What starts the juices flowing for an author sitting at a keyboard, staring at a blank screen? What actions inspired the words?

I was researching the horrors of the Nazi concentration camp at Treblinka when I found information about such a camp here in the United States that forced Japanese American citizens behind barbed wire fences, guard towers, and machine guns! Taken from their homes and stripped of their citizenship, businesses, homes, and self-worth – all due to their ancestry – they endured deplorable conditions in the “relocation camps”. Typhus ran rampant through the camp, and riots were a daily occurrence. But how should I proceed to create a new statement of an old (and forgotten) injustice?

I dug deeper into the official statements and the personal recounting of the actual events by those who endured it at locations in Puyallup, Heart Mountain, Minidoka, Manzanar, Tulelake, and others. But I wanted more information, so I conducted a few phone interviews to learn the more personal remembrances of this dark blight on American history. Behind 100 miles of barbed wire on a 1,100-acre prison at Tulelake, Japanese American citizens endured filthy sanitation, deplorable housing, poor medical services, inadequate education for the children, and a lack of respect for them as American citizens. They endured hot, dry summers and bitterly cold, windy winters. They survived a typhus epidemic and the subsequent mandatory, frequent, and embarrassing delousing regimens. They endured racism and hate.

I felt compelled to write this book because ‘those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.’ Were you aware of this dark chapter of American history? Have you read The Two Terrors of Tulelake?