Deborah Fleming

Author Deborah Fleming

Award winning hippie/Vietnam War novel Without Leave published by Black Mountain Press. Winner of the 2013 Asheville Award from Black Mountain Press, the novel Without Leave places brave people into the hippie experience and turbulent antiwar movement of the 1960s and addresses the existential question of freedom of the will.

Published 47 years since the “Summer of Love” and 49 years since the troop surge that ushered in the full-scale American commitment to the Vietnam War, Without Leave chronicles the stories of two alienated young people during 1967-70. David Shields goes AWOL from the Navy where he’d hoped to find training and focus for his life but instead finds boredom and disillusionment during deployment on an aircraft carrier in the Gulf of Tonkin. In the Haight-Ashbury region of San Francisco in 1967 he meets and falls in love with an artist, Diane Cavanagh, who drops out of college after a brutal rape and the death of the black man she loved. Through turmoil and separation, they find they cannot escape their past.