Nomads from THE NOMAD gather in Utah Oct. 13

Some of my fellow writers featured in The Nomad Literary Magazine will be reading from their work Oct. 13 at the Utah Humanities Book Festival. The event is 6-7:30 p.m. at the Utah Cultural Celebration Center in West Valley located on the western fringe of SLC. My work is featured in several issues of The Nomad, edited by Rachel White and based in Bountiful. One of my favorite stories set in Wyoming, "George Running Poles," is in the "Breakthroughs" issue. I won't be at the reading as I will be getting myself and my books ready for the upcoming Florida Writers Association conference in Orlando. Would I rather be in Utah? Well, the Wasatch Front is gorgeous in October. Sending my regards to all Nomads.

Where is Tomoka County, Florida? And what in the heck is a PETD?

My story collection, first published in 2006 by Ghost Road Press. GRP gave up the ghost a few years later. The collection was republished by Hummingbird Minds Press in 2021.
 

My first book of short stories is now available free on Kindle Unlimited. You can also buy the ebook for $3.99 or the paperback for $14.99.

I just formatted my novel "Zeppelins Over Denver" on Kindle Create. It will be an ebook shortly. Amazon AI Gremlins will alert me when it's ready. I prefer you buy the paperback, read it, and spread the news. I do admit that much of my reading lately has been on my Kindle Reader and on my Pixel. I did this when my vision was compromised by cataracts (the devils) and I needed high contrast and large type. A kindly eye doctor, assisted by fantastic nurses and my ISBA (Incredible Shrinking Bank Account; gas, alas, at $4.49!), removed the lenses which had been with me since my youth and replaced them with new ones. I now can see without specs most of the time except when I have to read the small print on meat packages from the grocers' shelves who must think that all of these gray-haired people wandering around the burgers and brats have had cataract surgery and can discern an "n" or a "k" at six inches. 

Read my stories. They can transport you to the Wyoming, post-World-War-Two Colorado, and even 2003 in a place I call Tomoka County, Florida, but most locals know by another name. The story is "Safe at Any Speed" and it begins this way:

Bob Rogers stumbled upon the vehicle of his dreams at the 2003 Tomoka County Leisure and Travel Fair in January. First he had to navigate displays of behemoth recreation vehicles, gleaming travel trailers, and a sea of customized vans. He dodged wave after wave of beaming salespeople touting their vehicles’ extras, such as built-in dialysis units (“Travel and Transfuse in Comfort!”) and satellite TV systems (“Never Again Stop for Directions!”). The prices stunned him. After less than an hour of touring vehicles bigger and pricier than his first house, he headed for the exit. That's when he happened upon the display for Mick Blake's PETD Extravaganza. 

What's next? 

You know what to do.

In the local library stacks, find a book or two by Shay

Several weeks ago, I dropped off two of my books to the Volusia County Library in Ormond Beach. My favorite library now than I’m a Volusia County resident again, this time in Ormond Station in Ormond Beach. During my early years in the area, 1964-78, I lived in Ormond Beach, Holly Hill, and various locales in Daytona. I asked the friendly woman at the desk if the library was interested in stocking copies of my two books. I am a local author now, have been since August 2024 when Wyoming got shut of me.

The Ormond branch does such a great job of featuring local authors and now I’m part of the collections. It includes my historical novel, “Zeppelins Over Denver,” and my first collection of short stories, “The Weight of a Body.” Several of the stories are set in a place a lot like Daytona (Go Green Wave!) and there’s also a scene in another story set in Gainesville where I graduated from UF in 1976 (Go Gators!). The others are set in Colorado, Wyoming, and Maine. I spent decades of my working life in the Rocky Mountain states and visited Maine a few times.

I naturally did a library search for myself and came up with my books and mention of a few others with “Shay” in the listings. I have met several women during the last decade or so by the first name of Shay. I don’t know if it’s a thing or not. I doubt if I would recognize a thing if it was staring me in the face.

There was one listing that caught my eye. From the Harlequin Western Romance Anthology 2017 comes this reference to a romance with a Shay in it:

THE COWBOY'S TRIPLE SURPRISE The Hitching Post Hotel by Barbara White Daille Bachelor cowboy Tyler Buckham is stunned to learn Shay O'Neill is pregnant with triplets. Even though he wants to do right by Shay, the thought of being a daddy has him running scared.

That’s a pretty good teaser and I may check out the anthology to see how it ends. I also am intrigued by the title. In Cheyenne, where I lived and worked for 31 years, there was a landmark hotel called the Hitching Post Inn. It was a cross between an old roadside motor inn and a sprawling bunkhouse. It was a big gathering place, a local favorite for weddings, arts events, and political rallies. If you wanted to catch one of the state legislators on neutral ground, the Hitch saloon was the place. I wondered: does the author have Cheyenne roots? Probably not. The term “hitching post” is very western and I’ve probably been in a dozen places with that name during my travels in the west.

I looked up Daille and she lists her home as “the Southwest” so that probably means Arizona and there is a Hitch out in the desert somewhere and probably doesn’t refer to my Hitch which was torn down a few years ago and replaced with an extended stay hotel.

I encourage local readers to check out my books from the library and write a review on the site if you’ve a mind to. Now excuse me as I go out and prowl the Local Authors and Large Print sections at my favorite library.

Journey into "Raymond Custy's Garden of Worldly Delights"

This is the opening of a story included in "The Weight of a Body," my first story collection. It was first published by Ghost Road Press at its tiny office on Evans Avenue off I-25 in Denver.  I dropped by on a summer day in 2005 to pick up the first copies hot off the press. I was dying to show off the books. I delivered the first copy to my uncle. I owed him a visit. His reading was mostly focused on the Denver dailies sports pages -- he was an athlete and a coach -- but he congratulated me and said he'd read it. I then drove back the 95 miles to Cheyenne to share the news with my family. My favorite story is set in a Florida beach town where I spent some of my youth. It has some basis in fact. I did grow up as the oldest kid in a big Irish-Catholic family. My brother and I walked to the beach to surf. My father was a reclusive sort but who can blame him?

I share this as a teaser to my story collection. I have another one in the works but the first one still has some zing. That's the author speaking. Anyway, to read more click on the cover image in the right sidebar.  The collection goes for $14.99 but if you're as dedicated a Kindle reader as I am, you can get a bargain. Check it out.

Raymond Custy’s Garden of Worldly Delights

            In June of 1967, when I was almost 16, my father checked out for a year. Locked himself in his room. Threw away the key. No messages. No contact of any kind. It was as if he died or decamped to Tahiti, only worse, because I could walk down the hall past that locked door and hear London Philharmonic symphonies blasting from the hi-fi. A cough might erupt from behind closed doors; the whisper of slippered feet. Sometimes a thin blue stream of cigarette smoke escaped from the room and formed a cloud in the hallway. If I was alone, I would stand in the midst of the cloud and inhale, hoping that the smoke might be the bearer of some singular message from my dad, the hermit.

            This hermit lived surrounded by eleven children, one wife, two dogs, a cat and a cage full of hamsters. On the brilliant June day my father bolted the door, the family queued up to coax him out. My mother went first. "Raymond Custy!" she yelled. "You come out of there right this minute!"  She waited, arms crossed, bare feet tapping on the wooden floors. I could hear the cars passing on the street, on their way to the beach. I could even hear the slap of the waves on the sand two blocks away.

THE NOMAD Literary Magazine takes a trip from Bountiful to Zoom tonight

Two of my short stories are included in "The Breakthroughs" issue of The Nomad Literary Magazine based in Bountiful, Utah. I've been submitting work to The Nomad since its first issue which became a print book. The project was launched by traveling writer/musician Ken Waldman (I just spoke to him -- he was traveling near Terlingua, Texas, which he said was remote and pretty cool) and Utah-based writer Rachel White. Rachel does most of the editing work as Ken travels coast-to-coast. Ken was a frequent visitor to Wyoming and he always stopped to see me in Cheyenne when I was the literature coordinator at the Wyoming Arts Council. While a trip to Bountiful was just a short jaunt across the Rockies from Cheyenne, I relocated to the edge of the Florida wetlands and couldn't be farther away from my old stomping grounds of WY/CO/UT. It's a good thing we'll be releasing the issue and reading our work on Zoom tonight at 7 p.m. MDT, 9 p.m. EDT. Free. FMI: THE-NOMAD.eventbrite.com

Why did Bernice bob her hair?

"Bernice Bobs Her Hair," F. Scott Fitzgerald's short story published in the May 1, 1920, issue of the Saturday Evening Post. It was his first story to receive national attention. (Thanks, Wikipedia, for the image. I  wear your [Edit] T-shirt when I'm editing.)

I lived in 1919 for five years. It was the mid-to-late twenty-teens and, physically, I was in Cheyenne, Wyoming, but my mind was in 1919 Denver. This is the year my grandparents migrated to Colorado. War puts people in motion and the Great War  did that. But other factors were at work. Young people were restless, as we were to see in 1920s literature. We have always been part of a moveable feast in this country. We value the ability to get up and move. No state border guards to show our papers to. No permission needed if we decide to quit our job and move cross-country to take another one. Relationships break and partners seek new pastures, new people to connect with. 

Some move for their health. That was never more true than in the 19-teens when the flu pandemic and tuberculosis caused many to get up and go. In John Green's book "Tuberculosis is Everything," we see the rise of TB sanitoria throughout the western U.S., land of clean air, dry climates, and expansive vistas. Some cities got their starts with TB, places like Pasadena, Calif., and Colorado Springs, Colo. Denver's air, when it wasn't choked by those winter air inversions and coal smoke, was pristine, just the thing for lungers, as TB patients were called and not in a nice way.

So I spent much of my 20-teens in the 19-teens. I suppose part of me will always be there. The novel that arose from the project, "Zeppelins over Denver," is nearing publication. I've written a follow-up since, this one set in 1922. And I am always at work writing stories and blogs. I've surpassed my 10,000 hours of creative practice. I'm a bit tired of practicing and want to get on my way to doing and finishing and enjoying. 

I'm still hooked on the era. My Millennial daughter Annie phoned yesterday. She was deciding on a haircut for a job interview. She talked about getting a bob. 

"Bernice bobbed her hair," I said. 

Annie didn't recognize the literary reference but suspected it. "OK, Dad, who's Bernice?" 

"From the F. Scott Fitzgerald short story, " 'Bernice Bobs Her Hair.' " 

"What happens, Dad. A sad ending, right?"

I had to think. "I don't remember. It's been awhile."

"It's not Gatsby-like, is it? Grim and filled with messages about a corrupt society?"

"I'll have to get back to you on that."

So I pulled up "Bernice Bobs Her Hair and Other Stories." I was about to send it to my Kindle when I came across an  audiobook version. I began listening to that, took a break for lunch, and when I returned, I found a "Bernice" graphic novel just released in 2024. The cover illustration intrigued me and I downloaded that. I stayed up late to read. Glad I did. My neighborhood is dark and quiet at midnight, as is my house. Peaceful. My laughs echoed down the hallway and might have reached my slumbering wife but she didn't mention it the next morning.

