Introduction
I had heard Mike Coleman’s name circling my friend’s group of authors for a while, but I hadn’t yet had the chance to personally meet him and then I a read a piece he wrote for WELL READ Magazine titled “An Ekphrasis Moment: Good for the Soul” about French artist Henri Matisse’s painting, The Piano Lesson. I felt instantly connected to his writing. Coleman was speaking my love language, on a subject very close to my heart. In the past, I’ve worked with artists and writers, bringing them together to write about artwork and was hoping (if I ever get it going) to create an online space for these types of valuable collaborations. And I realize it’s a fancy word, so before you Google it, in a nutshell essentially it means the verbal expression of a piece of art and/or how the two artforms relate to each other. Super simplified. Though the term “ekphrasis” is typically associated with poets who are known for using artwork as inspiration, Coleman used the literary device in his exquisitely crafted short memoir. I found it divine.
Serendipity. Not two weeks after reading that piece and thinking, I need to meet this Mike Coleman, he joined my Milledgeville salon (a/k/a M’villers) via my friend, Robert Gwaltney, who is also in our salon, and we finally got to meet in person. And then not a few weeks after he joined M’ville, we both won 2024 Georgia Author of the Year as finalists in our categories. Now that we are well-introduced, I thought it time to also introduce Mike Coleman to our Southern Literary Review’s readers, particularly his memoir, The Way from Me to Us (Riverdale Avenue Books 2023).
From The Way from Me to Us…
Alcohol was not on the menu that evening. The television stayed off. We talked and talked. We cleaned up the kitchen together and turned the living room lights off by 9:00. When we got in bed, Ted put his arms around me.
“This is what I want,” he said. “Right here.”
I thought of the Paul Jenkins print hanging over our bed. An explosion of color. A mess, some might say, but a beautiful one, a painting with an underlying structure that was clear if you looked closely. Like my life with this man. Color and structure—even though at times all I wanted was to run away from it.
I felt like crying as I pulled him close.
“I’m sorry I get angry with you sometimes,” I said.
“It’s okay. I get angry with you sometimes, too.”
“Can we get back on an even keel? Stop the craziness?”
“I’d like that.”
“Me, too.” I inhaled his toothpaste scent. “Why can’t we just love each other?”
“We can.” He stroked my back, his breath soft on my shoulder. “If you’d let us.”
About the Book
The Way from Me to Us is the story of a nearly fifty-year gay relationship against a backdrop of major cultural change in attitudes toward LGBTQ people. With scenes and dialogue in a five-act, memoir-as-novel structure, the book delivers a firsthand, deeply personal view of one gay couple’s experience, from the late 20th century into the new millennium. Using close-to-home details like the police shutdown of the first Gay Pride gathering in 1977 in Nashville, Tennessee, a few weeks after Ted and Mike met, the book reveals the zeitgeist of repression in which the pair fell in love and forged a long-term relationship. It also shows how the couple rode a wave of revolutionary change over four decades to the era where same-sex marriage is legal—how they married and experienced other benefits in their life together in rural northeast Georgia and Atlanta.
Their story isn’t always a pretty one, especially in the early years of their relationship. The book recounts their challenges as they turned upside down the expectations of their families and their church—and society’s view of how two “fine young men” should behave. But the challenges they faced weren’t always external ones. When Mike met Ted at age twenty-four, he was decades away from accepting the truth about himself. The memoir tells that story, too—the story of Mike’s often bumpy journey to freedom and self-acceptance, of learning to love himself before he could fully love another person. Hence the title of the book. It’s a story of victory over major cultural and psychological obstacles, and of what’s required for any long-term relationship, gay or straight, to succeed. As Mike writes in a closing passage: “Marriage is loving the way you are. Loving the way you were. Loving the ways you’ve changed.” The Way from Me to Us celebrates how the world has changed, too.
About the Author, Mike Coleman
Mike Coleman
Mike Coleman was named Finalist in the Memoir category of the 2024 Georgia Author of the Year Awards for his memoir, The Way from Me to Us, published in 2023 by Riverdale Avenue Books in New York. The book also was a finalist in the 2022 Chanticleer Journey Awards for nonfiction books about overcoming adversity.
Mike knew he had the writing itch when he produced a newsletter for his fourth-grade class at McDowell Elementary School in Columbia, Tennessee. A journalism major in college, he later won awards for news writing, for his work as a writer for a nonprofit organization and for his work with an ad agency specializing in the technology industry.
He also won awards as an independent writer, editor and branding consultant in the latter part of his 45-year career. During that time, he authored An Aquarium for Georgia: Commemorating the Construction of the Georgia Aquarium, a coffee table book commissioned by the Brasfield & Gorrie construction firm. He retired in 2020.
He has had a lifetime interest in creative writing. His short story “Worse than Murder” took Honorable Mention in Writer’s Digest’s 74th annual writing competition in 2005. Another story, “The Night Watch,” is featured in the “Stories Worth Talking About” section of the children’s story site Bedtime-Story.com.
He and his husband live in Atlanta, Georgia. Mike writes frequently about their life and travels together in his blog at www.mikecolemanauthor.com.
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