Swimmers and other survival stories

Each of the stories in this original collection features characters surviving in a dualistic world, a world at once beautiful and brutal, connecting and alienating, hopeful and frightening. Most of the stories are set in the northern Midwest with its harsh winters and idyllic, lake-soaked summers. Other stories take place in desert where the timeless and severe immensity of the land contrasts with the vulnerable and sometimes claustrophobic chambers of the human heart. These are stories about journeys, about place-loyalty versus the lure of the new, about leaving and homecoming and the collisions between. The characters in these stories survive---as we all do---according to their own coping mechanisms, whether optimism, pragmatism, prudence, flight, indulgence or denial.