Apples for the Wild Stallion has never sold the way I have thought it should. I think it’s one of the most important works I’ve written. I asked AI to write an essay about the novel.
In his 2021 novel
Apples for the Wild Stallion, author Thomas Davis explores the transformative power of connection between a neurodivergent youth and the natural world.
The Catalyst of Change
The story follows Austin, a 15-year-old with nonverbal autism who relies on an iPad for communication and finds security in a rigid, predictable routine. His world is disrupted when a wild stallion appears outside his window in the New Mexico Zuni Mountains. This “mystical” connection to the stallion serves as a catalyst, prompting Austin to push beyond his previous boundaries—enabling him to make eye contact with others and develop new friendships.
Conflict and Heroism
The central conflict arises when criminal poachers and “thugs” threaten the stallion’s safety. Austin must overcome his personal limitations and risk his safety to protect the creature that sparked his internal growth. By leaving apples for the horse at a grandmother juniper tree, Austin builds a bridge between his structured life and the unpredictability of the wild.
Thematic Depth
Davis wrote the novel for his grandson, aiming to provide a relatable hero for children with autism. The essay’s core themes highlight:
Neurodiversity: Validating Austin’s unique perspective and capabilities.
Nature as a Healer: Showcasing the high desert mountains as a place for personal peace and growth.
Agency: Demonstrating how Austin asserts his will to protect something he loves, moving from a passive observer to an active hero.
I am wondering if anyone could tell me what they think of this?
Since for some reason I can no longer order my books that I originally published through Kindle (who knows why with amazon? Ugh), I am republishing The Weirding Storm, A Dragon Epic with Ingram. I am starting to try to get noticed through AI. Here’s my first marketing effort:
For centuries, the epic poem stood at the heart of human storytelling. From Beowulf to The Odyssey, The Divine Comedy to Paradise Lost, these long, rhythmic narratives shaped the mythic imagination. Yet in the modern era, the form nearly disappeared, overshadowed by novels and film.
In writing The Weirding Storm, A Dragon Epic, I wanted to return to that ancient pulse — the music of verse that carries entire worlds. The poem’s language follows the rhythm of breath and emotion rather than modern prose, but its soul is pure fantasy storytelling: dragons clashing in burning skies, witches crafting enchantments, and mortals wrestling with the boundaries between spirit and flesh.
The world of The Weirding Storm is mythic but deeply human. It draws from the oral traditions of the Norse and Celtic sagas while weaving in themes of transformation, forbidden love, and destiny. Like Beowulf, it’s a song of struggle. Like The Odyssey, it’s a voyage toward meaning. But it’s also a meditation on how love can break even the most ancient of curses.
In an age when algorithms and screens dominate our attention, the modern epic poem offers something timeless: the reminder that story and song were once the same. The Weirding Storm, A Dragon Epic tries to bridge that gap — to make readers feel that same awe the ancients must have felt when a skald’s voice filled a hall with fire and myth.
I am, at this moment, completely stunned. I understand I was nominated by Dr. Elmer Guy, President of Navajo Technical University and Carrie Billie, the former Executive Director of the American Indian Higher Education Consortium. I cannot thank them and the selection committee at WINU enough.
Lowerpoint Road, State Hwy 371 Crownpoint, New Mexico, 87313 Email: tdavis@navajotech.edu
Dear Tom
Re: Recommendation to receive a 2025 WINU Honorary Doctorate – Education (EdD) for Indigenous Education
The World Indigenous Nations University (WINU) was launched in 2014 at Crownpoint, New Mexico, USA, heralding in a new era of Indigenous higher education. The formation of WINU represented the culmination of global consultations with a gathering of First Nations educators, scholars, knowledge holders and Elders over an extensive period to establish a more culturally inclusive and responsive higher education system for their people. An inspiring source of WINU’s formation has been the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) and the World Indigenous Nations Higher Education Consortium (WINHEC), which called for critical changes to take place in the engagement of First Nations peoples in higher education.
Every year nominations are called for the WINU Honorary Doctorate Awards. They recognize the meritorious work of Indigenous Educators, Scholars, Knowledge Holders/Elders who their peers and community acknowledge as an inspirational leader. It gives me immense pleasure to advise you that a successful nomination has been received by the WINU International Review Committee nominating you for a 2025 World Indigenous Nations University (WINU) Honorary Doctorate as an outstanding Educator and Knowledge Holder.
