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Notes from a Boy @ The Window

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Notes from a Boy @ The Window

Tag Archives: Careers

More Confessions From an Educated Fool

03 Tuesday Aug 2021

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, Cleaning, culture, Eclectic, Hebrew-Israelite, Mount Vernon New York, New York City, race, Religion, Youth

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Calling, Careers, Educated Fool, Failure, Foolery, Gift, Jobs, Journeys, Writing


Me and my receding hairline, May 22, 2020 (Donald Earl Collins)

This is the first of a series of essays and posts that I am doing this month about my journey as a writer, an educator, and a fool over the past four decades, simultaneously between Medium and my blog. I hope to educate, to entertain, to make people laugh and cry laughing, but (hopefully) not to feel too sorry for me. I am who I am, a work still in progress, even as my knees and my neck ache, even as my mind and spirit are exhausted. Still, I want to fly. “Ain’t that crazy?,” to quote music artist Seal, this as his song “Crazy” turns 30 this week.

—

Serving as a contingent faculty member at two different universities with few benefits, few avenues for promotion, and having lived through one obsequious toad for a supervisor after another year after year? This was not how I imagined my life would end up by the time I reached middle age. I didn’t even think I’d make it to 30 when I was a fourteen-year-old, so there’s that. But when I was 11 in 1981, I did discover my first true calling. I wanted to be a writer, what kind of a writer, I wasn’t sure. But after two years of reading World Book Encyclopedia and more than 40 college-level or higher books on World War II — mostly by British authors — I was ready to write something. That spring, I wrote a 500-word essay as part of a city-wide writing contest in Mount Vernon, New York, back in the days when this New York City suburb had its own separate newspaper, the Mount Vernon Daily Argus. I don’t remember what they asked us K-12 students to write about, probably something civic-minded and somewhat trite. But I finished second overall out of hundreds of entries. The first-place winner was a high school junior. I won something, on my first try, too. Yay, me!

I got a note in the Daily Argus, along with an invitation to an awards ceremony at A. B. Davis Middle School that June, where a photographer took my picture and a representative from the newspaper handed me a $15 check. Technically, this was the first time someone paid me for my writing. This wouldn’t happen again until I was a doctoral student at the University of Pittsburgh. Between that and me introducing the keynote speaker for our graduating class of sixth-graders earlier that morning — the eventual Mount Vernon mayor Ernest Davis — I was truly inspired. I thought, for the first time in my life, This is MY gift! I want to write! I want to be a writer!

I went for it a week after graduation. I decided that I would write a book about the latest in American military hardware and how this would create the most efficient killing machine “in the history of mankind.” I wrote about the prototypes of the B1 and B2 bomber and bomber-fighter planes. I wrote about the prototype of the original M1 Abrams tank, which had recently come into service. I even jotted down paragraphs on ICBMs (Inter-Continental Ballistic Missiles) MX and MX2s and SLBMs (Submarine-Launched Ballistic Missiles), the Trident-class missiles and the Ohio-class submarines being built to house them. Unbelievably, I wrote a letter to the Pentagon to get pictures of these machines of destruction, and they obliged me with more than a dozen color photos a month later. I was sure that at least two pictures were classified.

By the time my mom had birthed my then youngest sibling Yiscoc (this is a form of Hebrew for Isaac), and my next youngest brother Maurice had turned two, both at the end of July, I had written 48 pages of what was to be a nearly 100-page book. It wasn’t a children’s book. I wrote about the modern United States military and its ability to wage a traditional war and a tactical nuclear war, and what that meant for the rest of the world. And then I hit a wall, and fell into a sinkhole somewhere in Florida. I couldn’t reconcile my fascination with these weapons and the tens of millions of people who could be killed by such weapons. My 11-year-old mind could not grapple with the real-life consequences of such expensive and deadly military hardware. And as a still immature preteen, I didn’t want to consider the vaporizing and pulverizing ugly side of military weaponry. After more than a week of trying to move into another section of this book, I stopped at 52 hand-written pages. It was mid-August, and middle school and all the hell that would come with it was just three weeks away.

Did I mention that as I wrote my first book in the summer of 1981, my stepfather had converted me and my siblings and my mother to Judaism, making us Hebrew-Israelites, without asking me or my 13-year-old older brother Darren for our opinion? Or that I was a month away from social suicide in the classroom, in the magnet program I would be a part of for the next six years, all because I had to wear a kufi outside our two-bedroom apartment? Or that the Carter-Reagan years and two more kids had left my mom broke, and us without food in the house on the regular? All of this was in process even as I was writing my summer away. It would be one of the only times in my life where being blissfully ignorant of the future while pursuing my gift as a writer with all of my heart and mind was such luxurious joy. Where time itself was as abundant as all the atoms in the universe.