I did not remember the track of this story. I must have read it in grade school, junior high, high school. Now I do remember another notable story of that era, "Why I Live at the P.O." by Eudora Welty. Richard Connell's "The Most Dangerous Game" was an eye-opener. They all were in the same Catholic Church-approved collection as "A Bottle of Milk for Mother" by Nelson Algren and something by Hemingway probably one of the Nick Adams stories. I linger over those stories now. They are deep, wild, and funny, what I missed out on as a teen.

I loved "Bernice Bobs Her Hair." I had so much fun with the graphic novel adapted and illustrated by John Paizs and published by Graphic Publications. The story was first published in May 1920 in the Saturday Evening Post. Its popularity cased the Post to publish another Bernice Story in November that included a color illustration of Bernice. Fitzgerald was paid real money by the Post and it helped launch his career. In 1920, writers earned a living by writing stories for popular magazines. This has not been true during my time as a writer. 

Go read "Bernice." A pleasant journey during troubled times.

A Writer Orders a Birthday Cake

She’s pretty but doesn’t know it yet or maybe she does, maybe her new spouse told her that this morning before she hustled off to a new job. But she’s still in college, I think, summer break from FSU, a job making and decorating cakes. Could be worse, with her skin, working out in the Florida sun in June. A head taller than the slight Indian woman in a sari she helps. The woman wants a birthday greeting on a whipped cream cake. She spells out her granddaughter’s name and the clerk writes it down, says that’s a pretty name and then admires the women’s shiny hoop bracelets. The clerk tries to write on whipped cream but it’s not going well and she summons the head baker, a white-clad bearded guy old enough to be her father. I think they would like to tell the customer that she might try another cake, you know, one of those solid bar cakes or maybe a sheet cake with buttercream frosting, the ones you can write on. They come up with a solution, placing a plastic oval over the cake and writing on that. A bald Indian man rolls by on his store scooter that matches the one I ride on. He speaks brusquely and then rolls past the doughnuts and disappears down an aisle. Minutes later he returns but the woman from India is patient and keeps at it. He rolls away again. The Indian man is about my age, maybe even younger. I want to be a watcher at the counter, quiet, as I wait to order my cake. The woman customer turns to me. She is beautiful and tells me that it’s her granddaughter’s birthday and she is 10. Happy birthday to her, I say, and she smiles. The baker and the clerk finish their work and I draw close to admire it. Pink greeting on clear plastic over a white cake. High art. She turns and leaves. I order a sheet cake for my siblings’ birthday. A quarter sheet? Enough for 25? The clerk isn’t sure, looks for the baker and he’s in the back and she fetches a cake from the cooler and shows it to me. I know it is not the size I want and I think she knows it too but then consults with the baker and he comes out and tells me it feeds 20 when you cut 2-inch-by-2-inch pieces. If it’s not enough, you can grab some of our cupcakes. He points to a table piled high with them. I like that solution. I order my cake, the clerk writes down the birthday greeting, and I leave them for the day, a day that will lead to other days and other stories. I pass the Indian woman on the cereal aisle. She smiles, raises the cake in a salute, and peers down the rows of Cheerios and Fruity Pebbles, looking for the bald man in the scooter.

The Nomad anthology wanders from the western wilds to my fog-wrapped Florida mailbox

The first anthology of The Nomad literary magazine landed in my mailbox yesterday. Unassuming cover with lots of goodies inside. Last summer Ken Waldman, one of the Nomad founders, asked me to send in two pieces of my work, one that I was proud of and had been published and another that I liked and hadn't been published. He tasked me with writing a short essay on my choices. So I sent editor Rachel White one story that had been published several times, "The Problem with Mrs. P," and one I just finished in June, "That Time We Got Married at a Tent Revival." The first story is set in Wyoming and the second in Florida and South Carolina.

I spent 46 years in Wyoming and Colorado, did a lot of my growing up in East Coast Florida and spent my first two years of a not-very-successful university stint in South Carolina. I've also written speculative fiction that takes place off-world and in an Earth future that I imagined. I have returned to Florida which has its own otherworldly aspects. 

I am in such good company with this anthology. My long-time friend Ken Waldman has two poems, one set in the Alaska he calls home and a villanelle set in New Orleans. New Mexico's Lisa D. Chavez includes a poem which turns the Little Red Riding Hood fairy tale on its head and a nonce sonnet, the meaning I had to look up. Detroit's M.L. Liebler weighs in with "Flag" which dissects yet "another dark chapter in American history" (the one happening now) and "Decoration Day" about Vietnam.

Wyoming friends still talk about 2002-2003 poetry and music performances featuring M.L. and Country Joe McDonald. Buffalo, Wyoming's David Romtvedt explores "another past life" and a childhood dream in his selections. I was undone by the images in Amy Gerstler's poem "Siren" which opens the anthology. Paul Fericano made me laugh with "Still Life with Mormons in My Living Room." Amy and Paul are from L.A. Paul published some of my prose poems on his Yossarian Universal News Service site (yunews.com). New Zealand's Michael McClane got my attention with the long title and World War 2 theme in "On the Disembarkation of Sergeant Nathan E. Cook in Auckland, 13 June 1942."

That's just the beginning. Lots of great selections. You can get a copy of the book by subscribing to The Nomad. It's $25 for one year and $40 for two. You can also donate to this "non-for-profit labor of love by two writers." New submission guidelines are up for 2025. See the web site for the Bountiful, Utah, mailing address.

Loneliness of a long-distance dress salesman, Wyoming, 1949

The opening paragraph of the opening story, "Roadkill," in my story collection, "The Weight of a Body:" 

The shapes grew out of the smoke and fog -- three pronghorn antelope, running hard. Matthew Kincannon mashed the car's brakes and swung the wheel hard left. He missed the first two, collided with the third on its white-tufted rump which rose like a balloon before its rear legs smacked the windshield, its hooves scraping the glass like sharpened fists.

