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The Gandy Dancer and Other Short Stories

by B.D. Sparhawk

147 pages; quality trade paperback (softcover); catalogue #03-2252; ISBN 1-4120-1874-9; US$21.95, C$28.00, EUR18.20, £12.61

The author, after decades of Brooklyn, heads west with six cats and a chocolate labrador in an old Suburban, and meets the world along the way to Big Sur.

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about the book      about the author      sample excerpts      catalogue info

About the Book All of the stories in The Gandy Dancer are touching and surprising, O'Henry twists to Jack London yarns. This delightful collection, full of beautiful imagery of land and skies and people, are stories of the USA told by an American girl, raised coast to coast, and north to south, who took off on her own at 17 to see what's up. There's persistent virtue to each adventure, triumph over adversity, as they reach heart and soul for a rare look at the lives of strangers and the paths they picked up for themselves. The classic independent spirit of the American adventurer is captured in each original tale, and the everlasting joy of charting new territory. Has anything, Sparhawk asks, got more punch to it than a road map? "Your book is very handsomely put together, and you write in a lively and engaging way." Larry P. Arnn, President Hillsdale College, Michigan, USA From the Monterey Herald, March 8, 2004, Page One, Section B, Five column story and photograph Author Draws from Rich Life "Sparhawk's life has been a coast to coast odyssey of day jobs, art and writing... she's worked as a radio producer and press secretary to onetime Vice Presidential Candidate Geraldine Ferraro, network news writer, newspaper reporter, painter and sculptor. 'I like doing things that are a challenge,' she said."

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www.hawksperch.com About the Author B.D. Sparhawk is an unusual woman who has been: the only outdoor scaffold-climbing billboard painter in the USA; radio and T.V. producer; news-writer for CBS, ABC & Fox T.V.; writer on THE NEW YORK POST; US Congressional Press Secretary. She's had her own sign painting, mural and portrait business; wax chaser in a bronze foundry; sculptor, and more. And says she would still choose scary-thrilling entrepreneurial razzmatazz above all else. SPARHAWK lives in Big Sur with her cat Gorgeous. She has been driven her whole life by curiosity and the chance to witness. She is currently working on her second novel, Whirlpool, and her first novel soon to be published, Noise. And four new children's books. SPARHAWK was commissioned for original oil portraits William F. Buckley, Jr.; James Fox (former head of the NY FBI) and other luminaries. Her work has appeared in major motion pictures, and is in wide-ranging private collections. She designed and sculpted models for a heroic-sized bronze memorial to the slain police officers of NYC (The Angel & The Officer); her spirit of adventure most recently took her cross country as a photographer's assistant on T.V's SURVIVOR-AFRICA, 2001 after which she moved to Yosemite for a year to write.

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Sample Excerpts

Introduction

When I was very young I thought life an unfolding rapture which multiplied each sunrise: a bright-lit pathway into glowing air. I still do. And find, to my surprise, life also comes with climbing hills up, dropping down the other side, then mustering for another climb, and a revitalized view. Living creatures come equipped with resource; and taking risk is ours to use, not leave idle.

I've done some traveling and even stood stock still on frenetic Brooklyn byways; sand-worn Biloxi; pond-side porches of Sierra Nevada cabins; even downtown St. Petersburg/Leningrad/St. Petersburg. Adventure, the substance of life, is to be had anywhere, any time. Suddenly you're privy to something you didn't know before, and that something calls out-loud to leap you in, and forward ho! Into the magic episodes of life, which do link and do connect, even glistening briefly in the midst of grueling effort. So, if you've never had a wrong day, you're not living right.

Living a life is heroic, says my pal Sheila. She's right, and there is much more to be done, with courage and guts. You can pull that out of yourself or the very air when the need arises. In any abundant starry, starry night, or rays of lilac dawn, friends and animals and geography I've loved come on the run to me and I to them to make the sad go on the slip like silt, off a dream that is good and powerful and worth paying attention to.