I lost my way after that. The growing-up years had already been brutal, between a sexual assault I endured at six and a half, a suicide attempt, and years of therapy my mom administered with homophobia and a belt. With us sinking into welfare poverty, no food at home a third of the time, and my bullying, constant threatening no-good stepfather, my childhood love for reading and writing would take a beating. And still, when I emerged from the eight years of constant abuse to see my true face in my mind’s mirror, I still saw a writer. And then I lost my way, again. This time, to academia, to career-chasing, to chasing dollars, to the responsibilities of living an adult life.

My story is one of constantly denying who I am as a writer, and paying for it with blood, tears, and a damaged spirit, every single time. It doesn’t matter if I am a particularly good writer or a mediocre and overwrought one. After all, there are horrible writers who’ve published best-selling books, and great writers who’ve died before their work was ever read by more than a handful of family members or friends.

No, my story is about how the pursuit of all America pretends to offer can really fuck up one’s priorities. My story is about the spiral of falling in and falling out of love with life and the pursuit of making one’s life better, the illusion of choices, and the hypocrisy of the US, embedded in all of its institutions. My story is about the elliptical ebbs and flows of life, about my journeys as a writer, and how much of an educated fool I have been in these journeys. I promise laughter, sadness, and anger, and joy and victories, too.

The Sacrifice of the Lambdas

28 Wednesday Jul 2021

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Cleaning, culture, Eclectic, Jimme, My Father, New York City, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, race, University of Pittsburgh, Work

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Careers, Contingent Faculty, Erasure, Higher Education, Isolation, Job Loss, Ostracism, Sacrifice, Sacrificial Lamb, Sanity, Systemic Racism


Lambs from living to skewered (cropped and collaged), July 27, 2021. (Donald Earl Collins, via https://www.mygreekdish.com/recipe/greek-lamb-souvlaki-recipe-skewers-with-pita-bread/ and © Alison Toon/Adobe stock)

Most people I’ve met and known over the past 30 years have no clue as to what it is to teach high school, college, master’s and doctoral students. None. They think we who are serious educators just wing it and lecture to death, with no preparation at all. They have no inkling of what it takes to research topics, write articles for different audiences, to work on a book-length manuscript, or to publish one. Nor do they understand the job market — any job market, not just in higher education — or the psychological and emotional burden of holding students’ trust, or the constancy of systemic elitism, racism, sexism, in these elite white and elite Black spaces. 

I know my mom and dad never have. “You might as well have another high school diploma,” my mom said of my 10-year pursuit of my bachelor’s, master’s, and PhD, on the week of my doctoral graduation at Carnegie Mellon University. It was the day after she had finished her associate’s, a ten-year trek on her part.

My dad during one drunken stupor accused me of lying about having earned my master’s in barely two semesters. “Anybody coulda gone somewhere and made up a fake one,” he said in 1992 during my summer visit to New York, when I showed him my actual degree from the University of Pittsburgh. A few weeks later, after talking with his two white bosses, the Levi brothers, my now hungover dad admitted, “they say you can get a master’s in a year.” I said in response, “Really? I had no idea!”

But that’s only the beginning of the sacrifices people like me with advanced degrees and training make in earning these degrees and pursuing careers related to them. I know people whose first jobs were in weird and not-quite-ideal places. University of Maine at Machias. Austin College in North Texas. North Dakota State University. Washington State University. University of Maryland Eastern Shore. Sam Houston State University. University of Mary Washington. Northern Illinois. Illinois State.

Now, before anyone says, “Why, these seem like good places to work,” my response is, “Sure, if you are white!” Yes, I said it. If you are Black, Brown, Indigenous, man, woman, or transgender, most of these are between weird and horrible places to work. The communities around many of these campuses could be or would have once been sundown towns. Or, one could be a place where they tried to lynch someone like me 10 or 20 years earlier. The only people on many of these campuses who know your needs for culture and community play Division I sports or are the other three or four colleagues who aren’t white. To go through two, even three jobs to land at a place that provides one a tenure-line or tenured position — this is a massive sacrifice.

It means living a sort-of half-life, of only focusing on your professional development, or of partners putting their lives on hold so that you can build your career. And all while dealing with an everyday deluge of direct racism, isolation, marginalization, and erasure on the job. If one is lucky, you find community off campus in some of these places. In more white-bred (or more accurately, white-corn-fed) communities, that deluge can turn into a tsunami, and might force you to stay at home and away from these racist and misogynistic and homophobic Children-of-the-Corn-types as much as humanly possible.

There are those like me who never fully believed in making these kinds of sacrifices in order to publish a scholarly article or book, just so that we could get the plum job at a major university. But that choice means sacrifices, too. Like leaving your research and writing behind for a steadier and better-paying gig. But, at least in my case, I couldn’t ask my partner to drop her own aspirations while I took a job in the middle of Nowheresville (Colgate University, Slippery Rock, and Northern Illinois all come to mind here). 

So my first post-PhD job search between 1997 and December 2000 was an urban, mostly East Coast one. I turned down as many job interviews as I took on. I ended up in the nonprofit world in the DC area, though, and the abject racism I faced there was still not as bad as the elitism I dealt with during a job interview I had at Howard University. I said no to the only tenure-track job I was ever offered, with few regrets. But it still meant that I would lack the job stability necessary to build my writing career and to keep a steady paycheck. Not all sacrifices turn out the way any of us expect. 

My parents and other people born before 1955 have had the tendency to say to me in one version or another, “See, that’s why all that book learnin’ aint all that good for you. Better to do work with your hands. That’s how you become a man.” It wouldn’t have mattered if I’d become an award-winning author and full professor, or a senior program officer at the Ford Foundation. As far as they have always been concerned, I was sacrificing my mind to “useless facts.” If I had become divorced or homeless because of my path, on the other hand, they would’ve said, “I told you so.”

For the rest of folks in my life, mine is a “lazy” life, where my liberal butt “gets paid a lot of money to sit around and indoctrinate students.” All built on the fact that I and other faculty only teach for a few hours a week, instead of working from 8:30 to 5 like real Americans. They have no idea that I’ve given up ten years worth of weekends and holidays to prepare for my classes, review papers, grade assignments, to write a piece, to work on a manuscript or a new project, just in the past 13 years alone. Or, to meet with students struggling in the classroom or in life in general. The emotional toll of learning about some student or colleague’s trauma or abuse is incalculable. But, yeah, I’m “lazy” when I take a nap in the middle of the day, because it’s the only way I can get to seven hours of sleep in a 24-hour period five days out of seven.

They have never experienced what it is like to have the same qualifications and make some of the same sacrifices as my more successful colleagues, and not get a specific job or a particular grant. Just recently, I learned that I will not get interviewed for a term faculty position in my department at American University. The job is the same job as the one I have worked at AU for the past three years, but as contingent faculty. Patting me on my head to tell me that I’ve made “valuable contributions to the university,” to students, and to the department does not make up for my sacrifices as a writer, as an educator, and as a historian.

And I still have it much easier than my less lucky colleagues, who may be working at three or even five universities to generate a full-time-equivalent income. Or those who have had nervous breakdowns from the brutal conditions of working for abusive institutions within the nested doll of this matrix of elitism, racism, misogynoir, and other -isms and -phobias that is the United States. Or those who are burned out husks of the educators and writers they used to be. Or still, others who’ve died because of their sacrifice. 

Not all sacrifices are worth it. Then again, assuming my mind and spirit remain intact, I might be able to drill NBA-range 3s and run faster than most of my students until my 75th birthday.

Joe Theismann’s Leg and the Day I Learned ESPN Existed

18 Wednesday Nov 2015

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Mount Vernon New York, New York City, Pop Culture, Sports, Youth

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ABC, Broken Leg, Careers, ESPN, Football, Joe Theismann, Lawrence Taylor, Monday Night Football, New York Daily News, New York Giants, Sportscenter, Washington Redskins


Back cover of New York Daily News, November 19, 1985. (http://nydailynews.com/).

Back cover of New York Daily News, November 19, 1985. (http://nydailynews.com/).

In a really early draft of Boy @ The Window, I wrote the following about my ’85 New York Giants:

My football Giants had a chance to win the NFC East. But on a night in mid-November, after LT ran over Redskins’ quarterback Joe Theismann’s leg, which made a popping noise for all the world to hear on Monday Night Football, their season slowly slid south.

