Lake Stories and Other Tales

Comic, heartfelt, and mysterious, these stories charm the reader with good humor, affection for their natural settings, and the gentle, persistent seeking for a lasting place in the daily world of common folk. Some tales cast moonlight over the solitary in us all who wander at dusk. Others haunt us with loss and evoke a certain sense of autumn, likely to press sighs from an ache in our breath. Still others fill us with the pride in a true hero. Within, the reader finds young love, aged angst, bumbling travelers, the fogged memory, moon watchers, dog rescuers, lost and very-lost tourists, and long, sweet farewells. The humorous among these engender wistful smiles, occasional smirks, and outright chuckles punctuated by a shaking of the cynical head. In the tradition of Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and Henry David Thoreau's Walden, the narratives turn their gaze to our behavior, leading us to find ourselves outdoors rather than searching within. The words sometime cut sharply our venal selves, other times lead us to reach a hand over our hearts. These stories, unified by Jollymore's “wolf poems,” invite readers to join in a happy, pointed, and gentle cosmic dance, hand in paw with the wolves doing the “chill-rhumba, Borealis.”