The Uncommon Thread Blog Tour *Giveaway*

The Uncommon Thread by Russel Scott Anderson

A Note From The Author:

Hey Hayley, I’m glad to have the chance to hang with you in here. I don’t guess I’m actually in here, but for the sake of entertainment we can pretend I am, it’s more fun that way. I like it up here in Minnesota. I still have a couple of friends named Dennis that live in Bemidji and Cass Lake. One thing I’m sure of, y’all have mosquitoes as big as most turkey vultures we have back home in Mississippi. I got to spend some time up here a few years ago canoeing the Boundary Waters Wilderness Area with my nephew. Now I should have known that there was going to be some problems before we ever left Meridian. We started getting ready for the trip by putting our canoe in the pool in the back yard to practice. We were going to start off trying to flip our canoe over, right it, and get back in. Well the first part went just great. We flipped as easy as pie, sometimes even before we were ready to. Getting the canoe righted was a little tougher treading water, but with a little practice we finally got that right. The trouble came when we started trying to get back into the canoe, some of you are going to see the problem right away, but for the rest of y’all, the physics of a 265 lb man and a 65 lb boy heaving themselves up on opposite sides of a narrow boat like a canoe just don’t balance out well. The good part was that Holton did stay in the pool, I was kind of worried he wouldn’t when I saw him flying through the air like that, but the Good Lord was watching, and he hit right alongside the wall and only scraped about half the hide off his leg. Needless to say he lost some of his enthusiasm for practicing after that. The trip itself was even more of an adventure, but that’s another story. I guess I’ll write that one in the next book, but I’m really here to talk about the book I’ve already written. The Uncommon Thread, is a collection of columns that I’ve written in the Journal: of the Mississippi State Medical Association for the past five years or so. It isn’t really written for the doctors so much, though that’s what I supposed to be doing when I started, but I kind of got bored with that, so I just quit. I started to write for about anybody that might like to read a few goofy stories about trying to get through life being a doctor, a husband, and raising seven kids. It started with me agreeing to be a temporary fill-in for the author of the column, Una Voce, for one column to fill in for her while she was busy being the association president. It didn’t work out that way. One column led to a second and then a third and still no one else was stepping up to take over, so I just kept writing. The more I wrote the more things seemed to get out of control. The columns veered from here to there uncontrollably. They became their own little living things. If I tried to re-write one it would morph on me, and turn into something completely different. Being the creator that was no longer in control was a very fun, place to be. So, I just let them do whatever they wanted for almost a year and when that was over, I was done. I wrote a farewell column, and went back to work on other projects. But things didn’t work out the way I planned either. Dr. South was diagnosed with cancer, and so, as she went through her surgery and the treatment that followed her surgery, Una Voce and I careened along. The stories continuing to find their own direction down a jagged and imprecise stream of conscious. “What in the hell is this?” My left-brain (and sometimes the editor) would demand. “Don’t ask me to explain it,” my right-brain would beg, “just read it. Then you’ll feel it.” “But what are they supposed to feel?” My left-brain would counter. “Readers want things to relate to one another. They want to know what to expect.” Everybody wants a common thread. So to make the two sides of my brain knock it off and give me some peace and quiet inside my own head, I tried to come up with an explanation of what it was I wanted to do, and this is what I said: “What is it about our lives that prepare us to be physicians? It can’t simply be our education, and it had to be there before medicine was our vocation? It happens all around us every day we practice, and I don’t think it will stop when we retire. We are what we are because of the millions of tiny incidents in our lives that build up like threads woven into a fabric. That fabric of what we are is what allows us to function as the physicians we can become. It is like taking thread to make a cloth, then taking that cloth and making a garment. Medicine we think of as a white coat, but it just looks white because each thread, although it’s a different color, shines with promise and adds to the whole. I want to show it all, the threads, the fabric, all of it. Not just the coat. Dr. South understood what it was that I was doing while she was gone, probably better than I did, and it was she that came up with the name for my new column and this collection. See, it isn’t the common thread that I wanted to show in the first place. It’s the uncommon thread, the infinite number of uncommon threads that we weave together to become the people we are. Give the book a try. You can get it at www.chinagrovepress.com/Home/books-buy-checkout/uct/ or get an e-book from Amazon. If your bookstore at home wants to get a few have them e-mail us down here at chinagrovepress@gmail.com. I was glad to get a chance to visit with y’all up here, it’s a lot cooler this time of year than it is back home in Mississippi.

One lucky reader will win a copy of this book! Here's how to enter:

1. Follow this blog via GFC, the newsletter, or Networked Blogs.

2. "Like" Scott Anderson on Facebook.

3. Follow R. Scott Anderson on Twitter.

4. Promote this giveaway.

Giveaway ends July 15th. Good luck!