Fly away home

Mary Hedin writes luminous stories about people we have known in times and places we thought were lost. Full of absorbing everyday details, incandescent flashes of fantasy, and rich layers of imagery, her fiction is sometimes dark and disturbing, but the vision is always humane. A radiant sense of place is dominant in her work--the mountains, vineyards, and suburbs of California, and the lake and farm land of her native Minnesota. Of her writing she says, 'For me it is a central need, a basic drive. I can exist only so long before I must sift through the mysteries of human behavior and clarify my experiences.' Her poetry is widely published, and her fiction has been included in Best American Short Stories and The O. Henry Prize Stories. Hedin's variegated, intricately textured collection reflects the intensity and diversity of her life as a professional writer and poet, teacher on the Humanities faculty at College of Marin, wife of a busy general physician, mother of four, community activist, and hostess/cook par excellence for a large, extended family.--Back cover.