Curtis: The Wheelwright's Heart
About this ebook
They married the following autumn. Built the workshop together. Made things: wheels, furniture, a whole shared life. For five years, the house was full of the warm sound of two people who are genuinely good at being together.
Then the winter storm came. Arae arrived. Maren did not.
Curtis did not fall apart. This is the whole problem. He made a bargain with himself — he would grieve later, when it was safer — and later stretched into four years of hollow competence so thoroughly convincing that no one around him ever had sufficient visible evidence to recognize how much he was actually suffering. The wheels remained as precisely made as ever. The house stayed clean. The child was never left without. He maintained everything and felt none of it.
This is the story of what it cost him. What it cost Arae. And what it finally, quietly, unglamorously took to set the weight down.
A wheelwright understands: a wheel without a hub is just a ring of wood going nowhere. Curtis had been rim and spokes for four years — structural, functional, turning — without the center. This is the story of how he found it again.
Includes Jungian analysis and a call to action: What are you maintaining instead of living?
For every person who has ever been so good at holding things together that they forgot they were also a person who needed holding.
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About the author
Tiffany Solter, PhD is a mental health professional, educator, advocate, and lifelong seeker of magic whose writing explores the boundaries between life, death, justice, and the profound connections that define us. Born into a family of mountain people spanning Wyoming and Colorado, she grew up shaped, largely, by two grandmothers who taught her, one through train journeys across the West, the other chasing shooting stars across the plains, that anything is possible.
A survivor of a near-death experience in 1996, Solter spent decades integrating what she encountered in that "warm place where light is everything" into a life of healing work, academic achievement, and fierce advocacy. She holds a doctorate with a dissertation on grace and recovery, and has worked alongside peer counselors, nurses, and mental health teams she considers among the most transformative teachers of her life.
Her advocacy voice is unflinching and deeply personal. In "Be a Man": The Violence Society Ignores, Solter turns her clinical expertise and lived experience toward a crisis our culture has long refused to see: domestic violence against men. Drawing on research, survivor accounts, and her own family history, she challenges the archetypal and institutional blind spots that leave male victims invisible, unbelieved, and without adequate resources. The book is equal parts gripping fiction, Jungian psychological analysis, and practical call to action. It is complete with resource guides for survivors, supporters, military families, and children. It is the work of someone who has sat in clinical rooms with these men, loved them as family, and refused to stay silent.
She lives in what she calls Camelot, a home she and her husband Jeff manifested in childhood whispers, surrounded by family, familiars, motorcycles, and what she simply calls the magic.
“Between Worlds” is her memoir. "Be a Man" is her battle cry.
Live Authentically & Create Magic!!
