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The characters in Jack Greer's Abraham's Bay & Other Stories have set sail for islands in the Atlantic and Caribbean — some are restless, some curious, others are unhappy, while others are in love with roaming. Inevitable, these small boat sailors haul their personal histories along, their hubris, their failures, their frustrations. Some sail alone, others are looking to reunite, while others are parting for good. The protagonists of these eleven stories often seem to exist at the edges of the larger world — they anchor in lonely coves, make night passages across reef-strewn waters, contend with fears, inner and outer. In the title story, a retired cardiologist sailing solo encounters a dangerous theological argument on a remote island, defending in a most unlikely place his religion, his choices, and finally himself. Rather than record-breaking feats of circumnavigation, the stories of Abraham's Bay dramatize ordinary struggles with self and sea. The triumphs in these tales are those of living and seeing — the rewards, when they come, are in making it through.
Jack Greer has spent most of his life on or around the Chesapeake Bay, having worked as a boat builder and, in his younger years, as a sailing instructor. He and his wife, Bobbie, live on the shores of the Chesapeake Bay in Edgewater, Maryland. They sailed their 31-foot Vindo sloop as far north as Newport and Block Island and as far south as the Dominican Republic. A poet and fiction writer, Greer has won two Individual Artist Awards from the Maryland State Arts Council, while another story won the annual Baltimore Artscape competition. He is a senior writer on marine science and policy for the University of Maryland Sea Grant College; for this work, he has been awarded two citations from the Governor of Maryland and a President's award from the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science. Among his literary publications are America and Other Poems (Dryad Press). |
Abraham's Bay & Other Stories 240 pp., 5-1/2 x 8-1/2 Cloth, $22.95 ISBN: 978-1-928755-12-8 Distributed to the trade by Midpoint Trade Books
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