The Raconteur

Bend in the River

As a storyteller, Cecil L. Milliner is good at his trade.  His stories are novel, wholesome, refreshing, and vivid.  After a lifetime as a public speaker, he has learned a thing or two about spinning a good yarn.  In The Raconteur, he recounts 68 of his best stories as only he can tell them!

Dedicated to toastmasters and platform speakers around the world.

In the spring of 1835, Tom Medcalf steals $50.00 from his mother and sets out on a life of adventure.  Signing on as a pole-pusher aboard the Keelboat Queenie, he finds himself bound for Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, with a load of cargo for the cavalry stationed there.

At Leavenworth, he meets 19-year-old Katie, and after a stormy romance, the two are married and soon have twin daughters.  Marriage, however, does not satisfy Tom’s wanderlust.  Soon he is back on the river, traveling down the Mississippi River to New Orleans in the company of riverboat gamblers and other colorful characters …

Bend in the River is a well-wrought tale of life in pre-Civil-War America, when there were still endless untamed frontiers to be explored.

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 $24.00 Trade Paperback Edition

The Raconteur

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 $20.50 Trade Paperback Edition

Bend in the River

Willie May Medcalf

Sarah, Come Home

When she and their six children are abandoned by her gambler husband, Willie May Medcalf is left without prospects and penniless.  A stranger, Jim Bledsoe, takes pity on her even after being robbed by the no-account husband.  He helps her and the children relocate from a hardscrabble farm in Kentucky to Memphis, Tennessee.

After awhile, romance blossoms between Willie May and Jim Bledsoe.  Even so, Willie May remains loyal to her wedding vows.  Then, one day, a passing stranger brings news that changes everything.

Willie May is available as both a play in three parts and as a full length novel. 

In 1835, Willie May Bledsoe should have been content.  Her husband was loving, her children were growing up, marrying, and starting their own families.  

To Willie May, that was the problem.  The family that she had worked so hard to raise was leaving the nest, spreading beyond their home in Memphis, Tennessee.   The old worries that went with raising young children were giving way to new concerns.  Her youngest daughter, Sarah, was eighteen and would soon be leaving to begin a family of her own.

 What would Willie May do now?

 Sarah, Come Home is a novel of the American West.

$5.00 Electronic Edition

 $20.50 Trade Paperback Edition

Willie May Medcalf, the Novel

$5.00 Electronic Edition

 $20.50 Trade Paperback Edition

Sarah, Come Home