In one of Glen Chamberlain’s magnetic new stories, “Off the Road; or, The Perfect Curve Unfound,” the narrator sets off from Seattle for Michigan, “once again making the decision to leave before being left.” At Three Forks, Montana, a flight of geese take her off the road, into the Crazy Mountains, into a place the Indians consider one of the centers of the world, where she finds her own center. Each of the stories in this irresistible collection inhabits a center of the world, a piece of Montana country that she makes uniquely her own, whether she is writing about rearing Arabian horses, or building the three-generation history of a family around the evolution of hay-stacking, or ice-skating with Kate Brethwaite, the formidable physics teacher at Buckle High School, as she makes her increasingly exhausting journey by way of ice from a community skating place to her locked and forbidding home. Whether the stories are about living, loving or dying they inhabit the essences of their actions and compel the reader to view fresh terrains of the author’s rich and original imagination.
Jackie says:
"This is a wondrous collection of short stories, all but one about women, rural women for the most part, who are living life as best they can, with their quiet hopes and their everyday realities that make dreams difficult. They are all interconnected, occasionally you'll see a character walk through, someone's daughter, someone's wife, that you've seen before. Perhaps a week ago, or perhaps a generation or two ago. There is a lot of living, loving, anger, regret, birth, death and just general life moving on with these characters watching it, or participating in it, or hiding from it. Chamberlain builds characters with sublime subtlety and hard-edged grace that makes you sit for a bit, after each story, peeling the layers and giving more thought to what you have been shown. This is a very impressive collection, and I highly recommend it."
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