That was thirty years ago on this date. My Giants finished 10-6 that year, but had lost the division to the Cowboys, and would later get shutout by the Bears in a frosty cold day at Soldier Field that January. Thank you, Sean Landeta!

But the main story on November 18, 1985 was the ending of Joe Theismann’s roller-coaster career. Until this morning, I hadn’t seen Lawrence Taylor’s knee drive through Theismann’s right leg while twisting the rest of him around in at least twenty years. It somehow looked more gruesome today than it did to me in ’85. Maybe that’s because of tendonitis in my right knee or the hairline fracture I had in my left fibula on MLK Day ’10 while playing pickup basketball. Or probably because my life was much more painful in ’85 living in Mount Vernon, New York than it is now. One sympathizes. Taylor-to-Theismann proved the much-used cliche, “We’re all just one play away.”

We still lost the game, to Jay Schroeder no less, 23-21. The biggest story coming out of the game, though was Theismann’s crushed right leg. Over and over again, starting with ABC and Monday Night Football, they showed the play that ended Theismann’s career. And with each showing, I got to hear the pop that went with Theismann’s compound break.

By the next afternoon, I learned that this station called ESPN was showing highlights of my Giants loss. They, too, played the replay of Theismann’s demise over and over and over again. We had the sports channel as part of our cable package, so I watched. After years of watching stations with W’s as part of their name, I couldn’t understand why this one was called ESPN. By the time I’d hit bedtime that Tuesday evening, I’d seen and heard Theismann’s leg break nearly a hundred times. My love/hate affair with ESPN and SportsCenter had begun, thanks in part to the end of Theismann’s professional playing days.

Theismann waited a bit more than twenty years to look at the replay of the last moments of his NFL career. Good thing he did. He probably would’ve gone into shock after seeing his leg break 10,000 times in the course of a week.

My AED Resignation

09 Friday Nov 2012

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Movies, Politics, race, Work

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Academy for Educational Development, AED, Business Practices, Calling, Careers, Diversity Issues, Grants, Jobs, Lumina Foundation for Education, Nonprofit Organizations, Partnerships for College Access and Success, PCAS, Resignation, Richard Nixon, Shawshank Redemption, Tim Robbins


Richard Nixon delivering the “V” sign outside Army One upon his final departure from the White House, August 9, 1974. (Robert L. Knudsen via Wikipedia). In public domain.

Five years ago today, on the second Friday in November ’07, I handed my resignation notice to my boss Sandy (see my post “Early November” from November ’08). We were at the end of a two-day final Directors Meeting for our Partnerships for College Access and Success grantees. I had decided to step down from my deputy director position with the initiative, and of course, with the Academy for Educational Development (AED). This wasn’t the first time I resigned from a job in order to move on to another job or to a new track in my career. But this was the first time I’d done it without much promise for new work.

I hadn’t even been offered my teaching position with University of Maryland University College at the time I resigned (that wouldn’t happen for another two weeks). Yet I was sure that after seven years at AED and nearly four years with PCAS, that my role as a full-time nonprofit manager with the organization was soon coming to an end. It was obvious that Lumina Foundation for Education was no longer interested in large long-term programmatic work on college access and college success, with changes in leadership and philosophy in the previous year. The additional grant extension that we worked on in ’06 was due to end in March ’08, and with my $70,000+/year salary, I’d find myself without work soon after.

There were other options. Sandy and the AED NY office (with my help in a few cases) had obtained some smaller grants for evaluation work from Citigroup, from Wallace, and from Lumina related to the PCAS work. None of this work was full-time, though, and would likely not be more than half-time work. I would then have to go through months of selling myself to other projects across the organization in order to get close to full-time and maintain my benefits. I’d done this once before, at the end of my time with New Voices, in late ’03 and early ’04. It was a stressful, gut-churning process, one that I didn’t want to repeat.

2007 AED Logo, November 9, 2012. AED no longer exists, releasing logo to public domain.

Plus, I’d learned so much about AED during that process and over those last four years in my deputy director job, most of it not good. Bad business practices, shady accounting practices, poor diversity and promotion practices (see my “AED Update – DOA for 50th Anniversary” from March ’11). I just saw AED as a way-station for people who were truly dedicated to social change, and not a place to build a career.

