Stardust and Fate: The Blueroad Reader, owes its title, in part, to the blue highways explored by William Least-Heat Moon on his journey down America's back roads. Most of the writings in this collection do touch, at least tangentially, on the idea of travel, of the journey. But these short stories, poems, and essays aren't really about travel. Instead, they bring into view those moments when human experience and place entwine, moments when a community or an individual is transformed within the context of a particular place. Such moments are all rendered with clarity and detail, with rough edges and regrets intact, often with wit and charm.
John Gaterud (founder, with his daughter Abbey Gaterud, of Blueroad Press) presents Stardust and Fate as the first in a series of semi-annual anthologies. The book, with its anticipated serial publication and its assortment of stories, poems, essays, and illustrations, perhaps ought to be called a literary journal-except for the luxurious details of its design: the ample white space on the wide, horizontal pages, the finely textured prints and engravings, the woodcut vignettes accompanying each of the book's texts, the matte cover with its glossy illustration (a Jim Brandenburg photograph, "Ice on Judd Creek," whose framing of color, shape, and texture suggests an abstract painting). The result of these design elements is a book that is a delight to view and to hold as well as to read.
The collection covers a spectrum of experience, from the hungers and stumblings of adolescence (Ann Rosenquist Fee's "Toga Dance", Lorna Rafness's "County Fair, 1954"), to the final relinquishments of old age (Joe Paddock's "Finished Compost"), from the benedictions of nature (Carol Barrett's "The Hollow of the Mountain") to the human struggle following natural disaster (Bruce Weir Benidt's "Blue Notes from a Great City", on the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina). There are moments of wry wit, as in the Raymond Carver-like banter between young lovers in Nate LeBoutillier's "Your Own School of Fish". There are moments of sober epiphany, such as John Gaterud's discovery, driving across Illinois, of a monument to a mining disaster that sundered a community nearly a century ago ("Cherry"). Each of these depictions is grounded in the most telling details of character and place-no post-modern refusals of meaning, nor any Rockwellian romanticizing. Just the graces, foibles, and especially the surprises to be found around the corners of everyday experience.
Among the book's strongest fictional offerings is John Calvin Rezmerski's "The Romance of the West", in which the ill-fated adventures of a group of young boys play out against the ethnic and economic strata of a bleak 1920s industrial town. An elegiac essay, Terry Davis's "Merry and Joe", does a masterful job of tracing the interweavings of violence and humanity, faith and rejection of faith, through a family lineage.
The book's many visual images-mostly wood engravings and prints-are striking in their bold contrasts and finely textured detail. They stand not as illustrations to the texts, but as images that complement the stories. William Andrew Myer's illustration, for example, of a machine detail ("Machinescape II"), provides a visual counterpoint to the ideals of craft and workmanship that percolate through Davis's tribute to his workman father. Similarly, James Todd's "Montana Nights Riders", a devilish image of a sinister road trip, humorously plays off of Graeme McRanor's "Hecho en Mexico", the tale of intrepid young men on an exhilarating, if disastrous, road trip from Canada to Mexico and back.
The pages of Stardust and Fate: The Blueroad Reader encompass a wide spectrum of human experience. Midwestern readers, especially, will appreciate the book's attention to places and regions that seldom enjoy literary attention. But these works speak to a wider audience, shining their light, as they do, into the unfamiliar nooks and crannies of seemingly ordinary experience.
- Jana Bouma