All My Relations: Stories - Softcover

McIlroy, Christopher

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0820333093 ISBN 13: 9780820333090

Publisher: University of Georgia Press, 2008

Synopsis

Set against the stark but seductive landscape of the American Southwest, the stories in All My Relations explore the inner landscape of mind and heart, where charting the simplest course is subject to a complex constellation of relationships. In the title story of the collection, a Pima Indian hires on with a rancher in an attempt to quit drinking and to win back the wife and son who have left him. His efforts to master land and horses and to bake the perfect cake mirror his efforts to subdue his own demons and to embrace a peaceful domesticity.

In "The Big Bang and the Good House", Tony, a former drug dealer, pits his urge toward chaos against the orderly pleasures of marriage, finally yielding to the solidity and spaciousness of domestic love: "I feel myself gathering weight, density. Cautiously, I allow myself to inhabit this Good House, which surprisingly fits like my own body". Julia, the aging protagonist of "Simplifying", risream house with their own hands, and eventually they are forced to leave behind the illusion of safety and permanence: "Once the three had imagined themselves as a house on a hill, dug into stone with the tenacity of a lion. Now they sat tensely in canvas-backed chairs stretched like slingshots. They talked cautiously, with encouragement, hoping for the return of pleasure".

Embodying the transience and openness of the New West, the characters in All My Relations reinvent themselves, even as they struggle with the age-old, perilous necessity of loving.

About this title

About the Author

CHRISTOPHER "KIT" McILROY lives in Tucson, Arizona, where he is an author-in-residence for the Tucson Unified School District. His story collection All My Relations won the Flannery O’Connor Award in 1992. Between 1987 and 2010 he developed and implemented writing programs for the non-profit ArtsReach, which served Native American communities in southern Arizona. Some of those experiences were distilled into the nonfiction book Here I Am a Writer, which was published in 2011.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Publication date: 2008
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0820333093
• ISBN 13: 9780820333090
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 208