Novel Excerpt from "Are You My Father?"
a novel in progress by Janet Mason

copyright Janet Mason 2010

“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.