I set the story in the summer of 1949 on Hwy. 189 just north of Kemmerer, Wyoming. The morning was foggy and smoky, the latter due to a stubborn forest fire in the Bridger-Teton National Forest. I hit the rear end of an antelope that came out of nowhere. It tumbled to the side of the road, creating a dust cloud. I pulled over and ran to what I thought would be a mortally wounded creature. Nothing. I searched up and down the shoulder and came up empty. It was just dawn so no traffic. I returned to the car and investigated the front bumper. Nothing. My first thought was, "Did I imagine this?" But it was just a mysterious encounter along a deserted Wyoming road, of which there are many. On my way to a noon lunch meeting with arts patrons in Jackson, I thought about my father. In the late 1940s, one of the many jobs he tried post-war was a traveling salesman selling women's dresses for a Denver clothier. He sold one dress. He quit when he returned to Denver. He laughed when he told us kids the story. I laugh about it now. Dad was no high-pressure salesman. Still, he kept at it, first as an insurance salesman in Denver's Five Points neighborhood and the he joined Armour Meat Company to sell beef. The first thing the company did was transfer him to their Albuquerque office. He sorted mail at the Denver post office when I was born in 1950. Mom said he woke up with war nightmares when we got into Korea thinking the army would drag him into the fight. He spent four years in the army in Normandy, the Battle of the Bulge, and German occupation duty. After Mom died, we had drinks at his favorite watering hole and he said, "I always wanted to be a monk." I almost choked on my gin and tonic. "Too late Dad" I told the father of nine. As I drove the state for the Wyoming Arts Council, I often thought of Dad and his rack of dresses hanging in the backseat of his pre-war Dodge. He was engaged to my mom the nurse and just wanted to make good so he could marry her. I reckon that most of his thoughts were on Anna and not on sales tactics for dress store proprietors in Pinedale and Ten Sleep. I turned my imagination loose and came up with the fiction in my story. This blog is for you, Dad. 

Copies of "The Weight of a Body" are available on Amazon (book free with Kindle Unlimited membership). Tell them Father Tom, Father of Nine, member of the celestial monastery, sent you.

On that stretch of sand near J.D. Salinger's favorite Daytona Beach hotel

June 1966. My boss asked me why I was drilling a hole so close to the frothing ocean. High tide coming, boy. Looking for bananafish, I said, and turned the auger in the soft wet sand, digging a hole for the tourist's umbrella. What you talkin' about boy? Sir it's a perfect day for bananafish in Daytona. He grabbed the auger and told me to pick up my five dollars for a day's work and get off his damn beach. Now, he said. I dove head-first into the fresh hole. Blue-green water gave way to a murky yellow soup where dead bananafish floated. They ate too many bananas, swelled, and couldn't escape into sunlight. It was summer 1948. Salinger's Seymour tried to explain it to the kids on the beach at Daytona but they just thought him crazy, which he was, I suppose. So this is what you saw in the war, Sergeant Salinger? Bananafish floating, mutilated bananafish everywhere. That dreadful allied mistake off the English coast, bloody Normandy hedgerows, the bitter Bulge, the stink of the liberated extermination camp. Dead bananafish drove you into the asylum in Germany and you never came out, not really. You shipped out to another bigger asylum, the U.S.A., wrote about it, and we never understood. Your stories spread the alarm. We never understood. We kept looking for that one yellow bananafish who made it out into the blue-green waters. We are looking still.

Sources: Sergeant Salinger, Jerome Charyn; A Perfect Day for Bananafish, Nine Stories, J.D. Salinger.

Silas House's "Southernmost" takes the reader way way down south

Pain pours from  "Southernmost," the latest novel by Silas House. Most of it comes from Asher Sharp. He's a fundamentalist Christian preacher in rural Tennessee who yearns to do the right thing but brings down a cascading series of disasters. The river floods and he rescues a gay couple and invites them to his church. The congregation is scandalized. All hell breaks loose when same-sex marriage is legalized and the couple asks Asher to marry them. A strict gimme-that-ol'-time-religion preacher would refuse. But ten years before, Asher drove his gay brother Luke out of the church and out of town and he's regretted it ever since. He asks permission from the church council. Absolutely not, they say. 

From the pulpit, Asher blasts this narrow-mindedness and his angry tirade is filmed and goes viral and gets him in trouble. His wife turns on him as do church members and almost everyone in town. Lydia, his wife, uses the video to persuade a divorce court judge that Asher is too unbalanced for joint custody of their nine-year-old son, Justin. This loss is too much for him. He kidnaps his son and travels to Key West to ask forgiveness from his brother whose last communication from him carried a postmark of Key West, the "southernmost" city in the U S. Thus the title of the novel.

Asher does his best to keep a low profile and moves into an enclave populated by an engaging group of Florida Keys misfits. It becomes Asher's de facto congregation but that's not how he sees it. He just wants to safeguard Justin and apologize to Luke. Along the way, Asher learns key lessons in love and friendship and forgiveness. 

Almost anything can happen. Key West has a free-and-easy reputation. There is a price to pay for kidnapping -- just what will that be? House keeps us guessing to the end. Meanwhile, we get a deftly told tale at turns heart-breaking and delightful with a cast of intriguing characters.

I had never read this author but knew I was in good hands with its publisher, North Carolina's Algonquin  Books (now part of the Hachette Book Group). Look at their online catalog and try to restrain yourself from ordering new novels by Julia Alvarez and Lee Smith and works by Chuck D and Neil Gaiman. 

