Bedlam and Other Stories

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Now, asserts the Evangelist, we see as through a glass darkly. Now our mirror’s pocked and grody, and only in some better, brighter future will we see face to face. The author of First Corinthians had the story to go with it, too, the transformation on the road to Damascus. Right there on the highway, Saul became Paul, as his imagination carried him far into the future, beyond his own death and to the end of the world. Come to think, doesn’t the imagination always face the way? Towards the future? Isn’t it about what’s emerging: a Kingdom above the sky, a story beyond the scribbles? Seems so — or rather it seemed so, till Dzanc Books and their generous ePrint program showed me how the imagination colors a look back, too. For a writer, even in the future to which he once looked forward, the mirror of “now” remains smudged and blemished.

The publication date for Bedlam was the start of 1982, and that edition held just nine stories. In the first months of that year, though, I completed two more, “At the Dig” and “Chasing Names.” Both landed at good quarterlies and, in light of the Dzanc offer, both look to be of a piece with the rest of the collection. They’re products of the same inspiration and follow the same binary code. One is urban realism, the other another road-vision, voyaging out beyond death. So too they share the book’s most common narrative tension, between the gathering grind of the mundane and the tenuous filaments of the heart.

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