Matthew Vollmer, Author
Matthew Vollmer had a draft of a memoir written when his mother died and strange lights began appearing at the home she had shared with his father. “The lights were a conundrum, a mystery, an inexplicable phenomenon, but they were also an occasion for us to connect, and for me to try to understand how he was attempting to interpret what he’d been seeing,” Vollmer says of his father.
In the book, Vollmer also considers Seventh-day Adventism—his own disconnection from and longing for the comforts of religion, and the conclusions that faith leads his father to make about the lights.
Vollmer hopes that readers find it comforting. “Once my mother had slipped from the world, it seemed that, even though she was no longer anywhere, she was also everywhere,” he says. “Every instance of natural beauty—a bird at a feeder, a cloud gilded with golden sunlight, autumn leaves burning bright, fresh flowers in a vase—seemed to testify to the fact that one of the reasons that I could recognize and appreciate beauty in the world was because of her.”
All of Us Together in the End, April, 2023, memoir, softcover, $16.95, by Matthew Vollmer, and published by Hub City Press, Spartanburg, SC. Vollmer will appear Monday, May 22, at Malaprop’s Bookstore/Café. Learn more at MatthewVollmer.com.