The book you've opened is about to touch ground on a few of my journeys and I hope their telling provides adventures different from the ones you've had. How do you do, at long last.

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for Grandpa's Ticket to Ride

I was being properly raised in a world of white gloves and girdles and any hideous plain undergarment that would pinch short the exuberance of living. I don't know my mother's frenzied source of this kind of control. Maybe born of poverty's dreaded specter and having not; maybe despairing dirt from cities and their skies and streets she was raised on, of desperate clawing at the wind, just to rise above and out of the uncouth, and the unclean.

And maybe because I did not face those particular battles yet, it had not become my own mission. Though at the time, I had no clue as to either what I was sinking in or how to set myself free. I didn't like constraint, but I went along, uncomfortable but unprotesting. The scream stayed deep inside me, until I met its echo in Damon Runyon and Jack London and George Orwell, in Rudyard Kipling and Neitszche, James Agee and Fellini and Cocteau and oh the long list. Simmering in me was a loathing for convention, and I was begun, in youthful angst, on my journey to find out why I so hated its deadening presence. I was restless.

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for Vanguardinia

We got hit with a surprise storm, the temperature suddenly dropping and snow flying through the air long after I was sure we'd seen the last of it. It was then, for a full week, that Foxfire vanished. Every day I checked, but there was no sign of his having been in the bed he'd made in the loft box. I put pieces of straw or oddly folded the rug so I'd know if it had been moved, and the next day, it was as I left it. I'd seen the interplay between Foxfire and Vixen and the babies. He was a protective mate and father, and he'd never have left them willingly. Sometimes he'd lay down next to Vixen when she nursed, watching them, cleaning an ear or a leg. He was remarkable and rare. I thought them all deeply in love and dependent on each other.

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for Edith's Story

Edith had been living on a small island in Maine. The winters were her beautiful solitude. She lived alone. By early spring, her canoe could weave the remaining ice to shore, and by arrangement with the town grocer, who nannied her year round, she'd make her first trek in, to the dry snow-dotted earth of the mainland. She'd gather up the fresh supplies she'd ordered at Christmas, and pick up her mail.

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"I drove to Los Alamos," [Edith] said. "I had it in mind to explode. . ." She laughed, deep and bitter. "And I lay down two days in the desert, just drove off the road, laid in the sand, took off all my clothes and roasted, froze at night, didn't eat or drink water. . .I hoped actually, coyotes would kill me."

"But you lived." I knew what that meant.

"Yes. I decided I must not have it in my to die, not then. I didn't bathe, my teeth were rotting in my mouth. That last night in the desert, I'm half hoping a flying saucer from Art Bell land will come and take me, but I thought too, suppose my son lost me, and went through all this! That would be so wrong. So I checked into a Motel 6 and slept for a week, then I drove out here."

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for Outposts, Steamboats, Signposts and the Wild Blue Thunder on the Road to Mandalay

I departed big city life just under a decade ago for the woods of America, and the other day in a state of reflection, I thought myself in a boat similar to the one navigated by the British civil servant to exotic ports, a century and empire past.

Rudyard Kipling and his tales of bug infested barracks, the curried acquaintanceship with custom, frenzied marketplaces and surreal natives, long tempted me to join the fray. I now possess a kinship to his adventures I never felt reading him, curled up on my couch in downtown Brooklyn.

"I hit the road. At first like Auntie Mame with a thousand steamer trunks, then pared down, more like a traveling circus. Land somewhere and unfold the tents, open the rail cars, place the props, and I was a ready to rock'n'roll Bedouin.

Taking off was only part impulse. I no longer recognized the city I had been devoted to and loved.

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In the early nineties, New Yorkers were dodging machine gun fire, and tucking their children to bed in bathtubs so they wouldn't be killed by stray bullets piercing apartment walls. Homeowners and shopkeepers were hosing syringes and human excrement off sidewalks. Modern times had run amok.

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Catalogue Information

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