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 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.

As I started working on the retelling, I imagined a history of the fictional town and prep school to include in the piece. I awoke one morning in a hotel room in Seattle, where I was working at the time, with the name “Antietam” in my mind. Suddenly, my novella became a novel, which I have been working on at a snail’s pace ever since.

I’ve never been a civil war buff, and in fact always thought those who are civil war buffs to be a little strange. Nonetheless, something Shelby Foote had spoken about in Ken Burns’ documentary had been rattling around in my subconscious during the twenty years since I had seen it. At the time, I had no idea where or when the Battle of Antietam occurred. To my surprise, a Google search later that morning revealed that the battle took place near Sharpsburg, Maryland, about fifty miles from my home. I knew that I would have to visit the site eventually, but work and family commitments made me keep putting it off.

Meanwhile, I began the work of writing a novel, something that I considered too ambitious for where I was, and probably still am, in my writing career. Winslow is a set of threaded stories about the fictional town and school located at the foot of the Berkshires that threads multiple time periods: a contemporary story about loss, missed opportunities and regret, a story set in the early 1980′s about the centenial anniversary of the school (the basis of the original short story), and story about the imagined romance between a minister’s daughter and a young man in the town who dies at Antietam in 1862. Clearly there’s easier things I could attempt for a first novel.

When I finally got a chance to drive out to Antietam it was spring of 2007. Like any other battlefield that has been turned into a memorial, Antietam’s natural beauty is overwhelming. The knowledge of what happened there, the tranquility of the setting, and the hushed tones of the visitors, who all seem to be on their own pilgrimage, makes the only way to describe the feeling as “spiritual.” I’m not a particularly religious person, but it brought to mind those words from Ecclesiastes: “One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever.” I found myself mourning the death of a young man who existed only in my mind and on the pages of the novel I have been writing, and aching in sympathy with Sarah, the minister’s daughter in my imagination.

The Battle of Antietam was the single bloodiest day in American combat history. The events of that day are documented and the numbers of the dead and wounded have been counted and re-counted. Those numbers include the twenty-seven sons of the town of Winslow, New York. The numbers of the spiritually wounded include eight widows and nineteen children. The sorrow that enveloped Winslow lasted generations and is still recalled by the statue that stands in the square in front of the post office.

Time has forgotten, however, the wounded that are never counted. They were not widows; they were not orphans. They were the young women of the town of Winslow, who had tearfully posted their perfumed letters at that very same post office. Some of those letters were later found, muddy and blood-soaked on the battlefield. Their sorrow was private and they carried it for the remainder of their days. Their betrothed had left the earth, leaving no tangible sign that they had ever existed. These women would never see their lovers smile in a child’s face.

Instead, they were left to mourn their whole lives, driven from joy to sorrow and back again by memories of lives they had only imagined.

-Epilogue from Winslow

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