Joe L. Wheeler
Joe Wheeler has been labeled many things: as Father Christmas because of his editing/compiling America’s longest-running Christmas of story series — Christmas in My Heart (now in its 18th season); as one of America’s leading story anthologists (56 story collections by twelve publishing houses); as the world’s foremost authority on life and times of the frontier writer Zane Grey (he is co-founder and executive director of the international Zane Grey’s West Society); as a biographer, having written full-length biographies of Abraham Lincoln and St. Nicholas and shorter biographies of Louisa May Alcott, Abbie Farwell Brown, Daniel Defoe, Charles Dickens, Lucy Maud Montgomery, Gene Stratton Porter, Grace Richmond, Henryk Sienkiewicz, and Lew Wallace; and as a Renaissance Man because of his encyclopedic interest in everything (popular culture as well as the academic); and his master’s degree in the teaching of History, his master’s degree in English (thesis on Utopian and Dystopian literature), and his Vanderbilt doctorate in English (History of Ideas emphasis).
Because of all these variables, and stirring in his 71 books (and counting), this blog series promises to be unlike any other — and that’s why he titles the series, “UNCHARTED WATERS.”
“With age, gone are the forevers of youth. Gone is the willingness to procrastinate, delay, to play the waiting game. Now each day is a treasure beyond compare . . . because there are so few such diadems left.”
“There is something incredibly nostalgic and significant about the annual cascade of autumn leaves.”
“As we hypnotically watch the steadily diminishing reserve of sand in life's hourglass, the instincts of a miser surface. Life is now savored, sipped as with a fine 19th Century French wine.”
“Time remorselessly rambles down the corridors and streets of our lives. but it is not until autumn that most of us become aware that our tickets are stamped with a terminal destination.”
“There is something deep within us that sobs at endings. Why, God, does everything have to end? Why does all nature grow old? Why do spring and summer have to go?”
“Love may precede respect but it cannot survive the loss of it.”