortigern, Germanus and Justinian and Theodora, emperor and empress of Byzantium.

Lastly, for readers who wish to know what life was like in the Golden Age of the first sun, before the sky fell, I have written a delightful tale called RIBBON’S SONG, where there is no natural death, no illness, where there exist more than the five senses and people communicate across species boundaries with beasts and cosmic entities and live more or less in harmony with dinosaurs. Hint: the peace doesn’t last and Ribbon is called on to save human civilization by turning it in a different direction.

Following this theme is DREAM OF GOLD, where a crippled boy born into a perfect world is instructed to set out on a dangerous journey by the dying goddess who rules the world of Eden. This is a blend of creation mythology, pre-history and the loss of paradise. I am convinced our world was once very like this, in the long-ago.

ABOUT THE PHOTOS: There are hundreds of stone circles in the British Isles that once served a purpose, no longer understood. Loch Gur Grange Ring in the west of Ireland is the largest, built around 2100 BC. GWENUVAR provides the reasonable explanation that when the earth of the first sun changed to the present world, the energies and extra senses that connected us to each other were lost. In those places where pools of dwindling cosmic energy remained, fairy rings were built. By entering the rings, people restored their sense of connectedness with creation.

There are many dolmans in Ireland. This one, shown with the author, is thought to be as old as the pyramids, raised in honor of a long-forgotten neolithic warrior or wise woman.

Newgrange, a magnificent passage tomb in Ireland, is older than the pyramids and much more interesting than better-known Stonehenge. Build entirely without metal tools, with its beautiful quartz facing, Newgrange was lost for centuries and recently re-discovered. Unlike Stonehenge, you can enter, touch and sit in the dark to experience the world of 4000 BCE which was lit only by fire.

RECYCLING IN AMERICA, A PERSONAL HISTORY is my eye-witness account of the birth of recycling. One upon a time, beverage cans were three-piece tinplate. Aluminum cans existed only in the minds of a few dreamers. In 1964, the easy-open end was perfected along with the ability to make the can body from a single piece of aluminum. This upstart container, baked by new technology, committed itself to replacing steel cans entrenched in the marketplace. In 1964, aluminum's share of the 21 billion U.S. beverage can market was one percent. Today it's 100 percent of a 100-billion plus can market.

The engine that drove this success story was recycling--an idea that came out of the Alcoa PR department to protect the convenience package from restrictive legislation. When we began our first recycling programs in 1970, recycling was not only NOT a household word, it wasn't even in the dictionary. We overcame enormous logistical and technical barriers. A national network of recycling centers had to be set up, literally overnight. Machinery to process used cans for shipping to remelt facilities did not exist; we invented it. Even more challenging, 100 percent of the cans were in the hands of 200 million consumers. Recovering this above-ground aluminum mine was an incredible assignment. We did it with engineering and by spending $100 million on promotional activity, spread over 14 years. RECYCLING IN AMERICA shows how we waged war on steel to make the world safe for the aluminum can and changed the world for the better.

The author is shown with Dallas Cowboys wide receiver Drew Pearson aboard Battleship Texas, owned by the Texas Parks and Recreation Dept. "Save Battleship Texas" was our biggest promotional triumph, although there were hundreds like it. Bob Hope, country singer George Strait, the Hell's Angels, Coors Brewing, Coca-Cola, 7-Eleven and thousands of Boy and Girl Scouts along with the Goodyear Blimp combined to raise $250,000 and $2 million of in-kind donations to raise the sunken Texas from the Houston Ship Channel and get it to dry dock for overhaul. During the course of this activity, Texas can makers, who could run either steel or aluminum, chose to convert to our favorite metal.

RECYCLING IN AMERICA is a comprehensive look at technical achievements, advertising, brand awareness, marketing strategies, curbside recycling, litter, landfills, forced deposit legislation and reverse vending machines.