Homestead Lighthouse Press is proud to announce the impending publication of its latest book, Dwarf Stories, poems by Bruce Lawder. Readers might remember Bruce from his earlier HLP volume, Shorelines.
We asked Bruce to describe his latest collection, and here is what he said:
“I call these short stories “dwarf stories,” because they are shorter than the usual short. I began to write them during my first “full-time” job, when the only way I could go on as a writer was to get up very early, usually around 5:30 in the morning, and write until I had to catch the subway that would take me to the office where I was working as a reader in a New York City publishing house. They had to be short, in other words, and I soon discovered that in their brevity they offered the compactness and concision of the kind of poem I admired but with the larger syntactical and rhythmical freedoms of prose ⏤ and something altogether different from the sort of stuff I had to confront each day on my desk.
“Much of the so-called “realistic literature” I had grown up reading in America takes place outside of America and, if not in a hotel or a cafe in Parish, then during a lion hunt in Africa or a civil war in Spain, and at the time nothing struck me as more fantastic. Almost everyone I knew was working in an office, and so I decided ⏤ in the interest of realism ⏤ to set my stories in the world of offices and to write about what I was learning at the time about such a world. It was fantastic, to say the least, or struck me as such.
“And so, to be true to the experience, to be true to the sense of the fantastic, I began to introduce a fantastic note into this “real” world and to imagine, for example, what would happen if the god Neptune were to be discovered at the next desk ogling the secretaries, or a woman who claimed to be Snow White were publicly discussed and analyzed by her psychiatrist. I found a place for Plato as well, contemplating the fate of his Republic while sitting at his desk high above the pot-holed streets of Manhattan and wondering why he had banished the writers and musicians from his master plan for the ideal society.
“I soon left the office for teaching, and America for Europe, but I kept at my dwarf stories, for I had found a way, it seemed to be, to write about what dwarfs us today, in this age of mass communication, and how we live, or can live, as individual human beings, in such a world.”
✦
Bruce Lawder is an American who divides his time between an apartment in Switzerland and a house in France. In addition to writing poems, stories, plays, and occasional essays on poetry, he has published articles on painting in the catalogues of several major museums in France, Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. Before deciding to earn his living as a teacher, Lawder was an actor at the Charles Street Playhouse in Boston, Massachusetts. He has published four previous volumes of poetry, including Shorelines, from Homestead Lighthouse Press, and a book of essays, Vers le vers. His most recent play, Computer Time, was performed at the American Theatre of Actors in New York City in 2022.
We hope you’ll enjoy Dwarf Stories, which is set to release in September 2024.
Other HLP News
✦ We have just contracted to publish a third book by the prolific, award-winning poet, Michael Favala Goldman. His Destinations will be available in January 2025. Michael’s last HLP collection of poetry, Small Sovereign, was selected as the best book of poetry by the 2022 Los Angeles Book Festival.
✦ We extend our best wishes for a swift recovery to Robert Wallace Bennett, who recently experienced a cascade of health emergencies. Robert is the author of the marvelous memoir The Man of the House, published by HLP in 2022.