PURCHASE
CONTACT
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American Requiem
The Sum Of Moments.
Don J. Snyder
For those I lost and never lost
We are all refugees
from one war torn country
or another
from one war torn love story
or another.
Nothing means anything anymore.
We haven't seen our friends in years.
To talk with, I mean.
Really talk with.
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The Tin Nose Shop (2022)
The Tin Nose Shop was published in London by The Legends Press Ltd. and chosen as a BBC Radio 2 Book Club selection. The Audio edition was published by W.F. Howes LTD.
For most of us, it takes a while to realise that we cross lines in our lives. Silent, unmarked borders of time that we pass, as if in our dreams, without ever realising what we are leaving behind. We do not see that the matchless nights of being cherished and held close are vanishing even as we live them, and that we are all refugees from one war torn country or another, or from one war torn love story or another. Time moves so deceptively that we never say, ‘This is the last walk I will take with you along the shore.’ Or ‘This afternoon I carried a child in my arms for the final time.’ Perhaps early this morning while we dressed and put the kettle on, our destiny advanced, unwatched.
A BBC RADIO 2 BOOK CLUB RECOMMENDED READ
INSPIRED BY ONE OF THE LAST GREAT UNTOLD STORIES OF WW1 1916. Young artist Sam Burke is spared death by firing squad on the battlefields of France and brought to a remote castle by the Irish Sea. At the ‘Tin Nose Shop’ he is tasked with creating intricate masks to hide the mutilated faces of his fellow soldiers from the Front. While he tries to come to terms with the death of his best friend and the promise he failed to keep, Sam and the disfigured soldiers struggle to return to their former lives and their loved ones. A stirring and emotional tale based on the real-life story of the Tin Nose Shop. 'Beautifully written and sensitively observed' Hazel Gaynor 'Beautifully written and thought-provoking' Ruth Hogan 'Will both break your heart and give it wings as it explores the healing powers of friendship, love, hope and purpose' Robin Wells 'One of the best historical novels I have read in a long time... I have never read anything quite like it' Mark Sullivan 'Here is a beautifully written novel, sensitive, exploring not so much the brutality of war but the humanity which stems from it' The Yorkshire Times 'There are many novels based on the events of World War I; this one has to be among the most compassionate and moving' Historical Novel Society -
Walking With Jack (2013)
A long-standing promise from a father to his five-year-old son . . .
A poignant diary that chronicles the journey
When Don Snyder was teaching the game of golf to his young son, Jack, they made a pact: if one day Jack became good enough to play on a pro golf tour, Don would walk beside him as his caddie.
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The Winter Travelers (2011)
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Winter Dreams (2004)
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Of Time & Memory (2001)
Don Snyder knew nothing about his mother aside from the terrible fact that she died at the age of nineteen, just sixteen days after giving birth to him and his twin brother. All his life Don had been too shy, too deeply pained to ask his father or grandparents to tell him the story of the lovely girl named Peggy Snyder--what delighted or troubled her, who her friends were, how she fell in love, what cut short her brief life.
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Night Crossing (2001)
A novel of political intrigue (the time is 1998) with overtones of a classic Hitchcock thriller; a story of a romantic encounter—of two strangers suddenly invading each other’s lives.
Night Crossing carries us from a quiet Boston suburb to a wild pursuit across the northern counties of Ireland. The man and woman who find themselves bound together are from two different worlds.
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Fallen Angel (2001)
The death of his estranged father draws Hollywood film executive Terry McQuinn back to the coastal Maine town of his roots and gives him the chance to make long-overdue peace with his late father, come to terms with the events of the past, and rediscover the mysteries of family and love.
Adapted into a Hallmark Hall of Fame TV production that aired December 2003.
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The Cliff Walk (1998)
Snyder's account of temporarily losing his way in life presents a heartrending and inspiring memoir that "confronts the not-so-secret fear that haunts every American who works for a living" ("Atlanta Journal-Constitution"). Author publicity.
