LEARNING TO LOVE YOURSELF ~ Cleo Lampos ~ Miss Bee and the Do Bees ~ Giveaway

 Hi, readers. It's Throwback Thursday and our guest blogger today is author Cleo Lampos. Welcome, Cleo. The stage is yours.

Learning to Love Yourself

By Cleo Lampos

Image provided by author

Ever stand in front of a mirror, then look away with dissatisfaction?

When a photographer is snapping pictures, a quick getaway is made?

Clothes are bought that fold and drape over the body?

These are signs of body image uneasiness. A condition that is characterized with how the appearance of the body interferes in the way a life is lived.  Most people can cope on the surface but suffer on the emotional level.

In the novel, Miss Bee and the Do Bees, Veronica (Roni) Bagedonas suffers from body dysmorphic disorder. Although known as the most successful teacher of children with emotional and behavioral problems, Roni cannot overcome her embarrassment of her large thighs. A colorful tee shirt tops the long skirts that hide her legs. Her work is her life.

Enter into the picture, “Sunny” Vanderpool. This former beauty queen will now be Roni’s classroom aide.  Perfect hair, manicured nails, flawless make up, and a coordinated wardrobe set her apart from Roni. The comparison is unsettling to Roni who does not know how hard it is for Sunny to keep up appearances.

What is more unsettling to Roni is Joe Milanchovich, who has been assigned to the school as the fire department’s educator for fire safety. Joe suffers from PTSD after serving as a medic in Afghanistan.  His wounds are all internal. But real. Although Joe admires Roni as a teacher, he feels inadequate to tell her how he feels.

The conflict between inner wounds and outer wounds is brought to a climax when Sunny’s  fiancé’ is sent back to the United States severely wounded.  As Sunny views him in massive bandages and hooked up to IVs, she must decide whether to walk away from the relationship, or stay.

Top of Form

Can’t Miss Novels

by Cleo A. Lampos

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Contemporary Romance

TEACHERS OF THE DIAMOND PROJECTS SCHOOLS

Second Chances

Diamonds in the Tough

Miss Bee and the Do Bees

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                              The Story Behind the Novel

This novel draws on the Chicago urban school system, so it includes the dangers of the neighborhood, foster care, gang activity in the community and fires. Author Cleo Lampos taught behavior disorder/emotionally disturbed students, which brings reality to the classroom plot line.  She is familiar with both body dysmorphic disorder and PTSD. The fire-fighting scenes reflect stories she gleaned from her fireman son-in-law. The shoot up of the school bus occurs all too often on the streets of Chicago.

Cleo Lampos has written three books in the series The Teachers of Diamond Project Schools. Each novel is a stand-alone, but occur in the same make believe building.  However, the conflicts in the book are based on events that happened in the urban areas of Chicago. Fiction and news events are melded into realistic fiction. The underlying emotions are personally from the author. The characters in Lampos’ books delve deep into their faith to find strength and integrity.

As a retired educator, Lampos lectures at adult extension classes at nearby colleges and at senior gatherings. She quilts and cans the food that her Urban Gardener husband grows on their suburban lot. Eleven grandchildren fill their lives with joy.  Lampos stays in touch with educators and their challenges.

Cleo is giving away a copy of this novel to one of the persons who comments on this blog. To enter, just leave a comment with your name and contact information (so we can notify you if you win) in the comment section below. Giveaway ends one week from today on Sept 17, 2020, at Midnight, Central Time. 

THE GREATEST GENERATION ~ Cleo Lampos

                              Learning About the Greatest Generation

Retirement delivered many opportunities for speaking to senior groups and at extension classes of local colleges. Several historic fiction books hit the market, and life sailed along with my husband and cat in a Chicago suburb. Then, in November 2019, I read Jennie Allen’s book, Anything: The Prayer That Unlocked My God and My Soul.

I prayed that God would do anything in my life that would draw me closer to Him.

Gail Kittleson e-mailed me two days later.

An author of WWII historic fiction, Gail asked if I would want to co-write a book about the food that people ate during the war. After praying about this, I decided to jump full into the project. Research is one of my library skills honed over the years.

The range of material was vast. Trips to the library yielded books on WWII to read. The internet produced articles, memoirs, and PHD. Dissertations on the topics of military chocolate bars, ration kits, sugarless baking, foxhole foraging, the Victory Gardens, the Land Girls, Donut Dollies, and how the Dutch ate tulips. The women of North Platte, Nebraska, who served food to over 6 million GI’s in four years astounded me. Recipes and photos for all for all these topics bubbled from friends cleaning out their attics, historical archives, and government sources. A coffee table album on the topic complete with quotes, articles, photos and recipes resulted.

