Unlikely Heroes and Improbable Means

a collection of stories both short and unexpected

I have spent most of my life telling stories. In my first year at university in a northern city, I would walk the streets and tell stories I concocted to random people. I taught college and university for over 30 years, embedding stories into many of the lessons I gave. My students used to call me a storyteller. In the textbooks that I wrote and in some of my other adventures in non-fiction, I tried to

be more narrator than reporter of "just the facts." My students told me that reading my textbooks was like reading the words I spoke in class.

What are these stories like? They are more Alice's Restaurant than Alice Munro. Moving away from recent trends, they are not dark, psychological thrillers, and none of the heroes has super powers, although some have access to articles that possess magic, one being a vegetable These are ordinary people who through their reasoning and imagination win victories in life. Every story has a happy ending.