Apparition Made Real

Short fiction is on my mind today. Michigan mortician turned writer/poet Thomas Lynch (The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade), whose family business most certainly has allowed him to view life from a most unusual perspective, has a new opus, Apparition & Late Fictions, his first venture into fiction(WW Norton). This book collects four of his short stories and a novella, Apparition.

It may be difficult to discern which has had a greater influence on Lynch, his Irish ethnicity or his Michigan upbringing, but the result is a lyricism coupled with a locale of abundant natural beauty and an attachment to the offbeat characters who are its inhabitants.

Here’s a poem Thomas Lynch wrote after the Katrina catastrophe (first published on NPR.org):

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