Then Gail and I decided to bring the sacrifices and ingenuity of celebrating Christmas during the war to the album format. Again, conversations with elderly friends, relatives, and reading memoirs gleaned so many insights. Reading books like Soldiers of a Different Fabric brought the stories of chaplains at Christmas to light. Compilations of accounts of POWs and GIs in the field at the season of Christ’s birth allowed the emotions of the time to come into our writing. Photos from private parties made their way to this book.

So much happened to me emotionally as these projects were researched.  My uncles enlisted during the war but spoke little about their experiences. Uncle Melvin took us to the cemetery in Des Moines, Iowa, every time we visited him so we would remember the Sullivan Brothers and see all the white crosses. Now, I read the accounts of the sailors and soldiers in foxholes and on ships in hostile countries sharing their fears and hopes.

 My appreciation for the Greatest Generation increased as I read the letters of mothers and wives who put up a brave front even as they scrounged every day to make ends meet. The words of President Roosevelt, the volunteering of Eleanor Roosevelt, and the inspiring quotes of Eisenhower, Nimitz and MacArthur stirred a piece inside of me that had long lay dormant.  The folks who lived through WWII represented the best of our nation.  They are in a class by themselves.

It is with humility and pride that Gail Kittleson and I present the companion books that give the present generation a glimpse into the valor and courage of our parents and grandparents. The Greatest Generation.

Featured Books Will Release in September 2020

The Food That Held the World Together

World War II Christmas Scrapbook

Authors: Gail Kittleson and Cleo Lampos

Publisher: Wordcrafts Press

Genre: Historical non-fiction

Two companion books

Target Audience: High school to adult seniors who love history

Gail Kittleson

Gail Kittleson creates women’s historical fiction from her northern Iowa home where she lives with her husband, a retired Army chaplain. She is a frequent speaker and workshop presenter at libraries and other venues.

Cleo Lampos

Cleo Lampos is a retired schoolteacher who speaks to adult extension classes at local colleges, writes fiction, enjoys quilting, and helps her urban gardener husband on their Chicago suburban plot.

GIFTS FROM THE GREATEST GENERATION

Dust Between the Stitches: The Great Depression

By Cleo Lampos

A bundle of quilting materials derived from chicken feed bags and sugar sacks.  A trunk full of diaries and letters from Iowa dated throughout the decade of the 1930’s. From these humble scraps a story threaded its way into a book. An historic novel, Dust Between the Stitches, brings the dust storms and the desperation of the Great Plains farmers to life.

When my mother died in 1988, she left very little earthly goods behind. In a hall closet, we found a bag of muslin feed bags and flour sacks that were cut into 12-inch squares and firmly ironed. On many of these textural pieces, a transfer of a bird and flower was visible in faint blue ink. All 48 states were represented. I started to embroider the state flower/birds to complete the quilt. Significantly, I developed a curiosity about the quilting practices of the Great Depression and began an obsessive collection of quilts from that era. Several years ago, my granddaughter helped to finish this abbreviated version of the State Bird and Flower Quilt of the 1930’s.

The Bird and Flower Quilt created from feed sacks.

In an old trunk, a stash of diaries from my mother’s marriage lay under white linens with deep tatting on the edges. Married in June of 1930, my father and mother began their wedded bliss just as the drought hit the West and Great Plains. My father owned a drag-line and was able to find work as he dug irrigation ditches and spud cellars in Wyoming, Colorado, Nebraska and Kansas. Twenty-three different addresses in five years, then they settled in Greeley, Colorado, with my kindergarten-aged brother.  Reading these diaries, letters from folks back in Iowa, and some newspaper articles, brought the heart ache, insecurities, and fear of the Dust Bowl into reality.

The Novel’s Characters Come Alive

Addy Meyers is a first-year teacher in a one room schoolhouse near Greeley, Colorado. She faces the Board of Education as they assess her teaching skills. The eighth-grade boys challenge her authority. The dust storms bring her to the reality of dust, pneumonia, and poverty.

Foreclosure of grandpa’s homestead threatens the security of Addy, grandpa and the two orphan children that Addy’s grandparents adopted. Jess Dettmann is a single man who helps them keep their wits and possibly the homestead. The homeless people who occupy the Hooverville nearby are introduced to Addy by Jess. Her compassionate heart reaches out to these resourceful families who have lost everything. Addy is shocked when she cans applesauce at the community canning center that other women are canning weeds to be eaten in the winter.

