Learning to Dance and Other Stories (MVP) - Softcover

Warner, Sharon Oard

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9780898231328: Learning to Dance and Other Stories (MVP)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0898231329 ISBN 13: 9780898231328

Publisher: New Rivers Press, 1996

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"[These stories] say: Some lives are hidden. But they are lived right in our midst. How come we don't see them? Here comes the story, the poem ...better than electricity. Now you can see the person who's been standing right next to you." --Ms. Magazine

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About the Author:

Sharon Oard Warner is the author of Learning to Dance and Other Stories (New Rivers Press, 1992) and the novel, Deep in the Heart (The Dial Press, 2000). She is also the editor of The Way We Write Now: Short Stories from the AIDS Crisis. (Citadel Press, 1995) She is Director of Creative Writing at the University of New Mexico and Founding Director of UNM's Taos Summer Writers' Conference.

From Publishers Weekly:

Carol, the young undergraduate in ``Birds''--a story in Warner's first collection--takes a matron's job at an institution for profoundly retarded girls. She meets Beth, a patient whose self-abusive practices include gouging herself with her fingernails and beating her head against walls. Carol alone discerns in Beth ``the grace of an athlete or dancer.'' During a series of unauthorized field trips, Carol discovers that the direction of Beth's fierce energies shift from self-multilation to an innocent wildness--a fearless letting-go that Carol has suppressed in herself. Here as elsewhere in these stories, women who are strangers to one another become co-conspirators in escape from a multitude of prisons: institutions, marriages and personal fears. Most poignant is ``A Simple Matter of Hunger,'' detailing a young mother's struggle to care for her adopted infant--nearly a stranger--dying of AIDS. Warner renders with genuine pathos the woman's realization that the child, like birds in a field startled by human intrusion, will ultimately be ``just out of my reach.'' In ``Happiness Tricks'' and ``Under the Bright Sky,'' however, Warner's leisurely pacing undermines her stories' impact.

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