Background
Newell grew up deep in the Colorado mountains south and west of Denver, inspired by his readings of Thoreau, Black Elk and Kerouac.
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book
On the Road to Heaven
(From the author of "Latter Days: A Guided Tour Through Si...)
From the author of "Latter Days: A Guided Tour Through Six Billion Years of Mormonism" comes this exuberant and groundbreaking autobiographical novel about the modern Mormon convert experience. Revealing the author's hard-won path to meaning, faith, and forgiveness, "On the Road to Heaven" is a love story about a girl and a guy and their search for heaven-a lotta love, a little heaven, and one heck of a ride in between. In a style reminiscent of and offering homage to Jack Kerouac, "On the Road to Heaven" traces an LSD-to-LDS pilgrimage across the geographic and cultural landscape of two continents in the late twentieth century. From the 1970s hippie heyday of the Colorado mountains to the coca fields of Colombia, it's a journey through Thoreau ascetics, Ram Dass Taoism, and Edward Abbey monkey-wrenching to the mission fields of one of the world's fastest-growing-and most trenchantly conservative-religions. Few stories have ever described a more unusual road to redemption.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0978797132/?tag=2022091-20
Coke Newell
Edit ProfileEducation
After his return, Newell graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the journalism program at Colorado State University and remains a member of the Society of Professional Journalists and the American Society of Journalists and Authors.
Career
He converted to the Latter- Day Saints (Mormons) faith as a teenager and later served a mission to Colombia. Research for his first published book, Dying Words: Colombian Journalists and the Cocaine Warlords (1991) was funded by the Scripps Howard Foundation and the Interamerican University Press Association. Composed as a bachelor"s degree thesis, it is perhaps the earliest study of the Colombian media"s bold (and frequently suicidal) exposure of that nation"s militant drug cartels.
He later received a Master"s degree in communications from Montana State University and has a biography in Who"s Who in America.
The book performed well nationally, perhaps in part due to the national prominence of frequently interviewed church president Gordon B. Hinckley and Newell"s own iconoclastic writing style. His 2007 autobiographical novel On the Road to Heaven presented a mostly factual account of a Newell-like Colorado boy named Kit West in a Kerouacian style.
Like Newell, West falls in love with a girl, joins her church, and spends two years in Colombia as a missionary. Newell wrote the story as fiction because "A nonfiction story might come across like the daily news—arm"s-length facts, figures, and dates.
Readers might be less likely to relate to a nonfiction account and characters in a personal way.
Novelizing my story freed my creative psyche in key ways, and I believe this novelization allows readers to better insert themselves into the story as well, wherever they want to fit. They can own the story for themselves, and it becomes more useful, available." The complaint Publishers Weekly had about miraculous episodes is "the only possible drawback" to novelization. According to Newell, "Every one of those "miraculous episodes" is true." A former Adjunct Professor of communication at Salt Lake Community College and Assistant Professor of Communication and co-director of the concentration in public relations at the University of Saint Francis (Franciscan) in Fort
Wayne, Indiana, Newell is now Executive Director of Project Amigo, a non-profit organization in Colima, Mexico.
Works
book
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On the Road to Heaven
(From the author of "Latter Days: A Guided Tour Through Si...)
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On the Road to Heaven
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Born
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Nationality
United States -
Religion
Mormonism The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints