The Role of the Artist Empath
It is ten years since Other Likely Stories , my first collection of short stories, was published. For the last several years, I've been working, on and off, on a new collection of short stories, which from the very beginning I had named Crossing the Line . This is because, from the very beginning, I thought of these stories as character studies of individuals who, at moments of crisis in their lives, went too far in one way or another, driven by emotions like despair, anger, sorrow, fear. They were all individuals who "crossed the line" in ways that made it impossible for them to return to the identities or the lives they knew before, whether they realized it or not. These are often the characters who appear in my stories; I believe they know that they will get a fair telling. In "Beverly At The Fair," we meet an emotionally shattered ex-wife who, in an episode of tr