Browse Delaware Authors: Fretz, Philip

A poor fatherless boy in a deprived section of Philadelphia in the 1890s had little chance for social advancement, education or financial success. An orphan fared even worse. When a personal tragedy struck Alfred, he had nowhere to look for help. A strange man in the police station seemed to come to his aid belatedly, confusing Alfred with both anger and just a spark of hope. The events following his brief incarceration left him more bewildered.

A poor boy in Philadelphia in the 1890s has a wrenching personal experience when his baby sister was kidnapped. When he was paradoxically arrested in connection, an unlikely mentor propelled him toward a chance for success. His life seemed to becomes a script in his mentor's control. In this volume, he becomes a man, pushed ahead by his late mentor's wife. He tries to follow his heart in his pursuit of romance but finds delay and distraction instead.

The area of southern Delaware in and around Rehoboth Beach has long had a large community of LGBT vacationers and homeowners. Into this resort area come many couples looking for a romantic setting. Sean and Harry are one such couple who travel there for a summer weekend, in search of a few days of lounging on the beach, and dancing at night. What they encounter during their time there is a series of unexpected events, which cause them to re-evaluate their relationship and their own motivations. This is also a broader story of a generation of gay men whose lives have changed dramatically from their past, from which they are making a final break. They are uncertain of what they want and need, sometimes still haunted by families and other people left behind.

Raw emotions - The expressiveness of our spirit, that everyone can relate to.Poems of life and love are reflective of how I view the world around me. They explore themes of love, the challenge of maintaining a relationship, and the ecstasy of finding a lasting and rewarding partner.Poems help us break away from the weakness of solitude, to make the stories behind the emotions feel personal and very real.This collection is a dialog between you and me, expressed in words that often don't come easily to any of us, but words that are emotive and compelling in their telling.

Returned Peace Corps Volunteers (RPCV) are living throughout this country and in other lands as well. Those who have chosen to reside in Sussex County, Delaware have joined together to meet and socialize every couple of months. Several have offered to list their very short biographies for this volume.

Just a few months out of student life on the rolling green lawns of Haverford College, Philip Fretz was living in a small, remote West African city amid insect invasions, deadly snakes and coups. It was the tumultuous 1960s, in both the United States and Africa, and he had become an early recruit to the Peace Corps, founded in 1961. He was the first volunteer to be sent to teach English at the Kenema Technical Institute in Sierra Leone, a former British colony that had been left in stark poverty and underdevelopment when colonialism ended. Half a century later, he began to pore through the diaries he had kept, sporadically, during those two years in Kenema. When his father died in 1998, relatives found in his papers all the letters Philip had written home to his parents, recording his illnesses, his extraordinary adventures across West Africa, and the pain he felt watching his students struggle amid poverty and tribalism, in bare-bones classrooms without books and supplies, while keeping alive their hopes that they could have a brighter future.

I have written poems and short stories since i can remember, years before word processing freed me from the perils of my illegible handwriting. Subsequent to retiring, I discovered first the Osher Life Long Learning program in Lewes, Delaware, and then the Renaissance Institute in Baltimore, Maryland. Both of these programs offered many opportunities to practice writing in many subject areas with encouragement from classmates and instructors. The selection of poems in this volume represent many that were spawned by participation in these programs. I've been awakened to notice the people I see in ordinary settings and events that occur in everyday life. They arouse my inspiration to record what I see and hear and translate those ideas into poetry and prose.