We talk about the need to connect intimately, but do we recognize connection when it's here or only in retrospect? Is a feeling of connection something we can will into being—or something that, like grace, surprises us when we least expect it? Does it bear any relation to what we imagined it would be? What, if anything, does it have to do with love? With time's continuousness and mutability? With our own?
In this anthology, thirty-two talented writers invite us to explore with them, through story, memoir, and poetry, what remains as we all change—within families, between friends, between lovers, through childhood, adolescence, adulthood, career change, gender change, marriage, parenthood, divorce, illness, disability, and death. The writing here is strikingly mature—and moving—whether the writer is nineteen or ninety.
Join, among others, a father wryly observing his grown son, wondering what links them both to the child he will never be again; a man cherishing his tie with an institutionalized brother; a woman exploring the complex, formative cross-racial bond she had with a childhood caretaker; women, friends since childhood, exploring what connects them now that their paths have diverged so greatly; a man with a severely disabled son puzzling the bonds he still has with his ex-wife; a wife of fifty years warily contemplating the advisability of an eternal marriage.
The pleasure of this collection is through these stories to experience ourselves—in many moods and modes, at every age, living out perturbing questions (willingly or not), feeling alienated or close—as already indubitably, inexplicably connected. It's a gracious basis to live on—and quite possibly a true one. 272 pp. ISBN: 978-0-9826933-0-8
