Saved by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Allen Woodman

Synopsis:

   With Brautigan’s knack for the compact and Carver’s knack for the poignant, Woodman moves is through a landscape of bizarre, yet disturbingly familiar scenarios. For whether Woodman is employing fairy tales or longer, contemporary stores, all his characters ring-not just true-but you.

ISBN 0-942979-41-9, quality paper, $9.95             Sale $5.00

ISBN 0-942979-42-7, cloth, $19.95                         Sale $10.00

132 pages

Allen Woodman directs the creative writing program at Arizona State University in Flagstaff, AZ.  This is his fifth book.  His recent publications include two children’s books and a novel entitled All-You-Can-Eat, Alabama.  He is an Alabamian by birth and graduated from Huntingdon College in Montgomery, and received his Ph.D. from Florida State University.   

 THE  CHRISTIAN  VENTRILOQUIST 

     Even as a child, my lips were rigid. My entire body was very still. I used to sit for hours, not moving, not speaking. My father was embarrassed to bring his friends home for lunch. He called me Dummy. My mother longed for possibilities. She thought my silence bred some kind of genius. 
     She would take me to the music stores and set me on piano stools and place French horns and clarinets in my hands, but still my fingers did not decorously flex, my mouth remained frozen.
     It was when my mother had only one aspirin left in the bottle in the medicine cabinet over the kitchen sink, after my father had long since left over the purchase of expensive art supplies, that her inspiration came. She borrowed a TV from Uncle Hoot. She had him fix an antenna onto a pole for better reception. She set me on a little blue bathroom rug in front of the television all day long. She felt the technology would help. Every few minutes she would stop her housework and walk into the room to see what was showing on the screen and see if the sight of it had changed my posture or expression.
     Her wish for shape and purpose in my life turned to despair when my hands did not tremble before the visions of Lawrence Welk or Liberace. But then my throat betrayed me.

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