At Woomeroo: Stories
Before I talk about At Woomeroo, I have to talk a bit about Ishmael, because that's the book most readers know me by. Ishmael won an international award as "a novel offering creative and positive solutions to global problems," and aside from being translated into more than thirty languages, it is used as a text in high schools and colleges worldwide in courses as varied as history, philosophy, sociology, ecology, biology, political science, and economics. As should be obvious from these things, it's a serious book and reflects a serious side of me.The stories in At Woomeroo were mostly written in the twelve years during which I was working on the book that became Ishmael, and they reflect a different side of me. Stumped by how to describe the output arising from this different side of me, I gave Michael Schillace (a dedicated Quinn reader) a chance at it, asking him to write a description of the stories for the back cover.He did so with a panache I couldn't have managed or dared, calling them "tales whose characters are immersed in a world of mystery, enchantment, and possibility. Quinn pulls back the curtain that hides the magic and reveals characters who live in layers of the world that are unseen by those whose vision has been limited by growing up in our culture. These stories can only take place in a world larger and more fascinating than the one that man's dominion of the world has created. They are doorways into a space where people can find their own amidst the infinite possibility that arises when there is no one right way for people to live."You may get a different sort of taste of them by learning that a good number of them have been published in such exotic literary magazines as Asylum, Aberrations, Magic Realism, The Portable Wall, and The Shakespeherian Rag (as well as more sober journals such as The Lone Star Literary Quarterly, The Quarterly, and Fiction).