Creating a quilt from her Grandmother’s stash pile serves as a way for Addy to cope. Despair, dust, and drought weave through the Great Depression and Dust Bowl producing a fabric on which vivid threads of hope will appear. Will Addy save the farm, her job, and her heart on the Colorado ranch?

From Great Depression to Greatest Generation

The gifts of an unfinished quilt and a treasure trove of written accounts of a forgotten decade ignited my imagination. It is my wish that those who read this novel will realize that the children of the Dust Bowl grew up to be the members of The Greatest Generation. The children and young adults during the Great Depression learned to persevere in tough times and used those lessons in frugality all of their lives. We owe them a debt of gratitude that cannot be repaid.

Sunbonnet Sue and Overall Sam quilt that Addy created.

While teaching behavior disordered/emotionally disturbed students in a Chicago suburb, I discovered that historical fiction is an excellent way to learn about the issues and people of a time period. To help students write a book report on Dust Between the Stitches, an aid has been created. The insights help junior high and high school readers to understand the dust bowl’s uniqueness in the Great Depression, and to write an organized and thoughtful book report.

Cleo Lampos, M.Ed.

www.cleolampos.com

FB: Author Cleo Lampos

FB: Quilters: Mind, Heart and Soul

Books are available on amazon.com.

CLEO LAMPOS ~ A Mother's Song ~ Giveaway

Hi, everybody. It's "Throwback Thursday" here on Whispers in Purple Blog which gives authors a chance to spotlight a book from their back-lists. Please welcome Cleo Lampos as she talks about her historical novel A MOTHER's SONG, a fascinating peek into the historical Orphan Trains. 

While researching documents for the historical fiction, A Mother’s Song, the issues of the nineteenth century and the crisis of present times coincided. The challenges of the past mirror those of today.

Reading books on the orphan trains that transported over 200,000 homeless waifs from New York City to farms on the Great Plains occupied several years of my life. Each true account from the point of view of a train rider captivated my imagination. The resiliency of the children, their defenses, the fears, and the ability to cope brought their plights to life. Their stories stirred my heart.

The women who rode the trains for years with these children, helping them find “forever homes” inspired me. These agents of the Children’s Aid Society became the forerunners of social work as they fought against exploitation and work issues of their charges. They became heroes.

But the mothers of 1890. They astounded me. Those Irish immigrant mothers in New York City, Five Points, who had more children than they could support gripped my soul. The difficulties they faced on a day to day basis. The choices that haunted them. The ability to allow their children to ride the orphan train to a life that they could not give to them. Hard decisions. Life giving chances. Deep regrets. Their plight haunted me.

My husband traveled with me to the National Orphan Train Museum in Concordia, Kansas, to gather more books and information about the ragamuffins and agents who traveled the tracks between NYC and the west. He attended the Little Falls, Minnesota, Reunion of the descendants of the trains.  We heard the stories from four surviving riders and warmed at their positive attitudes toward life. Then I wrote this book, A Mother’s Song.

Perhaps for me, the creation of this novel served personal therapy. My father died when I was young, and my mother married an alcoholic. Several years of my life were spent in foster care. The stories from the orphan trains touched areas of my emotions needed healing.

When I presented a lecture on this book to a group of South Side Irish women, they leaned into the information. For them, the book represents the most complete view of what happened to Irish immigrants who escaped the Great Famine. They empathized with the main characters only in a way that hardship can generate.

A Mother’s Song follows the main character, Deirdre O’Sullivan, her husband, son, and four year old Ava Rose in Five Points, NYC. This 1890 washerwoman is pregnant with her third child.  When her husband is killed in an accident, Deirdre is left with three children and no support. Her older son becomes a newsie and lives on the streets. Rather than let the baby and Ava Rose starve to death, she signs for them to be put on an orphan train.

 In Nebraska, Claudine has suffered multiple miscarriages and is depressed. She adopts the children. Will the adoption provide the safety and opportunity that Deirdre hopes? This researched story of two mothers and the child who lives both is heart wrenching. It is a poignant tale of hope and courage against unfathomable odds for a better life free from prejudice and poverty.

 

The author, Cleo Lampos, is a retired educator who taught emotionally disturbed/behavior disordered children for 26 years. She lives in a suburb on the south side of Chicago where she quilts, helps her husband with their urban garden, and enjoys eleven grandchildren. She is the author of eight books and numerous magazine articles.

Cleo Lampos’ books are available on amazon.com.

The Giveaway: One free copy of this historic novel will be given to one reader of this post who leaves a comment below with name and contact info (so we can notify you if you're the winner).

Giveaway will run for one week from today on Thursday, July 23, 2020, at MIDNIGHT central time. Winner will be drawn via random.org and notified via email.