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From The Point (1989)
Jack, Ross, and Casey, growing up in the 1960s, spend a summer together on Hancock Point. Ross is drafted, leaving Casey pregnant with a child she aborts. Their lives diverge till, in their mid-30s, Jack decides that "going back to Hancock Point would give them all a chance to see exactly what was left of their past." Though Ross is married, Casey decides to have his child. We see mainly Casey "crashing along . . . with wounds," as she indulges in a lot of morbid reminiscing.
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Veterans Park (1988)
At a distance, young men in uniform satisfy all our vague longings for grace and order. Bobbi Ann Mullens watched these young men from the time she was a little girl riding on her father's tractor, wedged between his knees when he sang his song to her, the song he sand when he took her to town perched like a parrot on his arm, the song he sand like a lullaby at night in her bedroom when the windmill in the backyard sliced the moon into narrow white bars of light that fell across her blankets.
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Soldier's Disgrace (1987)
U.S. Army Maj. Ronald Alley survived three years in a North Korean prison camp only to be charged with collaboration on his return to freedom. Found guilty, he was dishonorably discharged and sent to Leavenworth, the only U.S. officer in this century to receive such a sentence. This riveting book reveals what Sen. William Cohen of Maine, a partisan of the late Alley, has called a gross violation of justice.
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For twenty seven years, since Colleen and I arrived as newly weds at the writers workshop in Iowa City, I have built a world of dreams around her. And our son and three daughters. After four healthy babies in five years, I had no right to ask for more. But I did. I wanted to write books that would bring meaning to people. My writing life began in a grey, impoverished city in northern Maine where I grew up in ignorance, believing that if I wrote novels that were beautiful enough they would be published by the best publishers in New York with a certain dignity, and they would deprive the world of some of its loneliness and its indifference. It was a bleak place to start my journey. Perfect for a writer.
After college, I began writing feature stories for newspapers and in the winter of 1977 I was hired as editor of a small weekly newspaper way up the coast of Maine. I was sitting at the editor's desk my second day on the job. There was a blizzard tearing through the town. Every summer store was boarded up. The little light on my desk was the only light on the main street. I looked up from the black Royal typewriter and there was a man walking through the storm, straight to my door. In that moment, I felt my life as a writer begin to turn. He was a big man, maybe six-- five, with wide shoulders. He kicked the snow off his boots and asked me if I was the new editor. I said I was. He said he had a story to tell me. He had just sat down beside my desk when the telephone rang. Someone wanted me to hurry to the dock to take a photograph of the storm tide ripping a restaurant off the pier and carrying it out of the harbor. I asked the man if he could come back and see me the next day. He said he would.
Don J. Snyder
AUTHOR
Just fell into the snow. And I ended up writing his obituary that week instead of his story. But I met his widow and she told me he had been a young soldier in the army during the Korean War. They had just had their first baby when he left for the war in June of 1950. Six months after he got there he was captured by the Chinese army. He was a POW for three years, held in a cave for most of that time. He lost over a hundred pounds and was very sick. For a while the POWS were in the hands of a sadistic Chinese commander who would pick one American soldier each night to tie to a pole in the freezing cold, torture and execute. So this soldier cut a deal with the commander- he said, 'If I get my men to sign germ warfare confessions will you stop this torture?' It worked and no other prisoners were harmed. Three years later the soldier came home to America and into the center of the McCarthy era. The United States army accused the soldier of being a traitor. They court-martialed him at Fort Meade, Maryland. All the men he kept alive in the cave, were summoned to testify against him. This was just a little man from Maine with no education. He loved the Army so much that he refused to hire a lawyer to protect him. He said, 'The Army will know that what I did over there in Korea, I did to keep my men alive.' Well, the Army sent him to prison on a life sentence. They held him for three years then released him. All his life he claimed he was innocent, and his wife believed him. Now that he was dead she asked me if I could find the truth. “I need to know the truth,” she said to me. I thought it might take me six months. It ended up
The NEXT morning
he DROPPED DEAD of a
HEART ATTACK
on his way to see me
taking me six years to track down all the evidence including the men who testified against him, and his files that the army told me had been destroyed in a fire, and the FBI files in which J.Edgar Hoover had identified him as a communist infiltrator.
I wrote that as my first published book, A SOLDIER'S DISGRACE, which Michael Curtis, Senior Editor at The Atlantic Monthly, wrote deserved to win a Pulitzer. Paramount Pictures optioned and then bought film rights (Martin Brest, Harry Ufland) and I was suddenly on the fourth floor of the Beverly Wilshire Hotel in Hollywood. Champagne in the fridge. Warren Beatty down the hallway. A red convertible for me to drive while I was in LA. The whole deal. That led to two novels published in New York. I had married Colleen by then and we had two babies in three years. Then two more babies. And I earned my MFA in Fiction Writing on a fellowship at the Iowa Writer's Workshop.
In the winter of 1996 I took a job working on a construction site on the coast of Maine where we built a 22,000 square foot mansion with ten bathrooms at the edge of the sea, working ten hour days outside all winter. Some mornings it was twenty--six below zero when we started. My story about this, "Diary Of A Laborer" became a cover story for Harper's Magazine and then Little Brown offered me a contract to write a book about the experience. THE CLIFF WALK was published in 1997 and became a best seller. After the book was reviewed on the front page of the Los Angeles Times, Kathleen Kennedy who had won an Academy Award for “Schindler's List," optioned the film rights. And I was suddenly back out in Hollywood riding in Steven Spielberg's limo. Kathy signed Curtis Hansen to direct right after he won his Academy Award for "LA Confidential," but they were never able to agree on a screenwriter and the project was dropped.
That book took me to Oprah's stage. I was in the Green Room where they were putting on my make-up before walking onto Oprah's stage when one of her producers asked me what I was going to write next. I can't explain this really, but I told her that I might try to write about my father. I told her that I had never known him at all and that I wanted to spend some time with him and try to understand what it was that made him so distant all my life. I remembered being his little boy, following him around everywhere he went, asking him if I was his buddy, and he was always trying to get away from me. I used to walk beside him when he mowed the lawn with his push mower, I was a chatter box, I never shut up. I would ask him one question after another and he would never answer me. Then he finally got a power motor with an engine so loud that he didn't have to pretend he couldn't hear me.
You have a father like this and what you really need to do is crack him open and find out what he is so afraid of. It always comes down to our fears, doesn't it? In the end, our fears define us. Our fears determine the contours of our lives. For years there had been a great distance separating my father and me. But now he had grown old and his health was declining. And he had seen me on Oprah. He asked me to come see him.
We were sitting there in his little apartment and he showed me a black and white photograph of him on his wedding day. Only it wasn't his wedding day to the only mother I had ever known. It was to a mother I hadn't known. There I was at age fifty and my father was telling me for the first time that my real mother had died when she was nineteen years old. I drove him to the cemetery a few miles away and he showed me where she was buried. As a boy I had lived just a few blocks from the cemetery but no one ever took me there.
No one had ever said a word to me about her. I set out then to find out why. And to learn all that I could about this nineteen year old girl who had died in the ninth month of her marriage to my Dad. I found her bridesmaids who were now elderly women. I found her friend who had played field hockey with her in high school. I found a girl who had worked with her caring for the children at the Lutheran Orphanage. I found the woman who taught her how to sew her fancy dresses. I found the nurse who sat beside her at the end of her life on an August morning in 1950 and wrote down her last sentences on a slip of paper and then kept that slip of paper for fifty years, long enough to place it in my hand.
Everyone in town remembered the death of this nineteen year old girl because she left behind new born twin sons. Everyone remembered her doctor's name and still blamed him for her death. I found him living a few miles from the cemetery, a distinguished looking man in his late seventies with a mind that was sharp. When I stood in his doorway he told me that my mother had never been his patient. "I delivered a thousand babies in my time," he said with a clear and measured voice, "and I never lost a single mother."