A podcast asks: What Should I Read Next? "Florida" by Gainesville writer Lauren Groff

I almost literally ran into fiction writer Lauren Groff outside the Tallahassee Marriott. I was chatting with my sister Molly, the pusher (of my wheelchair) and there was Groff, big as life and very noticeable in her pantsuit of many colors. My sister Molly stopped the wheelchair and chatted with Groff as if they were old friends but just met at the authors' table buying books for me, the Groff fan who attended her session at Word of South, the city's spring celebration of literature and music. "Is this him?" Groff pointed at me. Molly replied, "That's him." Me (a.k.a. him) was pleased that she knew my name and that I was a grad of UF where Lauren teaches writing. "I love your stories."

I was referring to her National-Book-Award-nominated "Florida" with a native Florida panther on the cover. Most stories in the collection are set in Florida (no surprise there) and they are knock-your-socks-off wonderful. I keep the trade paperback on my bookshelf within reach of my Wyoming writing desk where I write this now.

A few weeks ago I reread the opening story "Ghosts and Empties" about a working woman and mother who slips on her running shoes and prowls her Gainesville neighborhood at night. Why? "I have somehow become a woman who yells..." She hooked me right there. That is the joy of any fiction, the opener, one that delivers.

The next story, "At the Earth's Imagined Corners," is even better in an entirely different way. We leave contemporary Florida for the 1930s and '40s in rural Florida "at the edge of a swamp with unnamed species of reptiles." It's a tough one, filled with rage and unnamed reptiles. "Dogs Go Wolf" features two young girls abandoned by their parents on a Florida island. Uh oh, I thought, fearing the worst. The girls turn their dilemma into an adventure and the ending may surprise.

During our afternoon at the Marriott ballroom, we saw a rendition of "Peter and the Wolf" performed by the South Georgia Ballet Company. Following that, we heard from three experts on what we should read next. After that, Groff was interviewed by Anne Bogel for her podcast, "What Should I Read Next?" We discovered that Groff was set to open an indie bookstore in Gainesville, a "general interest bookstore” that emphasizes banned books, BIPOC authors, LGBTQ+ authors, and Florida authors."

My kind of bookstore. It's located at 601 Main Street, part of the new South Main Station. Groff's husband, Clay Kallman, grew up working at his parents' Florida Bookstore where I bought "gently-used" paperbacks for my English classes. As Groff told the Independent Florida Alligator: “We were hoping to respond to the recent authoritarian slide in the state of Florida right now,” Groff said, “and to respond with celebration of a lot of the books that are currently being banned.”

Amen and hallelujah.

It's a perfect day for Bananafish, until it isn't

Just one more thing about Jerome Charyn and J.D. Salinger...

In "Sergeant Salinger," the author stresses Salinger's "battle fatigue" (PTSD) which is a major part of the story. But not all. Charyn writes that some of the signs were there as a youth. An unusual boy with loads of imagination and talent. He struggled in school. First he was in a NYC public school that he liked and then went to a private academy when his father started being successful and moved to Park Avenue. He struggled here. His parents pulled him out, enrolled him in a military school in Pennsylvania where he thrived. The discipline and routine was good for him. It appears he had the makings of a soldier at an early age. And he was a good soldier in the war although a bit unorthodox. His teen years also gave signs of genius and mental health challenges. 

I bring this up because some experts have traced many cases to PTSD to a soldier's early life. Maybe they had trouble learning or maybe they were just a bit off-kilter. What would he have been like without his war experiences? Who knows? But he did and he was a recluse and very careful with his privacy and reputation. Not everything he wrote later in life was as good as "Nine Stories" and "Catcher in the Rye." He joins a long line of writers who hit it big early on and then not so much. Jerome Charyn, on the other hand, just keeps getting better at 86. 

I have no first-hand knowledge of military service and combat. But good books and movies can impart some of that experience. Charyn does it in this novel. Vietnam vet writers such as Tim O'Brien and Larry Heinemann and Bill Ehrhart and Yusef Komunyakaa do it in print. It took flyer Joseph Heller 17 years to write and then publish "Catch-22." It took Kurt Vonnegut even longer to serve up the Dresden firebombing in "Slaughterhouse Five." Silent movie film director W.S. Murnau took his years as a World War I German combat pilot and created a monstrous creature in "Nosferatu." J.R.R. Tolkien transferred the horror of the trenches into a blighted netherworld called Mordor with its pitched battles and fiery pits and humans adrift in murky holes -- you know, The Somme, July 1916. 

"No soldier ever really survives a war" -- Audie Murphy

Make that two more things...

In a chapter near the end of "Sargeant Salinger," Sonny Salinger and his sister Doris vacation at the Plaza Hotel in Daytona Beach, Fla. The Plaza was a post-war vacation destination for Northerners. It was best known for the tunnel motorists blasted through to get to "The World's Most Famous Beach," back when you could drive freely on it. That was my introduction to the Atlantic Ocean when our father drove us through it on our first day in Daytona. 

In the novel, Sonny breaks away from his sister's watchful eye and joins some kids making sandcastles on the beach. The kids eye him suspiciously as he joins in, shows them some techniques he perfected during family trips to Daytona. A concerned mother fetches her kids and eventually Doris fetches her brother. Nothing is mentioned about bananafish but you can see the beginnings of the short story. 

This became my beach in the late 60s, from the Plaza down to Hartford approach where we surfed. The only thing I knew about Salinger then is that I had to read "Catcher in the Rye" for English class. We chatted up girls, played frisbee and made sandcastles when the surf was flat, as we used to say. We eventually headed home and off to our night jobs at restaurants and hotels. My mind was mostly on surf and girls, getting enough pay for gas so we could find surf when none was to be found in Daytona.

