From Bars to Bands: Stories of Prison and Redemption Vol. 4
An aircraft mechanic the Federal Aviation Administration looked at for fourteen months and licensed - kept off the field by a five-member airport board that meets above a fire department.
An interpreter who passed, on the first attempt, a state oral examination that ten to twenty percent of candidates pass, and who will never be sworn in a courtroom.
A pharmacy technician whose entire working life depends on a waiver that only her employer is permitted to request, for which there is no form, no fee, no deadline, and no appeal.
A rigger told no once, by one nuclear plant, in an industry database that every reactor in the country can see.
Ten more people come home to the same city - and out past it to a grass strip on a farm, a drill rig on a quarter section, and a fleet yard on the north edge of town - learn a trade, get good at it, and run into a wall that has nothing to do with what anyone thinks of them. A statute. A licensing board. An underwriting sheet. A box on page three of a vendor form.
Three of them never get through. Four of them never own a business, and two of those are as far out as anybody in these books ever gets. One of them cannot even find the rule that is stopping him, because there isn't one - and he will go to his grave not knowing whether it was ever the reason for anything.
And one of them has spent thirty-five years drafting the petitions, statements and appeals that half the people in these four volumes will tell you they wrote themselves. They did write them - at kitchen tables and stainless tables, four nights a week, on the telephone, with a woman on the other end. Her name is not on any of them. There is no place on the page for it to go.
Fiction. The walls are real. Every barrier in these stories is drawn from how licensing, credentialing and underwriting systems actually operate in some part of the United States right now. The details vary by state. The shape does not.
Each volume of From Bars to Bands stands alone. Together they map one city.
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