In my pocket that morning I had the only remaining document from my mother's hospitalization. A single orange index card that had been taped to the railing of her hospital bed. On this card was his name. I could have confronted him with this but I did not. I thanked him for his time and walked away. I spent a year writing a book about my mother and father's love story, and in this book I excused the doctor's lie by speculating that
I read your book. You got it WRONG .
Years went by before he finally agreed to tell me everything. This doctor was the only obstetrician in that part of rural Pennsylvania. He was new in town. And he was Jewish in a town of strict Lutherans. One of his first deliveries was for a mother who could not keep her baby. He delivered the baby and then drove through a thunderstorm with the baby beside him on the front seat of his car. He took the new born baby to the Lutheran Orphanage which is where he saw my mother for the first time. Peggy was working there on the night shift. She was seventeen years old. The baby stopped crying the moment he place him in her arms. It was her practice to name all the babies in the orphanage after Hollywood stars. This one she instantly called Perry Cuomo. Which made the doctor smile. And fall in love with her in a way though he was eleven years older. And Jewish. It was two years later when a local doctor named Paul Moyers came to him for help. He had a young female patient who was showing signs of extreme toxemia very early in her pregnancy. Dr. Moyers explained that he was in a difficult position with this patient. If her condition grew worse and it came down to being able to save only the mother or her baby, he would have to sacrifice the mother according to his religious beliefs. And as a physician in order to protect the mother from distress, he would not tell her that her life was endangered. He would tell her father and her minister but not her and not her young husband.
He understood what Dr. Moyers was not saying to him -- "You have different religious beliefs. You are free to take the baby and save this young girl's life." And so he agreed to see her. And suddenly there was the girl he had met at the orphanage, standing in front of him. Now she was nineteen years old. And married. And pregnant. And very sick. He examined her and told her the truth. Her baby was destroying her kidneys. Her baby was killing her slowly. He tried to persuade her to let him induce labor in the fourth month when the baby would not have survived. His plan was for her to live on in the world, and simply tell everyone that she had miscarried. She refused. And then she grew sicker. And terrified. By the sixth month her feet were too swollen even to fit them in my father's slippers. And so she went barefoot to see the doctor, to let him take her baby. He planned the procedure for a Sunday morning when he knew everyone in town would be in the Lutheran church. He was examining her with his stethoscope when he heard two hearts beating. Not one. But Two. And when he told her that she was carrying twins, she would not go through with the procedure. And then she made him promise that if she were to die, he would tell no one what had happened. Because she didn't want her babies to have to grow up knowing that they had caused her death.
And here is the main thing: She made her doctor promise to never tell her young husband. Our father. Because she was afraid if he knew that these babies had caused her death, he might not be able to be a good father to us. She did not want anyone to know that she had chosen my brother and me over this boy who loved her hopelessly. She made the doctor promise. And he did. And he kept his promise. He delivered her twins in the early morning of August 11, 1950. His first set of twins. Sixteen days later she died. He stood across the street from the cemetery and watched that afternoon when she was buried. In the months that followed, when he was blamed for her death, he kept the promise he had made to her. My father, her husband of nine months-- who loved her depthlessly-- his first love-- her first love-- worked in the print shop in Hatfield. He set the type on the big linotype press where you stamped out one letter at a time in steel. One October afternoon in 1949 he had stood at his linotype press and stamped out the letters that made the printed words of the engagement notice in the little weekly newspaper. Then one November afternoon in 1949 he stamped out the letters that made the printed words of the wedding announcement in the little weekly newspaper. Then one morning, nine months later, through his tears and his desolation he stamped out the letters that made these printed words in a headline of the weekly newspaper:
he was standing on the privilege of confidentiality that he had shared with my mother - his patient.
