New book is featured in this month's Reader's Digest Magazine
TEMPE, Ariz. - Lawn Griffiths has released a collection of true stories and essays titled "Batting Rocks Over the Barn: An Iowa Farm Boy's Odyssey" (published by Xlibris). The award-winning writer's latest book follows his incredible journey as a young Iowa boy who dared to chart his destiny beyond the rural landscape of the 1950s and 1960s.
"Batting Rocks Over the Barn" captures the rhythm of rural life through the eyes of a young boy who grew up to become a newspaper journalist and farm editor. As largely a non-fiction biography, the work is narrated by the author from real experiences on the farm leading up to college.
The book devotes considerable space to the writer's parents, his twin brother and sister, plus such other people as hired men, neighbors, teachers and others who came to the farm. All are important because of their genuine place in the writer's formative years, especially in their teaching responsibility.
Pervading the book is the author's belief that, put together, the varied experiences, jobs and misadventures helped shape him to be an alumnus of the rural school of hard knocks. Time and again, the author has zeroed in on single elements of his farm life like fences, grease guns and harvesting wild asparagus in the roadside ditches, the death of the town's blacksmith and city kids' raiding of his father's melon patch.
"Batting Rocks Over the Barn"
By Lawn Griffiths
Hardcover | 6 x 9in | 150 pages | ISBN 9781503572843
Softcover | 6 x 9in | 150 pages | ISBN 9781503572836
E-Book | 150 pages | ISBN 9781503572829
Available at Amazon and Barnes & Noble
About the Author
Lawn Griffiths spent 40 years in daily newspapers as writer, editor and columnist, including 12 years with the Waterloo (Iowa) Courier, 25 years with Tribune Newspapers in Mesa, Arizona, plus freelance writing for the Arizona Republic. Born in Des Moines, Iowa, in 1946, he grew up on a farm near Parkersburg, Iowa. He earned a bachelor's degree in science journalism from Iowa State University in 1968 and master's degree from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University in 1972. He also served in the Peace Corps in Paraguay and the U.S. Army. Griffiths has earned more than 80 writing and community service awards.
