OTHER LIVES marks my first collection of short fiction. And while the material is new—I wrote the more than two dozen stories with within the past year—the project has taken a lifetime to complete.
As a child, my mother and father read the usual fare at night—Uncle Arthur’s Bedtime Stories at first, then tales of adventure featuring the barnyard animals of the Little Golden Books series. As I grew, my parents might not get the toys I wanted, but they would always buy a book. Reading fostered a desire to write, which led to magazine work in Manhattan and a career as a journalist.
By the early eighties, I’d run though just about every editorial job at the newspaper and struck out on my own. I credit former East Stroudsburg University professor Fred Misurella with reigniting my interest in fiction. In his short-story workshops, he challenged students to explore all the elements in their toolkit and imported talent to make the point, luminaries such as Marilynne Robinson, who had just released her breakout novel Housekeeping, a finalist for the 1982 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and novelist John Gardner (Grendel, Mickelsson’s Ghosts), who, while reading one of my pieces aloud, proclaimed, “As they say in the old country, ‘Das ist ein Dichter.’” Even with my rudimentary knowledge of German, I knew he had identified me as a writer. I was stunned.
Later, as we sat on the floor of Fred’s apartment in the literary version of an after-party, I told Gardner of the difficulty I’d had locating his novels in our local bookstore.
“They weren’t filed under Fiction, so I asked the clerk for help. He found them under Literature.”
Gardner howled.
While I wasn’t his student (he taught at SUNY Binghamton), he offered to read more of the work I’d generated in Fred’s classes. I imposed by sending a book-length collection of stories, most of which, read in hindsight, were terrible. Gardner invited me to his farmhouse in Susquehanna, Pa., and annotated the first story before sending me home with the rest. To the end, he remained a generous and gracious man, quite the opposite of the brash critic who wrote On Moral Fiction.
Fred continued to encourage me, suggesting I enroll in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the gold standard of American creative writing education, and attend the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, characterized by The New Yorker as “the oldest and most prestigious writers’ conference in the country.” Iowa was out of the question, time and money the biggest impediments, but I did make it to Bread Loaf and, in the summer of 1984, journeyed to Vermont to study with some of the best: Hilma Wolitzer, Nicholas Delbanco, Francine Prose, and Bob Reiss, my advisor and the only commercial novelist on the ticket (he writes thrillers).
The short story workshop remains one of my favorites. Led by Delbanco, it included fellow Pennsylvania resident Andrea Barrett, who submitted what quickly became a class favorite, “The Apple Picker Hits the Road.” I still have the photocopy she distributed in class.
After that, writing fiction took a backseat to earning a living. I did two tours of duty at a small newspaper in Northeast Pennsylvania, the first as a reporter and photographer, the second as an editor, then quit to write articles and books for US Airways and the University of Scranton Press, respectively. Fiction would have to wait.
And it did. After a second career in marketing and public relations, I wrote eleven novels and two slim volumes of nonfiction before running dry. But for many of us, we can never escape the question, What do I do next? I buy the Pushcart Prize collection every December, along with a number of other best-of books, and find myself reading more short fiction than novels, a function of a diminishing attention span, no doubt, but a motivating force that led to a series of stories written for my writers’ group.
Which leads us here. So, what will you find? A selection of two-dozen historical, crime, and speculative pieces encompassing the decades from the mid-1950s through today. Characters that include a rapturous cafeteria worker, a love-struck cab driver, and an embittered newspaper columnist. Women, men, and children who battle life and sometimes win the fight.
You’ll find people who tackle contemporary issues with an equal mixture of hope and hype: a billionaire’s ill-fated mission to Mars; a columnist whose state justifies the killing of political opponents as free speech; a storm-water field services agent who struggles with his own refusal to move to higher ground.
You’ll meet people who consider themselves accidental criminals: a woman who must decide whether to rescue a health-insurance executive who denies life to others; an abused young woman who, during a police ride-along, discovers a way to free herself from her drug-dealer boyfriend. You’ll also find overlooked souls who survive with surprising agility: An immigrant expecting deportation after cleaning a crime scene earns a reward for her silence; a software architect fleeing civilization after a breakup discovers the magic of imagination.
Then there are the speculative pieces that take place in the near-future: A father who resurrects his daughter through A.I.; a photographer who believes he can capture crimes before they happen; a woman who removes her ex by deleting him from her wedding photos.
Most of the stories stand on their own. Others form an interlocking chain, following characters through the perils of the Cold War to its re-emergence today. While the people, settings, and emotions vary, all of these stories ask an essential question, one that reverberates down the decades: who are the people we call others, these wayfaring strangers who look and sound remarkably like us?
The e-book and paperback are available now through Amazon from this link: https://bit.ly/4ALQ0jq
You can find my other work from the Amazon author’s page: https://amzn.to/4mDNuos
