This was our reading group’s “reader’s choice” month, so I selected an author I know and enjoy very much: local NH author Lawrence Kinsman. I’ve read and reviewed two books of his already: A Well-Ordered Life (1998) and Birds of Prey (2001). The only Kinsman offering I had not yet read was his very first, Water From the Moon & Other Love Stories (1996). Like the others, this book was published by Abelard Press. That is to say, it was self-edited and self-published. And as usual, the editing and publishing is top-notch.
Kinsman is a professor of English at the School of Liberal Arts at Southern New Hampshire University. Water From the Moon won the New Hampshire Writers’ Project award for “Outstanding Emerging Writer, 1996.”
Water From the Moon is a collection of 10 short stories. If you read these books in the order that I did, you can tell that this is an early work. The use of exclamation points in sporadic places suggests a young author at work. However, there is a clear sign of the very mature writing that is to come:
Jackson pulls love toward him, with open hungry arms. I have a perverse and ugly tendency to sniff around love with flared nostrils, find blemishes on the otherwise divine face of it, declare angrily that it is the wrong size or the wrong color, and push it disdainfully away. In my most awful moments, I actually wonder if, given the choice, I would not have taken the beautiful black sailboat and the pedigree over love.
The stories cover a wide range of topics and writing styles which at first suggest that they are practice pieces. Yet each is dedicated to someone, and the topics are unique. One story is told strictly as letters from a girl to her friend; she is trapped in a mafia-family where some of the henchman are gay and thus lead risky lives. Another is from the point of view of a woman who’s still coming to terms with her ex-boyfriend’s homosexuality. Still in the stalking stage, she drives him to the brink in a scene of surprising brutality, handled very well. The last story is a glimpse of the novellas that would follow in A Well Ordered Life. All of these stories are compelling and strong.
The only character not here is Sylvie Kaplan, who appears prominently in the later two works. Yet, Kinsman was blazing a trail for her here, by writing stories that have very strong and compelling female leads.
My colleague George Kester has also read this book and provided this one line review: “Not one weak story.” With Kinsman at least, we always agree.
All of Kinsman’s works can be purchased used at amazon.com for less than $10 each. Well worth it.