Beech River Books

Tim Barretto teaches writing, speaking, and literature at the University of New Hampshire’s Thompson School of Applied Science. He and colleague Kate Hanson co-founded the Community Leadership program at the school in 2001 as a way of helping students interested in becoming activists and community leaders to find and develop their voices. His creative work includes short stories published in literary journals and a one-act play about bullying that was performed at several schools in New Hamp-shire’s Strafford County. He has spent most of his adult life pursuing ways to eliminate child abuse, and in that pursuit has served as a passionate advocate for children. When he has free time, he loves to spend it outdoors fishing, hiking, or skiing with family and friends. He lives in Dover, New Hampshire with his wife, Mary.

A Family's Loss (Beech River Books, 2013) is a novel set in New Hampshire about a family whose love for each other can be smothering or withheld, confused or improper, impulsive or passionless. This becomes a force that drives their fate through the tumultuous times towards the end of the Viet Nam war and leads to a cataclysmic loss in the climax.

This book is for anyone who has ever wondered about the largely hidden undercurrents of family. In prose that is both riveting and unsparing, it explores the way relationships within a family are often complex and evolving, and can exist largely beyond our conscious understanding. It challenges us to consider how much of our past is fixed reality, how much is fictional mythology, and how much is some unknowable combination of both.

Searching for Joy (Beech River Books, 2007) is a novel told in a sensitive prose that particularly emphasizes the relationship of fathers and sons. With vivid scenes of skiing, fly-fishing, hiking and baseball, Barretto shows how learning to enjoy life and to have a passion for living is one of the finer gifts one generation can pass on to another.

Sixty year old self-employed architect Tom Derringer has always been a confident, self-assured man. But when he discovers he has prostate cancer his confidence is shaken, and he is forced to confront the meaning of his life and the possibility of his death in ways he has never done before. In the process he must come to understand—and come to terms with—himself, his wife and his son.