Somewhere a Phone Is Ringing

The 37 stories in this collection were published during Nancy Bourne's last decade—from 73 until she died in 2021 at 82 (the last one published posthumously, in 2022). The settings and human predicaments are remarkably varied, from the pre-civil rights South to a juvenile detention facility in the San Francisco Bay Area. Characters in many of Nancy’s stories find it hard to interpret or transmit messages about their own or others’ inner feelings and needs. Their messages may be scrambled by differences in social class, family income, and education, or by racial prejudice, neurological disease, and sheer chance. Nancy raises questions but does not pretend to know every answer.

Praise for Somewhere a Phone Is Ringing
“What a pleasure to have a decade of Nancy Bourne’s imaginative and passionate work here in one collection. These 37 stories cannot be easily summed up or described. Her characters are confronted with illness, dying and death. They dwell in spaces of ignorance and intolerance and hope and beauty and love. These are often stories of reconciliation, at the core a battle for understanding and acceptance. Her characters fail as often as they succeed, but fighters never fail when they give it their best. Her writing is spare and eschews writerly flourishes. Nancy understood how to stay out of her own way, how to let her characters emerge and speak for themselves, how to welcome the reader in. If you had the good fortune of knowing Nancy, you will know her even better after reading Somewhere a Phone Is Ringing. But more important, you will know the world she inhabited, which is the world we inhabit, seen as Nancy saw it, with extraordinary courage and grace.”
— Daniel Coshnear, author of Separation Anxiety