Still, the work at PCAS wasn’t complete, and would likely not get done (or get done at all deliberate speed – very slowly and gradually) if I just resigned with two weeks or four weeks’ notice. So I proposed the following in my resignation letter and in my conversation with Sandy. I gave three months’ notice, to ensure that I would complete any final reports for Lumina and to ensure my involvement in any potential funding opportunities to continue segments of the initiative. I proposed that I could finish the PCAS and related work as a consultant, making it easier for me to transition out of AED and for Sandy to transition PCAS. I could finish what would end up being a 144-page resource guide and a twenty-six-page scholarly journal article based on the PCAS work.

Sandy accepted my resignation and my proposal, of course. But I don’t think she believed I’d follow through with the resignation, given the amount of time I gave myself before my last day. I don’t think that she believed it until I submitted a copy of my resignation letter to Human Resources on January 9, ’08. She may have figured that my wife would talk me out of leaving.

But Angelia and me had discussed resigning as a calculated risk since the end of ’05. AED had rarely done right by me, right from the day I was first interviewed for a program officer position in November ’00. I was underpaid (given my skills, education and experience), and more important, I found the place an improper fit for the kind of work I wanted to do on education and other social justice issues. We had saved money and I had carefully applied for jobs in anticipation of this decision since the early part of ’06. A bit of good luck made it easier for me to move on, having been offered a part-time faculty position at UMUC right before Thanksgiving ’07.

Tim Robbins in Shawshank Redemption [screen shot] (1994), November 9, 2012. Qualifies as fair use under US Copyright laws – low resolution & symbolic relevance to post.

The question I’ve been asked the most often in the past four and a half years has been whether I miss working at AED. I sometimes miss the money I made while working there, as it’s easier working one job with a standard schedule than teaching and the feast-and-famine cycles of consulting and contract work.

But I don’t miss the organization, which essentially no longer exists. I really only think about AED when I do work for an organization that reminds me of AED (not good) or when I post about my experiences. Still, I learned a lot about business and greed, administration and ethics, people, social change and fairness in my time there. A mixed blessing, indeed.

“It Is Done” – 15 Years Later

21 Monday Nov 2011

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, race, Youth

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Academia, Barbara Lazarus, Barbara Sizemore, Betrayal, Calling, Careers, Carnegie Mellon University, Catherine Lugg, Dan Resnick, Daniel P. Resnick, Dissertation, Distrust, Education, Epiphany, Joe Trotter, Joe William Trotter Jr., Self-Discovery, Writing


Hands of God & Adam, fingers about to touch, Sistine Chapel ceiling, Vatican, Michelangelo, 1508-1512 (via Wikipedia). In public domain.

The next twenty-four hours will mark a decade and a half since my former dissertation advisor Joe Trotter wrote today’s title quote in a God-like-pronouncement of an email to me regarding my final content-based revisions to my doctoral thesis. With those revisions following my committee meetings in October, I was now officially Dr. Collins. I knew that. I just didn’t feel it.

Working on a book-length research project with an abusive advisor and disinterested committee members at a school as conservative and isolating as Carnegie Mellon University left me exhausted. For I never felt I could ever be all of myself there. I made myself into the scholar I hoped that I wouldn’t become. At least, the twenty-one version of me that began graduate school back in ’91 held that hope. Five years later, I felt alienated from my own purpose and calling, and was more than unsure about becoming a full-time professor and historian. Especially given the wonderful examples of scholarly inhumanity and hypocrisy that Trotter, Dan Resnick and so many others had proven themselves to be (see “You’re Not Ready” post from November ’08 and “And Now, A Plagiarism Moment” post from September ’10).

I was burned out. I felt numb, with a boiling mantle of rage underneath the surface. If Trotter had said the

Arching fountain of a Pahoehoe (like my post-PhD rage) approximately 10 m high issuing from the western end of the 0740 vents, a series of spatter cones 170 m long, south of Pu‘u Kahaualea, September 10, 2007. (USGS via Wikipedia). In public domain.

wrong thing to me at the wrong time in ’96, I probably would’ve laid him out with a right hook to the jaw. And Resnick’s lucky that I didn’t own a car, because I might’ve run him down with it.

As it was, when Trotter attempted to meet with me a few weeks later to discuss “my future,” I refused. Especially given his suggestions for job applications. One, a one-year position at a University of Nebraska branch campus. The other, a CUNY school in Queens with a proposed position that wouldn’t begin until July ’98. I told him, “You don’t get to determine my future, certainly not without me.”

