Please Stay Awhile Longer

Dear Readers

After two-plus years in the making, the third installment of the Mt Pleasant stories is here! Stay Awhile Longer was inspired by two events.

The first was the death of my brother Henry Lewis Powell in June 2020. And, yes, when I created the character Louie Pyle in the first book, I was thinking of my tall, handsome brother who watched The Andy Griffith Show reruns and appropriated Goober Pyle’s corny jokes for his own use. My brother could be serious when a situation called for sincere reflection but, in his natural state of being, he was a funny guy. He relentlessly bombarded family, friends, his customers, and total strangers with jokes and entertaining stories.

Louie’s family wishes he could have stayed awhile longer on this earth.

The second spark of inspiration came from a discussion my creative editor and I had about the Coronavirus Pandemic and past century plagues. In the fourteenth century, a young scholar Giovanni Boccaccio penned The Decameron which is a fictional account of Italian life after the Black Death of 1348. Young Florentine survivors retreat into the countryside to “social distance” themselves from the ravages of the plague. To give their minds respite from their devastations, they entertain one another with stories ranging from morality tales to family yarns.

And, so, like Boccaccio’s characters, Mt Pleasant’s Louie Pyle and his small circle of family and unlikely companions make it through the 2020 pandemic by telling one another stories to escape from their modern day worries, albeit for a short while.

I hope Stay Awhile Longer lifts your spirits in some small way.

Melissa Powell Gay