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Writes of Passage: Coming-of-Age Stories and Memoirs from The Hudson Review

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WRITES OF PASSAGE: COMING OF AGE STORIES AND MEMOIRS culls over twenty top stories from the last twenty-five years of The Hudson Review, juxtaposing emerging new writers with seasoned veterans from Wendell Berry to Tennessee Williams and presenting works which were first selected for their excellence, and only secondarily for their unifying genre. Any interested in coming of age literature will be pleased to find these stories under one cover.

Writes of Passage consists of 21 stories and ten memoirs, ranging in length from less than 1400 to almost 10,000 words. All first appeared in the Hudson Review between 1981 and 2008. Some of the more recent pieces were used in a Writers in the Schools program in Harlem, New York City. From that program the realization grew that the Hudson Review had within its pages unintentionally nurtured a Coming of Age genre. This book followed.

Among the authors, the headline names are William Trevor (a memoir on his childhood experience of County Cork) and Tennessee Williams (a story not published in his lifetime, but with which he was apparently rather pleased). Other authors, however, tend to steal the show.

Hat Check Noir, by Jocelyn Bartkevicius, haunts with its account of her 1960's experience of a night club owned by her stepfather. As a six year old she sat at table with her parents as they oversaw clients, performers and staff; at ten she became the hat check girl, subject to the unwelcome attentions of drunks. Jacqueline W Brown recalls a New York childhood, living in one room in a transient hotel with her Aunt Willie. Willie dies and Jackie, aged 11, becomes the sole family representative accompanying Willie's coffin on the long train journey back to the S Carolina soil from which she sprang. In Learning to Smoke by Kermit Moyer, a 13 year old boy learns something about sex too. He's one of the few children in the stories here (as distinct from the memoirs) who is not already remarkably well-informed about such matters, though even fewer have had any satisfactory experience to add depth to their knowledge. In Good Times by Dena Seidel, we fear for ten-year-old Willow, an innocent surrounded by sleaze that all too soon will surely draw her into its vortex.

Most of the writing is about Americans in America, but Barbara Wasserman's memoir takes us on a hair-raising 1948 trip from Paris to Spain and back, and Shelter the Pilgrim by Fred Licht tells of a Jewish family's brief sojourn in Berlin in 1937-38. Mairi MacInnes' Porrock gives an account of her family's move during World War 2 from Teesside in the north of England to Windsor in the south. She was disoriented by the experience, and much helped by a small black and tan terrier, "the first dog in our family that everyone thought of as mine".

In his introduction (which should be treated as an afterword), Dean Flower notes some of the widely recognized waymarks of `Coming of Age', or `growing-up'. He doesn't attempt a comprehensive list, and all the stories and memoirs in the book still do not cover them all, but they inspire reflection on key moments in our own rite of passage; and provide us with much enjoyable and stimulating reading.