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Four families old she stands against the rain
Green shutters with wooden flecks
And a porch gently warped and peeling

The broom-clean foyer stands behind the oak and glass door,
A common mosaic in black and white tile beneath our feet
As we stand before the hallway hand-crafted and cracking in plaster and lathe.

The staircase that rises before us to the second storey
Is covered with thread-bare carpet of a later vintage:
Deep-green seventies shag.

“That’s got to go,” you say, and I laugh.

In the empty sitting room stands a tarnished brass floor lamp with a tilted shade.
I turn the key-shaped switch and there is a brief flicker of light
And then we are back in the gray window light

On your knees, you take the ceramic plug in your hand and squeeze the prongs together
You press it back into the socket and the yellow-tinged light returns

We hear a gust of wind in the trees outside
Again the light flickers and finally takes hold
Casting our shadows across the room.

A dried rosebud sits atop a brittle stem in a church bazaar vase
Beneath the kitchen cupboards’ streaked panes and the frames
Covered with layers of pearly enamel.

The steps creak under our feet and echo through the empty house
As we climb the stairs to our room
With the balance of time still in our favor.

Originally published in the Loch Raven Review

Loch Raven Review – Four

Jim Doss. Loch Raven Press 2009, Paperback, 316 pages, $14.95

I’ve re-posted these pictures from Stony Brook, NY.  I took them down because there was a dispute over who actually took them, my daughter or my sister.  I wasn’t there at the time, so I can’t say definitively who took them, or if they took turns with the camera, or what.  The birth of a new family feud.

I’ve put them back up, however, because the place has been on my mind lately.  In the late 40’s my grandparents, who lived in a rented apartment in Queens, scraped together enough money to buy a small cottage in Stony Brook, which became their summer home.  When I was growing up in the ’60’s, I spent a good part of each summer with them and I have very fond memories of the place, as do my sisters and my cousins.   I wrote a bit about it in a personal essay about my grandparents.

One of the things that I think is important in a piece of fiction is a strong sense of place.  Whether it be Hemingway’s Paris, or Joyce’s Dublin, placing a reader in a place they can see, taste, feel and smell, is critical creating what John Gardner called “The Fictive Dream.”  It’s necessarily about burying the reader with dense passages of description, it’s about providing just enough to capture the essence of a place and time, using as many of the five senses as possible.

For me, my memories of Stony Brook are particularly vivid and I have been writing a series of stories set there during the time I was growing up.  They’re not really autobiographical; I grew up in Queens and my fictional characters are seem to me to be like people I might have known, but aren’t based on myself or any real person.  The stories are about a family in Port Jefferson, a town near Stony Brook that I actually lived in for a few years as an adult.  The first story, “Brothers,” was published first in Static Movement and again in The Square Table. “Come Together,” the second story will be appearing in a future issue of Cantaraville. I’ve completed a third story, I think the best of the set, that is under consideration for publication next year in a well regarded literary journal (I’m keeping my fingers crossed).  I’ve also begun a fourth story.  The story cycle isn’t something I’m actively working on.  Usually when I finish one story, I have absolutely no idea what happens next.  When it finally comes to me, six months or a year later, I write the next story.

One of these pictures played a role in the writing of one of these stories.  The picture at the top of this article was taken from the fishing pier at the Stony Brook town beach, next to the Stony Brook Yacht Club, and just across the street from the historic Three Village Inn.  That strip of beach on which stands that little green beach house is a place that my grandparents used to take us for cookouts.  It’s located at the end of a road that extends past West Meadow Beach and past some cottages, whose legal status has been questioned for years.  This picture was my desktop background while I was working my third Long Island Story.  I was writing a dramatically tense scene and I needed a break.  There before me was that lovely place that I remembered so well, so I had my characters jump into a convertible on a sunny spring day and drive out to that little green boathouse.  It provided a happy, energetic interlude in an otherwise sad story.

The Gallery.

In spring of 2006 I was attempting a rewrite of a twenty-three year old story about a teacher at a prep school in upstate New York. The original story was awful, but there was something about the characters and their situation that remained mysteriously compelling to me. I realized that the problems I had in writing the original version — I had written and rewritten it for about a year trying to get it right — mainly stemmed from the fact that I had written it in third person. My new attempt was to retell the story in first person as a novella.

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