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The day he left the sun fell out of her sky.
When Joseph Vivienne Wood stormed out of the house, he didn’t bother to turn around to look back. He didn’t see his oldest daughter leaning out of the second story window watching his every move. She stared as he stomped down the gravel driveway – down the hill that sloped away from the house with the general store in the front room.
He knew what she was capable off – crawling up on the catwalk, walking along the edge of the walkway that he had built, stretching her arms out as if she was a wide winged blue heron, with one leg raised and bent at the knee, about to lurch into flight. He did not look back. All he could hear was the sound of his own blood roaring in his ears -- hurtling him away from his critical Yankee wife and toward a trail of Prohibition speakeasies, roadhouses, juke joints; back to the South where he had come from, to the belly of jazz, Delta Blues, harmonica riffs and the low register of guitar chords; the Charleston and the Saints marching In, where gin flowed like water and the sound of shuffling cards was like the ruffled wings of pigeons taking flight. The South was the place that held the illusions and ghosts of his youth, where his stern Baptist Hell Fire father had condemned his only son to the flames of eternal failure. Joseph Vivienne Wood was going forward into a life where he thought he could be free.
copyright Janet Mason 2010
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"Are You My Father?"
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“Are You My Father” is an historical novel, set in the 1920s, that is based loosely on the life of my maternal grandfather, a Merchant Marine in WWI, also an alcoholic and a batterer, after he abandons his family in 1926, when his oldest child, my mother, was seven.
Janet Mason is an award winning writer of fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry whose literary commentary is regularly featured on This Way Out, an international radio syndicate based in Los Angeles and aired on more than 400 radio stations in the U.S. and also in Australia, New Zealand, and throughout Europe. Her literary website www.amusejanetmason.com receives on average, 6,000 visitors each month from an average of 80 countries.
Excerpts of her completed novel, Hitching To Nirvana, have been mentioned in The Kirkus Review and published in Drive: women’s true stories from the open road (Seal Press/Avalon Books); the Exquisite Corpse; Swell (a Chicago-based e-zine); Schuylkill Valley Journal of the Arts; and Philadelphia Poets. Her work has been published in more than sixty literary journals and anthologies, including the Brooklyn Review; American Writing; Chiron Review; and Phoebe, a journal of feminist scholarship, published by SUNY. A frequent contributor to the Exquisite Corpse, her poetry is included in THUS SPAKE THE CORPSE: AN EXQUISITE CORPSE READER, 1988-1998, edited by Andrei Codrescu and Laura Rosenthal, from Black Sparrow Press.
She lives with her partner in Philadelphia, where she teaches creative writing Temple University Center City.
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