My book called, OF TIME & MEMORY, was published in New York about two years after the day my father and I went to the cemetery for the first time and I read his name on the headstone beside my mother's name - in the place that was waiting for him to return to her. Why had he never taken me there? Why had he never said anything to me about my mother? And so, in my book I wrote that my young mother was not strong enough to have twins and that she died from complications of our birth. I was on the Today Show in New York talking about my new book. When I returned to my hotel room there was a call from home telling me that a doctor had called me. The doctor who had told me that my mother had never been his patient. All he said to me when I returned his call was this:
That was my mother. That was his wife. That autumn my father slept on her grave in the Lutheran cemetery, beneath his army blanket. His buddies would take turns coming by in the morning to take him for coffee and to try to talk with him. Some of them told him that his life would go on and that he would get over losing Peggy. They were wrong. He never really did. Peggy spent the last three months of her pregnancy, sewing her baby clothes and preparing to die. Too uncomfortable to sleep, she often stayed up all night sewing in her bedroom, and the little lamp on the Singer machine was often the only light still on in the town of Hatfield, Pennsylvania. Half a century later when I showed up to discover her story, people still remembered that little light on her sewing machine on Market Street. And how, soon after her babies were born, the light went out forever.
I was writing that book in the summer of 1998, on a morning like any other summer morning in Maine. I was awake at 4am while the house was still dark and silent. I had the radio on, National public radio-- while I made my coffee. And there was news of a bombing in Northern Ireland in the town of Omagh. The IRA had chosen that day to set off the bomb in the center of the town because that was the particular morning when mothers took their children into town to buy their back to school uniform. 39 people slaughtered. Most of them mothers and children. Hundreds wounded. We never think about the wounded. There are now fifteen people in that town who had both feet blown off in the blast. And there are more than twenty people who were so horribly disfigured that they wear masks over their faces. If you were to go to Omagh tomorrow you would see the people in their wax masks.
YOUNG MOTHER OF TWINS DIES
I heard that radio news and I knew that I had to go there right away to bear witness to what had happened because I had been there before with my own little children and we had been so happy. Twenty-two hours later I was walking through the wreckage of the town. The children all wear little patches on their school blazers; these patches were scattered all over the streets like leaves. I ended up attending thirteen funerals, walking in the long processions to the grave yards. Then I stayed in a hotel for a month and began writing a novel about it, NIGHT CROSSING. I fictionalized everything except the name of one woman who was killed in the bombing. She was holding the hand of her three year old daughter, and two weeks from delivering the twin girls in her belly. All of them were killed. I stood at the grave where they buried the four of them together. The only square grave I had ever seen. Someday I am going to go back to find out how the husband ever survived such a loss. If he survived at all.
In Maine where I came of age, there was real poverty. Bitter poverty in the 1960s. We walked everywhere through the unrelenting cold. It was the kind of cold where you can feel your bones grinding in their sockets. One freezing cold winter night when I was sixteen or seventeen I saw a beggar in the shadows of a parking lot. A car pulled in. The driver parked and left. Then the beggar laid himself across the hood of the engine to catch the warmth. This was how he would survive the long winter night. That would have been 1966. Thirty six years later, in 2002, when I was fifty-two years old, way up in Northern Canada on the set of a movie I had written, based on a novel I had written, I stood with Colleen watching Gary Sinise in that scene with the beggar. Writing the screenplay for that movie, FALLEN ANGEL taught me the craft, and I set out to write a movie of my mother's story. I thought I would finish the script in year. It has now taken me fourteen years. I couldn't write the last scenes until I was sitting beside my father on the last night of his life.
By then my son was in college. And becoming a very good Division I golfer. When he was five years old I had placed a sawed off golf club in his hands and watched him hit three golf balls out across an open field as if he'd played golf in another life. I told him if he ever became good enough at the game to play on a pro tour, I would be his caddie. Really all I was saying to him was -- I love you so much, I want to walk beside you in this life for as long as you will let me.
When he left home for college, to play for the University of Toledo, I missed him terribly. Colleen took the kids' leaving home in stride, but I was suffering. The empty rooms, the house as quiet as a cathedral, the dog looking at me all the time for some kind of explanation—you expect that part and you brace yourself for it. And I had when my first two daughters left. But then my son was suddenly a million miles from our home in Maine. Colleen came down the stairs one day and found me alone, wearing my son's old size thirteen golf shoes, five sizes too big. “I just miss him,” I told her. “You need to do something different,” she said patiently on her way to the laundry room. “Go somewhere. Where would you like to go?” I heard her call to me sweetly.