Next time I visit Daytona to see family and friends, I'm going to the beach in front of the Plaza and try to see what Salinger saw. I know now that writers see things others don't. I may spot a bananafish struggling to get out of a hole in the ocean because it got too fat eating underwater bananas.

"Sergeant Salinger" by Jerome Charyn will rip your heart out

I was gobsmacked by an historical novel written about a famous author’s experiences in World War II.

“Sergeant Salinger” by Jerome Charyn is about J.D. Salinger, the most reclusive of American authors. His war experiences and the PTSD that followed helps explain why he kept his distance from his fellow humans for most of his adult life.

But that’s not the whole story. We first meet Salinger as a young single on the make in New York City. He dates Oona O’Neil, the vampish daughter of playwright Eugene O’Neill, and hangs out at the Stork Club with the likes of Walter Winchell and famous people we recognize by their last names or nicknames. Papa “Hem” Hemingway is one of them. Salinger writes radio scripts and short stories and readers like them but they are nothing to write home about. The letters home come later when he has something to say.

Salinger gets drafted even though he’d been previously diagnosed with a heart murmur. It’s the spring of ’42 and Uncle Sam needs everybody, even “half-Jewish writers with heart murmurs.” You’d think that Salinger (he goes by the nickname Sonny) would land in a cushy stateside job writing press releases or speeches for generals. What happens is something horrific and unexpected, even for someone like me who knows Salinger’s stories of PTSD veterans (“For Esme with Love and Squalor” and “A Perfect Day for Bananafish”). Salinger told these stories from the inside out. The author’s “Nine Stories” broke my heart when I first read them all in my 20s. Another heartbreaking story about returning vets is “Hemingway’s “A Soldier’s Story.” In “Sergeant Salinger,” there’s a scene when a jaded Hem visits Salinger in a Nuremberg psych ward and calls his own story “amateurish.” Hem groused that everything was behind him. He published “The Old Man and the Sea” in 1952 and it won the Pulitzer Prize in 1953 and Nobel Prize in 1954.

Lest you think Charyn has employed his magnificent storytelling skills to make it all up, think again. I did too. Until Part One: Slapton Sands, the section that follows Prelude: Oona. Salinger is a Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) NCO, who accompanies invading troops to interview prisoners and others who might spill the beans on Nazi war plans. He speaks German. He’s been drilled in all the tricks of the interrogator’s trade. While preparing for the D-Day landings, he’s witness to one of the army’s biggest tragedies. In a practice run for Normandy on Lyme Bay on the Channel side of England, a live-fire exercise goes astray and German’s Kriegsmarine speedboats sneak in an torpedo LSTs, spilling overloaded troops into the ocean. There are 749 casualties, some interred in mass graves, and Charyn documents it.

I told myself this couldn’t possibly happen. I looked it up. It happened. That’s when I knew we were off on a wild ride. We go to Utah Beach on June 6, 1944. Salinger is in the thick of it with the Fourth Division. They get into hedgerow battles with dug-in German troops and 82^nd Airborne “sky soldiers” (paratroopers) who are keen to even the score with Nazis who shot their comrades out of the sky when they dropped into the wrong spot. I looked that up too and it was much more gruesome than featured in “The Longest Day,” book or movie. Anywhere, for that matter.

Kudos to Charyn for doing his homework. He is a brilliant writer, one I’ve liked since getting hooked on his Inspector Isaac Sidel novels. We are in the shit with Salinger all the way through occupation duty in Germany. And he comes home which we all know. Salinger humped his “Catcher in the Rye” manuscript through Europe and wrote until he couldn’t write any more. The novel ends with the manuscript in his tiny retreat on Sleepy Hollow Lane, a street that Salinger invents because of its locale near the setting of the famous Washington Irving story. Nobody but family can find him there. Until he finishes his war-battered manuscript and it becomes a best seller. "Catcher in the Rye" still makes waves. 

Publisher is Bellevue Literary Press of New York, a small press with origins at Bellevue Hospital, noted for its Psychiatric Unit (the Ghostbusters were interned there, briefly) and the medical offices where Dr. Lewis Thomas wrote the best-selling “Lives of a Cell.” I haven’t read most of its authors who write, Bellevue notes, “at the intersection of the arts and sciences.” They’ve also published other books by Charyn, including his latest “Ravage & Son,” a “vintage noir” set in Manhattan’s Lower East Side during the turn of the last century. I have pre-ordered it. Charyn has other historicals. Look them up at his web site at jeromecharyn.com

Is it possible to write contemporary epistolary fiction in a world without letter-writing?

I took a chance on reading one of the Amazon Original Stories on Kindle. It was "Evidence of the Affair" by Taylor Jenkins Reid. One of the site's many offerings, I took a chance on it because it was an epistolary story, told entirely in letters. This is a dangerous genre because, number one, letters can be incredibly boring. Number two, it can be very formulaic and limits POV. Number 3, nobody writes letters any more.

That final reason makes it an historical short story because it takes place in 1976-1978. This was back before email and the Internet. People sat down, wrote a letter on paper, put it in an envelope, addressed and stamped in, drove to the post office to mailed it. You then had to wait several days or weeks or even months before a reply came. You sometimes got an instantaneous reply if, maybe you were ending a relationship. A quicker reply might come via long distance phone call and someone (maybe you) might be a few drinks into the night when you took that call and got an earful from a wounded former partner. Let me give you an example. I got a late night call, summer 1973, from my girlfriend in Boston. She broke up with me, saying there was no future in our relationship because she was going to nursing school in Connecticut and I was working at a lumber yard in Florida barely making ends meet and it looked from afar that I had no future. I was upset after saying farewell and wrote a long sappy letter that included an entire Kahlil Gibran poem. Gibran's work is very accommodating for almost any occasion. I did not get a reply.

