Stories I Heard When I Went Home for my Grandmother’s Funeral is a collection of linked short stories I have written over the last 20 years about the place I call home—the Midwest—specifically, Iowa. Many of these stories are published in fine literary magazines.
Description…
Stories I Heard When I Went Home for My Grandmother’s Funeral emerges from a Midwestern landscape. The women in these stories are searching for, letting go of, and recovering from love. A young girl grows up in Iowa among a family of ten kids—a family that includes a charming father who likes to drink, and a mother overwhelmed by factory work and too many children. Another young woman gets married and escapes the Midwest to live in a metropolitan Montana city. In marriage, one young woman drinks to her heart’s content, divorces, quits drinking, and then discovers love again in the sunshine of a California landscape. But wait, life for these women is still not perfect. One woman journeys across country back to her Midwestern roots, possibly to find an answer to her discontent. Another finds some peace in the act of herding animals out of a suburban street. And finally, the stories come full circle, when a woman returns home to a second funeral during a cold Midwestern winter.
Praise For Stories I Heard…
“Jamey Genna writes fierce and unflinching working-class stories, attuned to the grinding effects of the unending struggle to make ends meet, even when the protagonist may have climbed a little ways up the ladder. These stories are also brilliantly structured, experimentally elliptical, weaving in the seeming non sequitur so that it proves to be explosive at the climax, when the reader finally registers how essential it is to the story’s meaning.” CATHERINE BRADY, Author of The Mechanics of Falling
“The tales in Stories I Heard When I Went Home For My Grandmother’s Funeral are honest, disturbing, sad, and treat us to a world of rolling plains, snow drifts, corn fields, honky tonks, small Iowa cities and the folks who dwell there. The characters are quirky, often alienated, but always entertaining.” KEN RODGERS, Author and Filmmaker
“Jamey Genna’s stories catch you unawares. They pull you into what at first appears to be the everyday, very ordinary reality of their Midwestern characters. But within a page or two, the reader realizes that these are no ordinary stories. In their unflinching observation of the most human and smallest of details of a life lived day in and day out, these stories entangle their characters and the reader into the deepest and most human of dramas.” JANE ANNE STAW, Author of Small: The Little We Need for Happiness, Shanti Arts, 2017
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