SeeChange

The first thing Michael Anders did wrong, the morning the call came that his mother had died, was reach past the envelopes in his truck for his phone. He had been doing that for years.

In a small Michigan harbor town where a rusted ship called the Titan has been docked for nearly fifty years - long enough that no one still notices it - Michael Anders runs the roofing business he took over from his father and made his own. Or what is left of it. Eleven crews. A checkbook that does not balance. A brother gone twenty-four years. A wife who had been watching him look the other way.

Then his mother dies.

And a stranger appears in town who asks Michael, quietly, to describe what he sees.

What follows is three hundred fifty-seven days in the life of a man who has spent his whole life looking - and is about to learn, slowly and at considerable cost, what looking has missed. From the wife who already knew. From the brother who came back. From the eighty-year-old woman whose roof collapsed with her under it. From the stranger in the garage who asked him to tell what he saw.

SeeChange is a quietly devastating debut about the difference between getting through a day and being in it. About fathers and sons. About what it costs a man to put down a weight he has been carrying his whole life - and what it costs to keep carrying it. About marriages that survive what no one watching would have predicted. About small Midwestern towns and the things that have been sitting in plain sight for so long they no longer register. About what a man finally sees when someone asks him, plainly, to look.

To a SeeChange.

For readers of Elizabeth Strout, Kent Haruf, Richard Russo, and Marilynne Robinson.

About the Author

James Ellis Balcom spent over three decades inside troubled businesses - turnarounds, second-generation failures, cash crises, owners and managers who had stopped speaking the same language. He worked with over a hundred small and medium-sized businesses across North America. When traveling to serve other businesses was no longer possible with vision loss, he started two businesses close to home. SeeChange is what three decades of watching businesses fail - and survive - looks like on the page. He lives in West Michigan.