Gary Dale Mawyer has been writing for over four decades, and to date has published four novels, Rockfish, The Southern Skylark, Exemptions, and The Adventures of Reese Macaque, P.I., as well as a biographical history, Sergeant Wolinski and the Great War, and a short story collection, Dark and Other Stories. Gary's writings draw on a wealth of history, lore and lived experience. He has a B.A. and an M.F.A. from the University of Virginia. Gary is a Central Virginia native with over 40 years of publishing and editing experience. His interests include American and Virginia history, military history, geology, hiking, travel, landscaping and gardening. He is the father of four grown children and has four grandchildren. He lives with his wife Karen and two cats in Albemarle County.
Contact Gary at garydmawyer@gmail.com.
Contact Gary at garydmawyer@gmail.com.
GARY'S BOOKS
Rockfish
As a young boy in Colonial America, Abraham Marr's life changed in a storm of violence and irrevocable choices that propelled him on a journey away from kin, comfort and old world certainties. He could not know how the consequences of his life would be felt for generations to come. Rockfish is a stirring chronicle of a Virginia family in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains still living out the repercussions of Marr's choices generations later. It is also a family history of America and a meditation among the quarreling philosophies of our national life. |
The Southern Skylark
When Augustus Hingely, poetical dilettante and acquaintance of the Romantic expatriates Byron and Shelley, comes ashore in America, he expects to be introduced to polite society in drawing rooms and lecture halls where he might express his thoughts on "The Lives of the Poets." The Americans, however, find entirely new and unexpected identities for Mr. Hingely in a picaresque of gothic manners as Hingely makes his way up the James River toward the Springs of Virginia, a would-be apostle of freedom in a land of slavery. |
Dark and Other Stories
This collection of haunting tales set in the mountains and small towns of Central Virginia illuminates the twilight of the 20th Century. Computers were new and telephones were not yet old, and electricity was coarse and unrefined. As in the otherworldly riddle stories of Jorge Luis Borges or the dark imaginings of Ambrose Bierce, fact and fantasy are not so easily separated in the architecture of Dark and Other Stories. |
Sergeant Wolinski and the Great War
Sergeant Wolinski and the Great War tells the story of one man's experiences on the Western Front during the last climactic months of the First World War, as the newly-formed American Expeditionary Force met the veteran German Army in France. Visitors of the Argonne Forest battlefield today see little evidence of the destruction that visited this region in 1918, but the signs of war remain for those who look. The causes and consequences of the Great War, as it was then called, are very much alive and still with us today. The actual events of the Great War are largely overshadowed by the later disasters of the 20th Century, but we can still, in a limited way, sometimes reconstruct what happened and what the soldiers of the A.E.F. experienced. |
Exemptions
Phil was an undergraduate and Marsha was a nurse. Andy was an SDS dropout, Leandra was an escapee from The Patch, and Tori was a townie chick. It was 1969 and acid cost 60 cents a tab. |
The Adventures of Reese Macaque, P.I.
A World Where Genetics Ran Mad … 2296 C.E. A distant future. Or is it? Reese Macaque, Private Investigator, doesn’t think so. Because that’s when he’s alive. If you call a career investigating Shady Land Transactions, Shadowy Usufructuary Rights, and Tortured Titles being alive. Unfortunately Reese does call that a living, because it’s the only career he knows. And there’s plenty of work, because the rule of law has taken some hard knocks after the disastrous Sea Change and the often-inconvenient Secession Era. There’s more than a whiff of anarchy in the air, grimly compounded by the unexpected outcomes of genetic experimentation run wild at the end of the Federal Era—our experimentation—and Theirs—whoever They are... |