“If you want an unhappy marriage, go home and start talking about feelings.”

These are the words of Kelley Brigman, a longtime family and marriage instructor at Minnesota State University who said he is challenging the “gold standard” of marriage counseling.
But marriage help is a difficult and oversaturated genre to crack.
Now retired, Brigman said he harbored no real intention of writing a book. But he felt compelled because of a growing disenchantment with other professionals in his field. Brigman, who is a licensed marriage and family therapist and holds a doctorate in human development and the family, said many marriage counselors are openly opposed to the institution they claim to support, and that some counselors actually do more harm to relationships than good.
To publish his book, Brigman started his own publishing company, Purple’s Edge Media. His book was the first the company published, and he has begun reviewing manuscripts for future books on similar topics.
Like many authors, Brigman said the biggest challenge was marketing. He promotes the book during speaking engagements and has sent out some advance copies for review.
“That was my biggest issue,” Brigman said. “It’s a fierce market.”
For more than a half-decade, Brigman said, marriage counselors have been preaching to couples that they need to resolve conflict by communicating and discussing their feelings. And while he agrees such interactions have their place, Brigman also says “feelings are fickle” and can be misleading, miscommunicated and misunderstood.
In his book — which is part case study, part help manual — Brigman proposes a simpler solution to unhappy marriages that emphasizes the responsibility of the individual:
“We are finding out that a lot of the things we used as solutions are really the problem,” he said. “If you want a better marriage, be a better person.”
For information on the book or a speaking engagement, contact Brigman at kelley.brigman@mnsu.edu.

L. Dale Redlin has no interest in becoming a best-selling author.
Now in his 70s and retired from a 40-year career in the ministry, the Mankato man said he had been told by friends and family for years that he should write down the stories he often told about his upbringing in a long-lost era of American history.
But Redlin knew his collection of quaint and country rugged stories of growing up on a South Dakota farm in the 1930s and 1940s would have little appeal to a wider audience.
“They were life-fulfilling experiences,” Redlin said. “They were little, but life-fulfilling.”
With little need or motivation to pursue a book deal with a large publisher, Redlin said he was content to pay a small press in Nebraska to print 1,000 copies.
Redlin said his intent was not to make money on the book, but to preserve the memories of an outhouse stocked with pages from a Sears Roebuck catalog instead of tissue, of getting sun stroke at age 12 during his first foray into threshing work and of frantic cross-farm chases with charging bulls.
The first thousand copies, Redlin said, went quickly. He’s already printed his second thousand and has self-published a second book — “Poems of Prayer and Praise” — which is a collection of spiritual poetry he wrote during his career as a minister.
The toughest part of self-publishing, Redlin said, is finding an editor with a keen eye. But, if authors can manage the upfront costs of printing and promotion, Redlin said the reward is in the work.
“I wouldn’t trade the way we grew up for anything. I wanted to pass some of that along.”
For more information about Redlin’s books, contact him at hope-dale@juno.com.

Jody Allen Crowe is an educator by trade. He became an author almost by accident.
As a principal and administrator in several Indian reservation schools, Crowe began to see a pattern among the aggressive, and often physically violent, students in his schools:
Many, if not most, were subjected to pre-natal exposure to alcohol. And after quitting his career to focus his efforts on fetal alcohol spectrum disorders, Crowe discovered a link between such disorders and those involved in school shootings.
Aware of the controversial nature of his topic, Crowe wanted to maintain editorial control of his message. He decided to self-publish his findings and has been promoting his book through a nonprofit organization he established — Healthy Brains for Children — to bring awareness to a subject Crowe admits is painful for many individuals to explore.
“I understand the fear people have” Crowe said. “But I can’t deny the truth. I want to issue a warning to everyone.”
Filled with neurological and scientific evidence supporting his claim, Crowe’s book details his research at the Crow Wing County Jail, where he interviewed inmates about their mothers’ alcohol habits. Almost all fit Crowe’s profile for possible pre-natal exposure.
He also conducted interviews with family members and friends of school shooters in Minnesota and Wisconsin and found at least two-thirds of them were exposed to alcohol in the womb. He also has studied the more than 40 cases of school shootings nationwide and found more than 80 percent of shooters fit the profile for pre-natal exposure.
For more information on his book, contact Crowe at jodycrowe@gmail.com.