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Kelly’s stories are tough, real, honest, and always true. Unadorned by gimmick or artifice, the pieces in this collection—all framed between the imagined voices of that most primal couple, Adam and Eve—carry us deep into the heart of a wild American world that in many ways (and most definitely for a lot of younger people) sadly no longer exists. The human settings of these stories—bars, strip clubs, dingy apartments, goldmines, ranches, logging crews, homesteads, highways—are rich with details and textures that linger long after the closing sentences. Beyond those, however, there’s always a sense of something even larger and older surrounding the often small, sometimes strange, yet always compelling events his narrators are recounting. Sometimes this larger thing is the natural world—the oceans and forests, the plants and animals—always placing the events into their proper context. At other times, it’s the human interactions themselves that somehow seem to take on this greater, at times even mythic, weight and power. Reading these pieces, we recognize how the hungers and desires, the fears and hopes, the regrets and epiphanies of his people have all somehow entered our cultural DNA, and how—like them–it’s up to each of us to come to terms with all the beauty and terror that comes with being alive.
Dave Sims
After 30+ years of teaching in colleges, universities, military bases, and prisons from Alaska to Louisiana, Dave Sims retired to the mountains of central Pennsylvania where he now dwells and creates. His most recent comix appear in The Nashville Review, Talking Writing, and Freeze Ray, and panels from his digital painting sequence “Somewhere Around the Edges,” appear on the cover and in the Winter 2019 issue of The Raw Art Review.
What Oregon authors say about this book:
“This book is good company. And I appreciate the opportunity to associate with intriguing folks out there where I rarely venture.”
Lawson Fusao Inada, emeritus professor of English at Southern Oregon University, Oregon Poet Laureate, and author of Before the War: Poems as They Happened, and Legends from Camp, which won an American Book Award in 1994.
“The remarkable thing about this collection—how often it touched my heart. These stories have a soul.”
Robert Leo Heilman, author Children of Death, and Overstory Zero: Real Life in Timber Country (Winner of the Andres Berger Award for Pacific Northwest Nonfiction 1996).
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The establishment people think they have a pretty advanced civilization here. Well, technically maybe they’ve done a lot, although we know civilizations that have gone much further in the same direction. In most respects this is a pretty backwards civilization. The establishment seems completely incapable of learning some basic truths. The most basic principle of all is that of not harming others, and that includes all people and all life and all things. It means not controlling or manipulating others, not trying to manage their affairs. It means not going off and killing people over there – not for religion, politics or military exercises or any other excuse. No being has the right to harm or control any other being. No individual or government has the right to force others to join or participate in any group or system or force others to go to school, to church or war. Every being has the right to live his own life in his own way. Every being has an identity and a purpose. To live up to his purpose, every being has the power of self-control, and that’s where spiritual power begins. When some of these fundamental things are learned, the time will be right for more to be revealed and spiritual power will come again to this land.
