Snowdrops in my garden
As surely as the snowdrops in my garden just announced the coming of spring, my estimable publisher, Ruth Greenstein of Turtle Point Press in New York, just announced the date for the publication of my next book: September 23, 2025.
The timing is a writer’s dream, seldom realized, of putting the next book into the hands of readers who’ve enjoyed the last, my Taken by the Shawnee, published by Turtle Point in June, 2024. Our memories are short and even a gap of two or three years between one book and the next means starting all over to build a readership from scratch. My seventeen public readings of Shawnee at book clubs and libraries since last June convince me that my readership, loyal and patient, is waiting.
My next book, now titled How Daddy Lost His Ear and Other Stories (the former Cowboy Tales) will delight and startle readers in about equal measure. It can be pre-ordered now, and pre-orders mean a great deal to my publisher, indicating that an audience is waiting and affecting the number of copies printed. I urge any of you so inclined to pre-order How Daddy NOW at a reduced rate and help my book on its way.
I look on the eighteen short stories in How Daddy as a miracle I will never entirely understand—or need to—but here’s a stab at it. The most important consequence of my living here in the Southwest since 1991 (in addition to a group of devoted friends) is that I’ve absorbed through my skin all kinds of anecdotes about the peculiar and fascinating people who live or have lived here, Native Americans, Hispanics, African Americans and the late-coming Anglos like me. My next book, The Souls of White Folks will give us Anglos our due.
An anecdote is not a short story but as I state in my dedication, it can be the seed. Planted deep in my imagination, this seed put out roots, shoots and leaves, the developed chronicles of imagined lives.
And what lives they are! Raucous, disjointed, addicted, splendid with the splendor of destructive intensity, grounded in family relationships that seem to thrive on turmoil and unquestioning loyalty.
These are like the people in “real life ” we worry about and may secretly scorn. We have gone about as far in that direction as we can, funneling our relatives and friends into rehab or court or jail. None of those remedies, if we expect them to be remedies and not punishments, have done anything to stem the flood of poverty, addiction and its assorted ills.
It’s time to take a breath, step back and laugh at their shenanigans. I want my readers to laugh with relief, welcome detachment, and perhaps a bit of newfound understanding and empathy.
Why is it that the difficult men and women in my stories continue to receive their family’s support and love? Love can’t cure, and continuing to offer it to a sufferer who is unable to love back drains and may even destroy the lover. As Mary Oliver so potently states in her famous poem, “The Journey”:
One day you finally knew
What you had to do, and began…
And you felt the old tug
At your ankles.
“Mend my life!”…
But you didn’t stop…
Determined to do
The only thing you could do—
Determined to save
The only life you could save.”
These stories tell that journey, and also its opposite.
[How Daddy Lost His Ear and Other Stories can be preordered in person, or online from:
Carmichael’s in Louisville
Garcia Street Books
Turtle Point Press
Amazon.com
For other bookstores, the ISBN is: 9781885983220.]
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