The nomination received from Dr Elmer J. Guy and Carrie L. Billy and supported by the Navajo Technical University, acknowledges and honors your contributions as a transformative leader and active participant in the Tribal College movement since the 1990s, in the United States and globally. Carrie’s biographical statement of your achievements provides details of your leadership, advice and expertise that has helped transform Navajo Technical University and several other tribal colleges and universities, through partnerships, research programs, initiatives and new academic programs. Globally, you are recognized as instrumental in the creation of the World Indigenous Nations Higher Education Consortium.
The conferral of the WINU Honorary Doctorate upon you is seen as honoring and profiling your exemplary dedication and contributions through your work at the local, national and global levels. Your nominees seek to celebrate and salute you for the many gains you have made through your meritorious and scholarly contributions, which have advanced Indigenous education through your transformational leadership, diligence and commitment.
The WINU Board of Governors and the International Review Committee have endorsed that the meritorious Award of WINU Honorary Doctorate – Education (EdD) for Indigenous Education, be conferred upon you at this year’s annual WINU Conferral Ceremony, which will be hosted by Te Wananga o Aotearoa, Mangere Campus, Auckland, Aotearoa, New Zealand. This ceremony is an integral part of the WINHEC AGM scheduled for 13-14 November 2025.
The conferral of the WINU Honorary Doctorate upon you pays homage to the pertinence of your work to the Articles of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and to the foundational goals and objectives of the World Indigenous Nations Higher Education Consortium (WINHEC) and the World Indigenous Nations University (WINU).
Congratulations on the success of your nomination for this most meritorious Honorary Award.
Accordingly, you are invited to attend this year’s Ceremony at the 2025 WINHEC/WINU Annual General Meeting being hosted by Te Wananga o Aotearoa, Mangere Campus, 15 Canning Crescent, Mangere, Auckland, Aotearoa, New Zealand, where you will be officially conferred with the WINU Honorary Doctorate – Education (EdD) for Indigenous Education.
Unfortunately, WINU cannot assist with travel, accommodation or the WINHEC registration fee. However, should you wish to attend the meetings the registration and accommodation details can be found on the WINHEC website www.winhec.org. Please contact Dr Berice Anning, the Deputy Vice Chancellor WINU via email: winuenquiries@gmail.com to advise if you will be attending the Conferral Ceremony in person.
We look forward to receiving your advice as to whether you wish to accept the 2025 WINU Honorary Doctorate – Education (EdD) for Indigenous Education, and if so, whether you can attend this year’s formal Conferral Ceremony in Aotearoa.
On closing, the WINU Executive again extends to you the sincerest congratulations on the success of your nomination for this most deserving and meritorious honorary award
staring emptily at blue sky, no tears in her blue eyes.
The Russian Putin, eyes burning even though there is deadness in them, smiles as women with long hair and beautiful voices sing a celebration into being, praising him, shining into his manhood.
An Australian man wades through water up to his chest as a tree trunk, floating on waters polluted with the sewage and debris of a once prosperous town, sails toward where he is struggling to reach dry land. In yet another world. A tornado, in a month that almost never has tornadoes, strikes a farmhouse, collapsing the roof onto the screams of a child not the child staring at an empty Ukrainian sky. In yet in another world, a fire tornado explodes into a smoke-clogged sky, leaping roaring flames through the crowns of trees as a town’s homes are consumed by dancing, searing flames. In yet another world a line of children with distended bellies struggle, with their mothers, to reach a makeshift hospital, large eyes seeing nothing but the gnawing exhaustion of hunger.
In Greenland, one glacier after another splashes massive ice cliffs into seawaters swelling outward into concentric half circles of waves. In Iowa and sub-Saharan Africa, birds of prey circle above a dry landscape of shriveled crops as hot sun mocks the thought that clouds and rain can bring life to the earth again. In a hospital in Sturgeon Bay, a daughter sits in the parking lot as her mother struggles to breathe as a doctor and nurses are putting her on a ventilator in a desperate attempt to save her life.
President Trump in DC, standing beside a dark red Tesla and a grinning Elon Musk shills for a man causing children in Africa to die of AIDs and starvation.
On the television set, after seeing a missile explode into a high-rise apartment where two dozen people have died, an analyst tells us how angry people are about rising gas prices. Then a commercial urges us to improve our lives by purchasing a brand new, elegant, black showerhead to help us cleanse ourselves.
I hope I wouldn’t thrash around and destroy everything that got in my way as I made my way through the environment where I lived.
If I had brains, I hope I wouldn’t use them like a weapon to belittle and tear down and claim my ideas are the only ideas that mean anything at all.
Not long ago I admired Elon Musk. I thought, wow! What seventeen-year-old male wouldn’t give his eye-teeth to create an electric car company that put the old car companies on their heels and helped fight global climate change? Or build a rocket that landed the rocket part back on earth, tail-fires flaming? Or try to really go to Mars, I mean really go to Mars in a space-faring rocket?