I don't know where a man would go at age fifty-eight to become a race-car driver or a chef, but if you want to become a caddie then there is only one place. And so, on Valentine's Day I flew to Scotland and took up residence in the village of Elie on the North Sea. Carrying rocks in my bag for extra weight I played my way back into the game and into condition, by walking 36 holes a day, always marching at a good clip and pacing off the yardages in my head. “I'm in training!” I yelled to a groundskeepers during a ten-day gale when the wind knocked me to my knees twice. “You're MAD!” he yelled back at me.
That season I was hired as a caddie at The Kingsbarns Golf Links in St. Andrews, the number five ranked course in the world. All I had to do to get the job was promise Davey Gilchrist, my caddie master, that I would work 187 days straight and never ask for a day off, and if I couldn't keep up with the young boys in their early twenties, I would resign without a fuss. I walked a thousand miles that summer carrying golf clubs, living alone with no car or TV, no internet, no radio, and no bank account. Just throwing my tips into a drawer at the end of each day. I kept a journal when I got up each morning at 4am before I left for a day of caddying at 6am. I learned as much as I could from some of the best caddies in the world so that one day I could be of use to my son.
So we spent a winter living in one motel room without murdering each other, and I caddied for him while he played on his first pro tour, The Adams Golf Tour in Houston Texas. My book about this journey-- WALKING WITH JACK, opens with these words: From as far back as I can remember, when my son, Jack, was still putting his shoes on the wrong feet, there was always golf drawing us together, and we were always making one last long putt across the living room floor or one final great shot in the back yard for the Championship of the world. Even then all I wanted was never to lose him the way my father had lost me, and so I promised him that if he ever became good enough at the game to make it to a pro tour, I would be his caddie. Really I just wanted to walk beside him for as far as the game might take us. The book is a love story at its heart, and so it has all the joys and sorrows of any love story.
Our dream of him making a pro tour and me being his caddie was coming within our reach now. But then he was dropped from his team for poor grades. It was a blow to me. I was disappointed in him and I told him. We didn't see each other for a year. And we barely spoke. When we met up again it was at my father's funeral, and I took one look at Jack and I knew that he had given up on himself. So, I went back to Scotland for a second season of caddying, this time at The Old Course and The Castle Course, to show Jack that I had not given up on him or on our dream. We had no contact with each other for the six months I was away. Not even an email. But when I returned home he called me and said he had taken his performance test to earn his PGA card and had turned pro. "I'm looking at a pro tour in Houston next winter. Do you still want to caddie for me?"
In 2018 Snyder established the world's only Caddie School For Soldiers in St. Andrews, Scotland where soldiers who have been haunted by war come to spend a month and train to become caddies and then go on to work at some of the most peaceful and beautiful places in the world. Each session includes two soldiers from the US, the UK and Canada who live together for one month with soldier mentors in a lovely 10 bedroom house purchased by The Kohler Company and Family, a fifteen minute walk from The Old Course, as a permanent home for the school. Witnessing these soldiers rise up from the darkness of war and believe again in themselves and in life's possibilities has been a great gift to Snyder and everyone involved in running the school. Here is a documentary that was made about the soldiers’ school.
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He grew up in Bangor, Maine. He graduated from Colby College in 1968 and earned a Masters Of Fine Arts from the Iowa Writers Workshop in 1986 where he was chosen for their prestigious Teaching-Writing Fellowship. He was awarded a James Michener Fellowship for his first novel. He taught at Colgate University, Colby College, The University of Maine, and Columbia College.
From the time I was seventeen years old I wanted to write important books and movies that would bring meaning-- DEEP MEANING-- into peoples' lives. I wanted it so badly that from the time I was 21 until I turned 34 I locked myself in a room and lived alone like a monk, reading the classics over and over while I taught myself how to write luminous sentences that revealed the great truths about life and love and friendship.