The epistolary novel has a fine history. In 1740, Samuel Richardson wrote the first epistolary novel I studied in English class, "Pamela." It was immediately parodied by Henry Fielding's "Shamela" in 1741 and later by Monty Python. The most well-known contemporary epistolary novel is "The Perks of Being a Wallflower" by Stephen Chbosky and "The Guernsey Potato Peel Pie and Literary Society" based on letters and telegrams to and from the female protagonist. I liked this book and the TV limited series wasn't bad. 

Reid is known for her romances and this story is one. At first, it doesn't seem so as the two main correspondents in "Evidence of the Affair" find out their spouses are cheating on them. The letters fly back and forth. They unearth letters from the cheaters in briefcases and recipe books. The drama builds and I won't ruin it for you but the ending is more dynamic than I expected and very sweet. 

What is this thing Amazon Original Stories on Kindle? Look them up on Amazon, the keeper of all things (most recent purchase: belts for my vacuum cleaner). You can sign up for Kindle Unlimited and read some for free. I do that, I have to admit, although I paid $1.99 for Reid's story. Sometimes you pay for the print edition and get the Audible audiobook version for free (or vice versa). 

I came across a new collection entitled "Warmer" which is described this way:

"Warmer," a collection of seven visions of a conceivable tomorrow by today’s most thought-provoking authors. Alarming, inventive, intimate, and frightening, each story can be read, or listened to, in a single breathtaking sitting. 

Stories include three by writers whose work I admire: Jane Smiley, Lauren Groff, and Jess Walter. The four others must be pretty good to be in such company. You can read and listen to all seven stories for free. I can anyway. These free stories are designed to get you to buy the authors' books. Sign up for Kindle Unlimited and you get the stories free along with free shipping for vacuum cleaner belts.  

PS: I have republished a story collection on Amazon, "The Weight of a Body." You have to pay for it although it's also a free offering on KU.

Jane Campbell explores the "persecution of remembering" in her Cat Brushing story collection

The cover of Jane Campbell's story collection, "Cat Brushing," shows a ringed hand sweeping across the fur of what must be a very large cat or maybe the gorgeous gray locks of one of the author's elderly women characters. It could be both as you will discover reading her 13 wonderful stories in the POV of women in their 70s and beyond. This is her first book, published in her 80th year, as it says on the book jacket. I'm nine years younger than her which puts us, approximately, in the same age cohort.  

These tales are quite personal, erotic in spots. Am I surprised that women of a certain age have erotic thoughts and sometimes more than thoughts? No, but as a person in this age group, I am impressed by the directness of the stories. It challenges the idea that women of a certain age must be handled carefully lest they fall and break a hip or leave a pot burning on the stove. It's the "I've fallen and I can't get up" woman sprawled on the kitchen floor who would be lost without her handy Medic-Alert bracelet and her male rescuers. Old and helpless.

Fuck that.

In "The Question," the narrator gulps down a dose of morphine and describes the rush that results. I figured she was a goner, in the last stages of cancer, but she's actually a feisty woman who chased after her cat on a winter night and fell on her porch's icy steps. The idea that she likes the buzz of the morphine helps us get to know this woman in a rehab center who has no intention of staying abed. Tests surprisingly reveal she has no broken bones and only sustained a few bumps and bruises. When released, she asks her male nurse if she can have a to-go portion of the opioid. He genially refuses but as we read the interaction between patient and nurse, we find that she knew him in the past and knows his dark secret. 

The writer has a sure touch in turning tales on their head. In "Kiskadee," a woman lies by a pool in Bermuda and hears the melodious song of the Kiskadee, a predatory tropical bird with a big beak designed for killing. Interspersed are memories of her "special relationship" with her father. She recalls years of touching and cuddling, sleeping together, syrupy words from the father. Story's end has a horrible twist which I won't spoil here.

Most of these women recount loves gained and loves lost. The memories are clear and immediate, no brain fog here.

I reread Campbell's second story, "The Scratch."  Nell wonders how she scratched herself, a cut that bled profusely. 

What drawers had she opened carelessly, perhaps knives rearranged, had she handled scissors?

She forgets about phone calls with her grown children. She forgets things even though she writes everything in her diary.

But it's not the forgetting that concerns her most. 

The old barriers behind which she could once shelter... they all tumble down as the years pass. Just as running upstairs becomes a lost art and skipping down becomes impossible, so the capacity to forget is lost. There is a persecution of remembering. Remembering so much. Those midnight hours, dark nights of the soul, where remorse bites hard and the past presses against you.

Nell, in her 70s, forgets how to forget. 

I too, in my 70s, have forgotten how to forget. Memories become crisp and clear, even those I want to forget. This hit me so hard. Since retirement, I've been wondering why old memories come flooding back to me. As an old person, aren't I suppose to forget things instead of them rushing back to me with incredible force? It's not like I'm bored, lazing about in a tepid pool of nostalgia. 

Still, the memories flow. 

As you climb toward retirement, friends and family urge you to be busy when work ceases and you have all the time in the world. People get bored, get sick, get careless. But that's not it at all. Memories can overwhelm your present if you are not busy making more memories. They don't tell you about the "persecution of remembering." We have to leave that up to Campbell and her fictional characters. 

"The Weight of a Body" collection now available in print version

The print version of my book is now available to order on Amazon. "The Weight of a Body: A Collection of Short Stories" features 12 stories set (in no particular order) Wyoming, Colorado, and Florida. The collection was originally published by Denver's now-defunct Ghost Road Press and I decided earlier in the year to republish it as an e-book and now a print version. Here's the cover:

The act of republishing on KDP Amazon entails formatting, design, and editing. I formatted my MS Word files on Draft2Digital (D2D). I then brought that over to KDP to transform it into an e-book. It took me awhile to read an e-book on my Kindle and even longer to make one. My guide through the process was writer and critique group colleague Liz Roadifer. Read her books here. 

Here's a teaser from the opening story, "Roadkill:"

The shapes grew out of the smoke and fog -- three pronghorn antelope, running hard. Matthew Kincannon mashed the car's brakes and swung the wheel hard left. He missed the first two, collided with the third on its white-tufted rump which rose like a balloon before its rear legs smacked the windshield, its hooves scraping the glass like sharpened fists.

This won't be my only project on KDP. Stay tuned for news about my second collection later this year. Most of those stories are set in Wyoming and Colorado. 

Mrs. P has a problem and needs some help

The opener for one of the stories in my collection, The Weight of a Body, now available as an e-book on Amazon. The story was inspired by a real incident, one that I've taken great care to turn into fiction. Poetry wiz and literary lion M.L. Liebler liked it enough to include it in the anthology, Working Words: Punching the Clock and Kicking Out the Jams, published by Coffee House Press. It features poetry, fiction, and nonfiction by and about America's working class. Contributors include Philip Levine, Diane di Prima, Willa Cather, Jack White, Quincy Troupe, Li-Young Lee and a host of others. Find a copy at your favorite bookstore. Read on...

The Problem with Mrs. P 

First problem: nobody was home to help. Not her two daughters, off to school. Not her husband Robbie, who hadn’t been home for weeks, probably right this minute at that whore Gloria’s house.

Second problem: she was seven months pregnant and bleeding like crazy. She pressed a cream-colored towel against her crotch; it bloomed with a red chrysanthemum of her own blood. She stood in the bathroom doorway, eyes sparking, knees shaking.

Third problem: her damn husband had the car. Not that she was in any shape to make the seven-mile drive into Cheyenne, a few more if you factored in the hospital which was downtown.

Fourth problem: the telephone was dead, thanks to Robbie not paying the bills like he was supposed to. She had her own cell phone with a few minutes still left on it. But it was downstairs on the kitchen table. Just the thought of negotiating the stairs brought a throbbing to her abdomen.

Fifth problem, or maybe it was the first: she and her baby boy might be dying.

To be continued...

"The Weight of a Body" can be measured in stories

Opening of the first story in my collection, "The Weight of the Body," now available as an Amazon e-book. 

Roadkill

The shapes grew out of the smoke and fog -- three pronghorn antelope, running hard. Matthew Kincannon mashed the car’s brakes and swung the wheel hard left. He missed the first two, collided with the third on its white-tufted rump which rose like a balloon before its rear legs smacked the windshield, its hooves scraping the glass like sharpened fists.

Kincannon wrestled the car to a stop on the wrong side of the state highway. He had a vision of a huge logging truck red-balling down the road, smashing him like he’d smashed the antelope. Tapping the gas, he swerved back into the north-bound lane, and eased his car to a stop on the road’s shoulder.

Read more...

Welcome to e-book land w/update

Friend and writing colleague Liz Roadifer is my mentor to the e-book world.

She has formatted five of her titles and they are featured on Amazon. To access, write Liz's name in the Universe of Amazon search box and there you are. The books are in five different categories: suspense, fantasy and young adult. I have read them all in manuscript form because Liz and I are members of a local critique group, Cheyenne Area Writers Group or CAWG. You won't find a listing for us on or off the Internet. We're not so much a secret organization as a nondescript one. Members are five now and we meet via Zoom every two weeks to critique one another's fiction projects. Members have come and gone over the past 20 years. But all of us, past and present, are published thanks in part to the good graces and fine eyes of CAWGers.

Most of my colleagues write what's labeled as genre fiction, a category MFAers are taught to loathe. Silly MFA programs. I wrote a suspense novel back in the day which never sold even though I had an agent I met at a writing conference. It taught me a lot mainly that I wanted to be a better writer. So I left the corporate world for the academy and the rest is history. I now write better than I did in my 20s and 30s. How much of that is due to maturity and voracious reading and how much is due to writing workshops is hard to say. Let's say 50/50. 

So here I am, formatting my first book of stories for Kindle Direct Publishing. Rights for the book reverted back to me after my press folded. I have a few print copies flitting about but have resisted the e-book world. I have written another book of stories and a novel, still unpublished. I am putting them all online. I've been writing on Blogger for 16 years, having signed up on a whim in 2001. I've posted almost 3,600 blogs. I used to be part of Blogger's AdSense program but never made any money. It requires you to have ads on your site and I found some disturbing and others stupid. 

So now I am signing on to the largest corporation in the known universe, the people who gave us spaceships, delivery drones, and free shipping. The KDP program is easy to learn and widens the audience. What's not to like? I'm almost finished with the formatting stage and ready to release it into KDP's care. It would be wrapping it up right this very minute but I am blogging instead. I spend too much time on my blog but it does give me a platform for promotion that not everyone has. Platform, of course, is the thing that all writers must have these days. Writers you see on TV usually have a platform or they wouldn't be on TV. I saw an interview with George Saunders on Stephen Colbert a few years ago and went out and bought "Lincoln in the Bardo" and his wild story collection, "CivilWarLand in Bad Decline." I love those stories. It was fantastic to see a real author on the airwaves. We need more of that.

So back to e-booking. Kudos to Liz for her persistence and patience. The book should be available soon, just in time for Christmas and the next Covid lockdown. 

UPDATE 12/6/21: "The Weight of a Body" Kindle edition now available on Amazon.