For Love Of Self by Robin Reardon

For Love Of Self by Robin Reardon

A beautiful young man, dancing alone and completely naked at the edge of a pond, is not what Spencer Hill expected to see. It's 1987, and he has been assigned a ministerial post in a Unitarian Universalist parish in Assisi, Vermont, close to the Canadian border-a far cry from his hometown of New York City. So a sky clad wood sprite takes him very much by surprise.

What might have been a ho-hum posting in this remote northern location turns out to be anything but that. The good news: His progressive parish doesn't care that he's gay. The bad news? His attempts to make a goodwill connection with The Forest, a nearby Pagan community, are consistently rebuffed for reasons he doesn't understand.

As Spencer makes friends and enters into a love affair, he begins to explore the fraught relationship he'd had with his late father. And in his efforts to reach out to The Forest, he uncovers a dark secret the Assisi townsfolk don't want to talk about.

Robin Reardon is a lifelong watcher of human behavior who has been writing since she was a child--childish songs, poetry, and short plays. Short stories, creative nonfiction, and novels for and about teenagers have all been published recently. Robin's day job is as a information manager for an international financial institution, where she writes, edits others' work, and develops strategic communications techniques, with a focus on intranet delivery of internal communications. Singing, photography, and the study of comparative religions are some of her hobbies outside of writing. Robin works in a butter yellow study with a view of the cityscape of Boston, Massachusetts.