Prolific McCauley author Leif Gregersen has released two more book within the past month. Inching Back to Sane: My Years with Bipolar, is an autobiography about his struggles with mental health issues. It picks up where his previous autobiography, Through the Withering Storm, left off.

“It took nearly 20 years to get my first book to print, and after that time, many of the dynamics of my condition had changed,” says Gregersen of why he decided to write the sequel. “Another strong reason was that I feel I had grown as a writer, and one of the recurring comments I got about my first memoir was that people really wanted to know what it was like to suffer from a mental illness, and I tried very hard to describe with as much honesty as possible what I went through.”

Gregersen hopes that readers gain a “new understanding of what mental illness is like, and perhaps a taste of the hard fact that just about all of us have imperfect brains and have problems from depression to insomnia all the way down to hearing voices, and basically, that people who are sick need understanding, medication, treatment, and especially compassion.”

Mustang Summer is Gregersen’s other new book, and is a collection of short stories. “Quite often, the process of writing them went like this: lay in bed, let my mind wander, and try to come up with a theme I can write a story line to that allows a main character to be sympathetic and grow through a story event and be changed as a person,” he explains.

“Some of the themes I had the most fun with were the ones that were more along the lines of old Twilight Zone episodes, or stories about crimes and rip-offs that go horribly wrong. I feel a great deal of us are hardened to the world around us by our negative experiences, and it doesn’t take as much as one may think to soften a person’s heart, as happens to the main character in the story ‘Mustang Summer’.”

Gregersen’s titles are available as paperbacks and e-books, and can be purchased through Amazon. Links for each book are available at his new website: edmontonwriter.com. Some of his books are also available at the Boyle McCauley Pharmacy 10817 95 Street.