Foreword

Foreword by Lorian Hemingway, critically acclaimed author of Walking Into the River, Walk on Water, and A World Turned Over. Ms. Hemingway is the director and final judge of the Lorian Hemingway Short Story Competition.

It is rare that a story collection weaves its threads through so many varied corners of the world — Jakarta, Tel Aviv, Hong Kong, Denmark, Arizona, East Africa — and leaves the reader with an overarching sense of the vulnerability of humanity in all its mutable forms.

Author Lucy Weldon tackles the immensely difficult task of addressing a veteran’s PTSD, the ever-pervasive threat of war in Israel, women’s rights, the plight of immigrants, — and an especially moving portrait of an Arizonia outlier who defies the system and finds a poetically heroic way to touch the lives of the immigrants he meets — to the deep and abiding grief of a woman drowning in an unfulfilling marriage who has just lost her mother. There is the stark brutality of rape that renders an immigrant woman mute. There is love lost and love found within these stories, and when it is found the magic of discovery is transcendent.

When it is lost there grows within the reader an acute mourning that Weldon brings forth with her exquisite and emotionally astute prose. So staggering is the breadth and scope of Weldon’s focus that the reader is moved by the author’s own humanity in having taken on so much, given so much with, again, prose that is almost defiantly unique in its rhythm, timbre and cadence, and its very clearly beating heart. The works of Nobel laureate Kazuo Ishiguro come to mind in the reading of this collection. As to why, one must look again to the humanity in each of the stories, to the empathy elicited in the reader by one who understands the power of human kindness.

The collection’s title story — Ultramarine — gives us, arguably, one of the most sympathetic male characters in contemporary prose, the nerdy husband John whose wit and subsequent heroism in the face of near-certain death endears the reader for all time.

There is frequently the fresh and unexpected phrase, an especially keen insight given with a quick brushstroke, and all of it achieved so deftly that one is moved to give a standing ovation when the final story is done. And, yes, to weep.