Teaching Learning Leading K-12

Luke Gherardi talks with me about his novella Children of Violence. This is episode 448 of Teaching Learning Leading K12.  Luke Gherardi is a writer of short stories. Children of Violence is his first novella. He writes what he knows, basing his fiction on real-life people and inspired by his observations or first-hand experience of actual events. He is a fighter. And a survivor. He overcame childhood cancer – lymphoma. That was the easy part. Being raised in dysfunction was not. Growing up in a suburb of St. Louis, Luke lived with his mother, a church-going, God-fearing woman from The Philippines, who provided anything but a sane childhood. To the outside world, everything seemed normal in this nice farm community. But in reality, he says his mom’s practice of her faith was more like a cult, where militaristic brainwashing went on. He grew up with survivalists. His parents were divorced when he was very young. He would visit his dad on the weekend in a crime-infested part of St. Louis, where the gang-ridde