Ruminations: stories, essays, and poems)

by James Garrison

Ruminations, stories, essays, and poems “. . . accumulated during the author’s journey in writing over fifty years, spanning the Vietnam War, a legal career —time was spent staring out the window and imagining—and travels either alone or with his wife and family, and observing people, places, and things around him, including a freight train crossing a street intersection in a west Texas town.”


STORIES and ESSAYS: The eleven stories and essays are short, self-contained works that can be read at leisure and in no particular order without missing anything. There is a wide variety of genres (Sci-Fi to suspense), settings (Southern backroads to a desert wasteland), and viewpoints (intimate first-person to remote third person). The Vietnam-era related works were almost all written in draft form while the author was in the Mekong Delta or shortly after his return home. The fictional stories derive from a mélange of the author’s life experiences and observations and thinking “what if,” including a dystopian story set during a future world-wide pandemic in which only the wealthiest survive. Each of the essays or creative nonfiction stories has its genesis in something the author experienced or learned from his family history.

POEMS: The poetry is mostly short, easy-to-read free verse, examining the mysteries of life and death and who we are through the use of irony, paradox, whimsey, allusion, and allegory.

Unknown Binding