Getting Out There, by J.D. Hosemann

Prose, chapbook, 36 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

The stories in Getting Out There are inhabited by a cast of somewhat disparate characters. There’s the newly married wife who finds herself on a brewery tour in a city the name of which she can’t remember, a long-distance runner trying desperately to join a run club whose members disappear each time they set off on their route, hunters struggling to mourn the death of a camp member, and the vaguely evil realtor tempting a young couple to buy a dilapidated home, to name a few. If there’s a common thread connecting these stories, it might be, quite simply, that the Tower of Babel has fallen and these characters find themselves speaking in tongues. They want what all of us want—to connect with one another and the world at large. But unity is hard to achieve in such a fallen world that, at times, seems to express agency alongside its inhabitants.

These very short stories were written with care and honesty. The author hopes you’ll spend some time with them. He hopes you like them. Mostly he hopes you will read them and find yourself, days later, while grocery shopping or jogging, recalling a certain phrase or image.

J.D. Hosemann’s stories have appeared in places like The Kenyon Review Online, New World Writing, hex, Gone Lawn, Maudlin House, and elsewhere. His work has been supported by a Literary Arts Fellowship from the Mississippi Arts Commission as well as the Nancy Zafris Short Story Fellowship from the Porches Writing Residency. He lives in Jackson, Mississippi and teaches English at Tougaloo College.