Mr. Yaremko's books:
Long Story Short, A Guided Journal: A gathering of quotations drawn from my blogs, my books, and my poetry. Each quote heads a blank page as a prompt for writing your own thoughts.
The book’s open pages beckon you to distance yourself from the distractions of the day for a few minutes of consideration and contemplation, of journaling or illustration. It’s a guide to spur thoughts of your own each day for a year of days, making it a personal journal. Pages are not tied to the calendar. So you can start when you want, skip around when you like. As are the meanderings of our minds, pages aren’t numbered.
This book is not on Amazon. If you’d like signed copies, please email me and I’ll send them to you. I’m asking $25 for each book to help cover printing and mailing, via Venmo or PayPal.
Billy of the Tulips: A homeless boy’s grim engagement with innocence and iniquity.
When he is put onto the street by his abusive father, fifteen-year-old Billy never dreams that he is embarking on an odyssey that will force him to choose his place in an intimidating world. Set in 1957, Billy’s story unfolds in letters to his younger sister. He speaks for a generation fascinated with UFOs and Elvis Presley. But his letters also record the clash of innocence and iniquity, including a first sexual skirmish, until a confrontation with a band of menacing hunters forces him to take a stand—a dangerous one.
Published by TouchPoint Press.
Saints and Poets, Maybe: Writing that fuels your passion to live like you mean it.
In Saints and Poets, Maybe, author Peter W. Yaremko leads the way to what Druids called the thin places. This is where—if attention is paid—we hear the beating heart of things, see the oak within the acorn. Yaremko takes us with him to wander these thin places as did Thornton Wilder’s saints and poets who, maybe, “realize life while they live it.”
The hundred essays in this collection demonstrate writing that runs deep. The author, seasoned in the city rooms of metropolitan newspapers and the corridors of global corporations, is not afraid to go where the story takes him, such as the death of a life partner or betrayal by a trusted friend.
But this is no collection of somber essays. Here you will find writing that fuels your passion to live like you mean it. The tone throughout has a light touch whose pointed satire stretches to include the farcical quality of otherworldly stuff like candy corn and supermarket muffins. The author’s witty irreverence is evidenced in essays like “A Few of My Most-Hated Things” and “The Assault on Architecture.” Nor is any subject off-limits. Equal-opportunity victims include Victoria’s Secret bras, iPhone’s Siri, and the New York Yankees’ baseball uniforms. For starters.
The stories in this collection summon characters who range from the ninety-seven-year-old “Queen of the Fairies” to supercilious captains of blue-chip companies. And Yaremko doesn’t hesitate to enlist expert witnesses as diverse as Aristotle and Aquinas, Orson Welles and Andy Warhol.
The book’s action is a moveable feast that shifts among the author’s assorted haunts: Outer Cape Cod, the Puerto Rican island of Vieques, Manhattan’s Great White Way—and a Trappist monastery. With a reporter’s eye for detail, Yaremko’s writing zooms in to reveal and explore our true frontiers—the people, events, and ideas we too easily overlook.
Saints and Poets, Maybe is an entertaining, exhilarating, and enchanting journey, and a welcome gift for readers thirsty for a book of enrichment and companionship.
Fat Guy in a Fat Boat: The misadventures of a newly minted Sunday sailor.
As a boy, the author fell in love with the graceful sailboats that dance on shimmering waters like toy ballerinas on a mirrored music box. But it took a half-century before he had the time and the wherewithal to buy a sailboat. Fat Guy in a Fat Boat is his story of trying to tame a ballerina of a boat that morphed into a she-devil. Seasoned sailors and armchair mariners will find this tale at once hilarious and heart-warming.
A Light from Within: When the moments of our lives blossom into a transforming force.
A Light from Within captures a year in the paradise locales of Cape Cod and Vieques Island. Reminiscent of A Year in Provence, these incisive stories visit the odd and the ordinary, the exceptional and the unexpected, the humorous and the sober–the many moments of our lives that seem commonplace until they are examined under a creative lens. The essays in this ebook appeared in a slightly different form in the author’s blog during 2013 and 2014. Of them, Mr. Yaremko says, “I found that when I lived my life the first time, there were many things I didn’t notice. It was only in replaying scenes—as I sat each week to write the stories—that I had the aha moments.”
In Progress
Down the Edges: What happens when evil comes alive.
