Oh, I know. Don’t believe anything I say; I haven’t yet turned away from the Glimmertrains since there were about a dozen of them to go through. But I’m into the idea of mixed genres and fiction together with non-fiction and not above throwing in a video novel at the same time.
While I really should have brought up some points on the prior issue, I don’t feel like going back through the book and instead have made a promise to myself to write when something strikes me. Then I can freely move on ahead. In this issue #49, there is a short story, "Re-construction", written by Mandy Dawn Kuntz that attracted me to the voice and style, in that perhaps it is just a bit similar to mine (or mine to hers? What would be proper: she’s published in a lit mag, I’m not, but then I’m much older than her, and age before…?) The story is multiple POV, first person in each case, of a widow who married young, lost her husband, is childless, and living alone in the hills where she finds and adopts a three-year old boy. The second narrator is the boy. The narrative structure is both linear as well as segmented by the alternating narrator’s ongoing story of their life together. It is a story of love, lost by both, found in each other, and of life and death, leaving behind and looking ahead. It is lovely, the way they each carry their pasts apart from each other, while their new life together grows entwined, yet is bound to separate them.
The writing is nicely done in fragments of sentences, feelings expressed by the poetic language. The only problem I had with the story was that the two narrators differed very little in their voice. While it made the transitioning easier, especially with the characters’ names heading each short section, it was almost as if, had you taken out these notations, it would have been impossible to follow because though the viewpoints were different, the voices were not.
Well enough done, though, and something that has struck me with its lesson in writing technique.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology