Charles David Kleymeyer

Biography

Charles David Kleymeyer is an award-winning writer and applied sociologist with a lifetime of experience serving organizations and communities of low-income ethnic groups throughout the Americas. He has published short stories and poetry, and during a Fulbright Fellowship in highland Ecuador, he produced a trilingual collection of documentary short stories-in Spanish, Quechua, and English. Over the past decade, he has published six stories from the novel, one of which won an Award of Merit for a Seasonal Article, from the Associated Church Press. His professional publications include four books and more than thirty articles.

As a Creative Writing major at Stanford University, the author studied under Wallace Stegner. He then served in the Peace Corps in Peru, and subsequently earned an M.S. in Sociology and a Ph.D. in Development Studies from the University of Wisconsin. His career in international grassroots development is still ongoing.

For five decades, the author has been a performing storyteller at folk festivals, spiritual retreats, Indian reservations, and on radio and television. This avocation shaped his narrative voice, while his cross-cultural international development work molded his philosophical and ethical outlook. The life lessons and oral history techniques he learned from Indians and Blacks throughout the Americas have informed his vision of the teaching style and humanistic practices of the historical Jesus and other New Testament figures. These lessons of love, compassionate service, and forgiveness were amplified by his long-time spiritual commitment to the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers).

More than thirty years of involvement with the Friends Wilderness Center, a spiritual retreat center adjoining the Appalachian Trail in West Virginia, deepened the author's environmental ethic and rooted the book's narrative in the powerful connection between nature and the spirit, and in the human imperative to care for the Earth.

The author is the father of two adult children and a teen-all three of whom have served as his fiction editors. He visits classrooms and libraries where he presents a self-scripted performance-in first-person and authentic costume-of Abraham Lincoln telling stories of his Indiana childhood and how it impacted him as a father and a President.

Books

YESHU: A Novel for the Open-Hearted
Price: $9.99 USD. Words: 185,880. Language: English. Published: March 14, 2014 . Categories: Fiction » Inspirational, Fiction » Inspirational
An interfaith, Quaker retelling of the historical Jesus saga, this book invites its readers in to join a storytelling carpenter named Yeshu, his young neighbors Daavi and Shoshana, and a band of fellow seekers on a spiritual-quest journey through wilderness, village, and city. A journey brimming with lessons, laughter, and natural beauty, it forever alters their lives and still impacts ours.