What should’ve been a period of rest and repair between Thanksgiving Week ’96 and graduation day in May ’97 was hardly that at all. It took me, really and truly, six months to recover from the dissertation process, and probably close to two years to not pass by or go on Carnegie Mellon’s campus without wanting to strangle my dissertation committee with piano wire. By then, I’d moved on to the rather mundane task of figuring out how to cobble together a career that wasn’t dependent on a full-time faculty position in academia.

And over the past fifteen years, I have pieced together several careers. As a part-time college professor, as a nonprofit program officer and as a consultant. It helped to have people like the late Barbara Lazarus and my dear friend Cath Lugg in my corner in those first years after I’d finished my doctorate. It helped that I expanded my career options from merely pursuing a history professorship wherever Joe Trotter’s winds could’ve taken me.

But it helped, most of all, for me to start trusting my instincts, my own heart, again. The irony of my complete disillusionment at the end of my degree-earning journey was that it left me with the time to contemplate whom I thought I really was, what I really wanted to do in life, and how I wanted to do it.

It was far from an immediate process of epiphanies and revelation. It took me nearly six years after finishing my dissertation to see myself as a writer, cutting through twenty years of denial and abuse in the process. It took me a little longer to see myself as a writer first and foremost, with all of my other professional hats second, third, and so forth. To understand that mine was a concern far greater than multiculturalism in education. My role as a writer and educator was also about aspirations, academic pathways to success, racial and ethnic equity in education, access to and success in college.

Barbara Sizemore, 1927-2004, circa mid-1990s. (http://sesp.northwestern.edu).

Now, that doesn’t mean that I haven’t looked back to wonder what could’ve been. If I were a White male with my credentials, I’d long ago been doing what I’ve been fighting to do as a writer and educator for years. If my advisors had been someone like a Cornel West or Henry Louis Gates. Or if I had attended an Ivy League school in undergrad. Or if I’d earned a master’s degree in journalism or communications, or a doctorate in a school of education or in psychology.

The late Barbara Sizemore once warned me about earning my doctorate in history some two decades ago. “You always have to do things the hard way, don’t you?,” she said to me with disapproval when she learned of my acceptance into Pitt’s history PhD program. I should’ve said, “Yes, I do.” Because the last fifteen years have been a hard road, as all roads to enlightenment are.

USAID suspends District-based nonprofit AED from contracts amid investigation

16 Thursday Dec 2010

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Eclectic, Politics, Work

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Academy for Educational Development, AED, Careers, Corruption, Jobs, Suspension of Grants, USAID, Washington Post, Work


I learned from a friend last night that my former employer, Academy for Educational Development (AED), was suspended by USAID for mismanagement of millions of dollars http://wapo.st/gIhw8Y. I’m mostly unsurprised. But it’s still shocking and very disappointing to learn that a place that I worked so hard for between December 2000 and February ’08 might’ve been involved in corruption, and on a fairly large scale.

The slogan for the organization for most of the time I worked there was “Connecting People, Creating Change.” It seems to me that if this investigation holds water, the C’s for corruption (obvious why) and chaos — for the futures of most of the staff — should be added to its fifty-year legacy. I was never a big fan of the organization, as its corporate structure wasn’t particularly appealing to me. But I did have quite a few friends and colleagues who I enjoyed working with over the course of my seven years. It’s those folks that I feel for the most right now. Especially in our current economic and job climate.

Boy @ The Window: A Memoir

Boy @ The Window: A Memoir

Places to Buy/Download Boy @ The Window

There's a few ways in which you can read excerpts of, borrow and/or purchase and download Boy @ The Window. There's the trade paperback edition of Boy @ The Window, available for purchase via Amazon.com at http://www.amazon.com/Boy-Window-Donald-Earl-Collins/dp/0989256138/

There's also a Kindle edition on Amazon.com. The enhanced edition can be read only with Kindle Fire, an iPad or a full-color tablet. The links to the enhanced edition through Apple's iBookstore and the Barnes & Noble NOOK edition are below. The link to the Amazon Kindle version is also immediately below:

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Boy @ The Window on Amazon.com: http://www.amazon.com/Boy-The-Window-Memoir-ebook/dp/B00CD95FBU/

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Boy @ The Window on Apple's iBookstore: https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/boy-the-window/id643768275?ls=1

Barnes & Noble (bn.com) logo, June 26, 2013. (http://www.logotypes101.com).

Boy @ The Window on Barnes & Noble: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/boy-the-window-donald-earl-collins/1115182183?ean=2940016741567

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