Middle Distance: Short Stories

A woman awakes from a coma and slowly figures out what happened to her and what is wrong with her life. A Korean War veteran, retired State Department official and inveterate smoker shares an al fresco table with a younger couple who won't let him light up. A bright teen schemes to make her still-secret pregnancy palatable to her parents."Middle Distance" comprises short stories of 5,000 to 9,000 words completed between 1990 and 2017 by journalist Chuck Twardy, who has written feature articles and reviews of art, architecture and books for newspapers and other publications since 1982. Six of the stories chronicle the life of the semi-autobiographical character Castor from eighth grade to late middle age, but the other stories range widely in terms of protagonists, settings and plots, from an executive superintending a casino implosion in 2055 Las Vegas to a harried young mother simultaneously managing dense traffic and an unruly child in contemporary Raleigh, North Carolina.The title "Middle Distance" refers to the tendency to focus on the immediate or the distant while disregarding the topography between them and it reflects the author's belief that truths are most often found far from the extremes. Also, many of the stories hinge on irrevocable moments between what used to be Here and what we have to accept as a new There. Words and actions pitch us onto unpredictable paths and how we navigate the new terrain is all that matters. "Life deals moments without reprieve or reprise," observes the narrator of "Buchenwald Weather," a woman trying to account for the unaccountable.The narrative techniques are fairly traditional but varied. Letters to her late husband trouble a widow in the epistolary "She's the One." Past and present meld on a last journey for "Maggie." Flashbacks fill in the context behind Karen's attempts to acquire "The Dragon Vase" at an auction in rural North Carolina. The narrator of "Buchenwald Weather" tells her story in present tense but most of the stories are third-person-omniscient and in past tense.Chuck Twardy earned master's degrees in English literature and journalism from Northwestern University. He was a staff writer and critic for The Lawrence (Kansas) Journal-World, The (Columbia, South Carolina) State, The Orlando (Florida) Sentinel and The (Raleigh, North Carolina) News & Observer. He has written for Metropolis Magazine, World Architecture, Las Vegas Life and Las Vegas Architecture. While living in Las Vegas from 2000 to 2006, he regularly wrote art reviews and cultural analysis columns for Las Vegas Weekly, and continued writing articles and book reviews for that publication until 2018. He is a member of the National Book Critics Circle. Since 2010 he has taught journalism and writing courses as a faculty member of the School of Communication at East Carolina University. He lives in Ayden, North Carolina, with his wife and three cats.