Gary Gildner

Gary Gildner is a nationally recognized poet and writer, whose books include Somewhere Geese are Flying, Blue Like the Heavens,The Second Bridge, and The Warsaw Sparks....

Somewhere Geese Are Flying: New and Selected Stories

Gary Gildner

Click this link to read an interview with Gary Gildner, from Weber Studies, 2004

In Somewhere Geese Are Flying, A son (in the often anthologized "Sleepy Time Gal") competes with his parents to tell "a simple story" about a poor boy/rich girl romance that "happened many years ago in the woods by a lake in Northern Michigan”... and the song he wrote her that became famous.
 
A champion pole-vaulter jumps out of an airplane in France on D-Day, wearing a parachute that fails to open; he survives but, as his son says, "Imagine a man falling from the stars. It’s a long way down."
 
Thrasher, in Paris, hears geese honking in the sky and Barbara all the way from Iowa saying, "Hold still... I’m going to kiss you now.' 
 
Stories in Somewhere Geese Are Flying were written in many places—Michigan, Paris, Iowa, Slovakia, Oregon, Greece, Idaho, and on the Isle of Skye. Gildner says, "For a time, I thought to call the book ‘Foreign Stories’, but the title I use carries a sound I favor, a music both close and far away, something like stories trying to connect in what seem the only ways available to us: love and loss and that inseparable hold." 

Reviews

"Gildner, who's been publishing poetry and fiction since the late 1960's, has the confidence (and the good sense) to stay in the background and let his characters speak for themselves in their own distinctive voices."
- Andrew Ervin, The New York Times Book Review

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"There's such a good feeling about these stories - that the writer knows his people, the whole texture of their lives, in different lights, that he'll take you a long way into them, and you'll always be surprised and satisfied in the right way, never tricked or betrayed."
- Alice Munro, author of Open Secrets