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Prose, chapbook, 36 pages, from Bottlecap Features.
Troy is both an ancient city (site of the Trojan War, of course) and an old, now post-industrial city in upstate New York. Dave is a young teacher spending his first summer vacation working as a construction laborer for a college friend, Ron, who is managing a refurb project on Congress Street, a crossroads of culture and class in a seedy part of Troy between the prestige and privilege of a major engineering school and the wealthier parts of town and the down-at-the-heels scrubbiness of urban decline and decay.
The four young men working in this hot summer are all slumming it: two are college graduates and the other two are finishing up. None really understands his privilege, but they know not to flaunt it in this working-class neighborhood. While they watch one evening, a fight between a neighborhood tavern owner and his girlfriend erupts on the street before them, and it is this moment that fixes in Dave’s mind the distinctions between himself and the others on this street and the differences between himself and his co-workers as well. The girlfriend, a woman whose name he never knows, becomes for him an emblem of all he desires but is not sure he will ever have: a human connection with another.
Bruce Rowe comes to writing after a long career (nearly forty years) as a teacher/professor. He has also worked in hospitality, as a cook, and as a hiking guide in his adoptive home in the Adirondack Mountains. Rowe earned his MFA in Fiction at Lesley University, Cambridge, MA. He is a “kitchen-sink realist,” a writer who throws everything in, including the kitchen sink; more precisely, his concerns are to present the truths we can arrive at only in fiction about the lives of ordinary people grappling with the ordinary struggles of life: finding meaning, finding love, facing death, being true to ourselves and others. Because he is a positivist, his stories end with an upward pointing trajectory. Not all is well at the end, and the transformation may be subtle and muted—no fireworks or cymbal clashes—but they are real and earned. Rowe lives in Lake Placid, NY, with his wife, Susan, and their dog, Ace. He does not like lima beans.