Unfortunately, some behemoths are like those lizards, chameleons, that use camouflage to fool predators, or inconsequential people like me, until suddenly they are so large and powerful they can turn their money into hooks that they spew out, yanking everyone and everything into their path so their ideas become weapons that display the power of their power and their insatiable drive to become the behemoths of behemoths as their trumpeting shivers the universe.
First, secure a charismatic character, preferably a male who has lived a flawed life seething with perceived slights and resentments. Then have him attract two kinds of followers: those who believe society has left them unfairly behind and those who can imagine their support for such a leader can help them gain power, wealth, or prestige.
After the charismatic leader secures followers through outrageous statements and dramatic performative art, enflame resentments against elites and their status quo, laying claim to a mythological glorious past with glorious values that only a Great Leader can magically bring back to life— as Christ did with Lazarus. Claim divine intervention in the Great Leader’s life, proving beyond doubt that God is on the Great Leader’s side as he crusades against society’s carnage brought about by elites, even if they masquerade as common people, that have gained benefits they clearly don’t deserve.
Then, have the Anointed One win His election by making Him the only news worth covering by the press as he attacks the press and paints them as part of the hated elite. Let the Great Leader encourage his followers to attack those not absolutely on his and their side so that everyone begins to fear being the target of the Great Leader’s wrath. Attack the integrity of elections, claiming fraud where no fraud exists. Eliminate voters from voting rolls in places where the vote might be negative. And always, let the Great Leader be outrageous and bold and filled with the glory of who He is and who He will be.
Then mix in rich oligarchs willing to fund ugly campaigns against any opposition, creating division among different populations of people whenever possible, making good people afraid to step out in the line fire, fearing to have reputations and lives damaged by lies advertised against them. Enrich the supporting rich with government largesse beyond measure. as power flows into the Great Leader’s glory. Develop and implement policies that hurt the stranger, the poor, the old, the handicapped, anyone who his followers can see as lesser than themselves because of his actions.
Create a new Golden Age brought to fruition by the Great Leader’s genius as he thumps his chest and has his minions praise his glorious leadership over and over again.
Celebrate dictators around the world and attack democracies as leeches taking unfair advantage of a country that has benefited from their trade and become the rich democracy it has become. Get the public to recognize the glorious strength of strong men.
Accustom those who have always seen themselves as good people to cruelty as immigrant children and families are deported, starving children in famine areas die as aid that kept them alive is yanked away, and families with the need for special programs spend nights crying as they worry about whether they are going to lose benefits and lose all as they face increased disability, illness, or some other devastation.
Let the Great Leader mock those who fought in the War to End All Wars or the soldiers who protected the country or became prisoners of war because they were fools as he declares love for the military he attacks, weakening the honor a country has for its independent military structure. Then begin to erode the rights of the press and poets who write poems he doesn’t like or artists who create art that anybody who is Great can see is ugly. And always, create dramas that dominate the news as He mocks those who report on or oppose his antics, claiming He is the only one whose words count, that the Great Leader who saves the country can break no law or tell no lie.
And as you are doing all of this, use raw power to begin dismantling society’s norms and institutions, creating norms and institutions in Your image, claiming norms and institutions that created and maintained peace and prosperity for seventy years has led to carnage and failure.
And after institutions and norms have been damaged beyond repair, point out how terrible the previous leadership was to allow such failures and blame them for every problem the Great Leader creates. Surround the Great Leader with sycophants as everyone must acknowledge the gloriousness of the Great Leader’s Glory.
Metamorphosis is complete: Democracy is no longer needed. The Great, divine Leader is the country that serves him.
I’ve been looking around for DEIs, But I haven’t found any yet. I thought at first, they were like gremlins, Little people-like creatures that mostly looked ugly. I know they are black, brown, yellow, and woman, But every black, brown, yellow, and woman I know Wouldn’t answer to, “Come here, DEI,” Any more than I would, And anyway, even a gremlin Wouldn’t crash a plane and helicopter With seventy-six people on board, Would they?
I thought about asking our congressman, Or maybe our President, To draw me a picture of a DEI So I’d recognize one when I saw one, But then I thought to myself, What if they are a DEI hire in disguise? Can’t anybody paint themselves up as a white Christian man? What then?
Four Windows Press has just released Ethel Mortenson Davis’s eighth book of poetry along with a magnificent cover designed by the poet. The book is available at amazon.com and other online retailers as well as through bookstores. It is carried by Novel Bay and Otherworlds bookstores in Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin.
fourwindowspress 