The lives presented in Arthur Turfa’s short story collection, Epiphanies, appear calm, measured, routine, even. Teachers, students, ministers, soldiers, characters leading recognizable existences.
Until something changes: The characters are just minding their own business when a question emerges, a new circumstance, or even an old circumstance, surfaces. A thing that presents a challenge that in most of these stories the character had not foreseen, thus the title.
In his introduction, Turfa wrote, “The main character sees the way he or she is to proceed in life instead of the way they or others expected them to. A sense of affirmation follows the epiphany.
None of the main characters has “earned” this epiphany; I believe that is impossible, but some would differ with me. Rather the epiphany presents itself at the right time, a time of kairos, which people cannot bring about themselves. When it occurs, they know it and proceed ahead.”
Turfa is a retired teacher, a soldier, and ordained Lutheran minister, and these stories are drawn from that life. He has published several collections of poetry and one novel,THE BOTLEYS OF BEAUMONT COUNTY, which tells the tale of the changing circumstances of deeply Southern family.
Full disclosure: I read and commented upon early versions of the novel.
In Epiphanies, the stories are drawn from the details of American lives filled with routine, family and broken families, tradition and change.
The details matter: Parents marshaling kids through breakfast and off to school, favorite coffee shops, the mundane pieces of one’s job, seemingly minor work tensions, missing lovers, break-ups, road trips and favorite songs, the happenstance of a meeting, an announcement on a bulletin board; woven into all of these common circumstances are the seeds of change, doubt, confrontation, and deliverance.
Don’t be fooled: Within their simplicity, calmness and commonness, these stories hold a mirror to modern American life and expose the silent and at times ignored squirming forces of division and suspicion, power and authority.
Turfa looks under the hood of these seemingly calm lives and exposes some bit of unrest that could – that is the key word –could—foster a new direction.
There are no violent blow-ups, no shouting matches, no dramatic end-of-life soliloquies, just characters weighing their futures and acting on the idea that has presented itself.
The lack of drama in most of these stories is what makes them so compelling because there are no conclusions, just possibilities. The characters take the fork in the road, or ponder taking the path less traveled. Nothing is promised, just the action taken.
There are choices presented to these characters that we can all share.
The collection is published by Alien Buddha.
