Geographies

Stories by Carmelinda Blagg

Reviews

Geographies, by Carmelinda Blagg, emerges as an exceptional anthology of short stories, weaving a tapestry of human emotion and experience. Within its pages, readers are introduced to a range of vividly drawn characters, each navigating the complexities of love, loss and the intricate dance of human relationships.

Through fleeting encounters and lasting impressions, these stories capture the essence of places as ephemeral homes, where the heart finds refuge in unexpected corners.

[This] is a collection of literary and psychologically astute short works that is highly recommended reading for followers of contemporary fiction; especially those who look for stories rooted in transformation and geographic landscapes of discovery

Included in Independent Book Review’s “The Best Books We Read in 2023”

Silver Book Award, Literary Titan, December, 2023

In these fourteen wide-ranging stories, Carmelinda Blagg traces the wanderings and longings of the human heart with delicacy and precision. With lush, sensual prose, she plumbs seemingly small details—a map, a dress pattern, a sun-drenched piazza—to reveal whole worlds of regret and desire. This fine first collection establishes Blagg as a geographer of secrets.

A luminous collection of richly moving stories about love and aging and family life and the memory of war with all of its strange displacements. In GEOGRAPHIES, characters move across time from post-World War II to present, carrying the weight of places they’ve passed through: a wounded paratrooper recalls the child he couldn’t save; a man writes a grocery list that becomes a love letter to a woman he lost; another man’s compulsion to steal oranges masks a strange, powerful yearning; a lonely woman befriends a hologram named Paul—these and other stories are told with such immediacy and compassion, their characters shine with humanity and all its strengths even in their grief.

Geographies, the excellent debut collection of stories from Carmelinda Blagg, features characters who are often lost, though gamely, if befuddlingly, finding their way. The author, a literary realist, writes about people and settings firmly planted in the past, a Twentieth Century of waning promise. In “The White Cliffs Hotel,” an elderly man returns to a hotel he’d visited as a teenager with his parents, “between the wars.” The man, Mr. Brightman, is introduced to the reader as “jetlagged…His old legs, the intractable, unforgiving aches from muscles and joints, urged him out of…a bed that felt as unsettling, as inevitable as the grave itself. There wasn’t, after all, much left of the unused portion of his life.” What follows is an exquisite story of regret for lost youth and missed opportunities, with descriptions and sentences so keen I found myself reading with a pencil to underline and asterisk my favorites: “The tablecloth was freshly pressed,” Mr. Brightman observes in the hotel’s dining room. “He fingered the line of its hem. How pleasant it felt, as if someone still cared that it should be so.”

In Geographies, Carmelinda Blagg plots her strikingly beautiful prose across a diverse landscape of relationships that each of us has experienced but rarely understood. From the poignant and sometimes bitter reflections of a long life in the title story “Geographies” to the chaotic relationships of our children that even the most thoughtful parenting can’t prevent in “The Things She Said”, Blagg offers up subtle and mounting tension at each turn of the page.

About the author

Carmelinda Blagg was born in Oklahoma and raised in Texas. She earned her B.A. in English Literature from the University of Texas at Dallas, and fondly recalls those years as a time when she fell in love with literature and writing. After graduating, she spent several years traveling throughout Europe, living and studying in Florence and Perugia, Italy and later in Paris, France where she earned a certificate in paralegal studies from the American University in Paris, focusing on International Trade Law and European Union Law. After returning home, she resettled in the Washington, D.C. area where she went to work for the World Bank for fifteen years. In her free time, she began writing short stories and pursued her M.A. in Writing from Johns Hopkins University. After retiring, she continued to write and eventually published her short fiction in many journals and anthologies, both online and in print. In 2010, she was awarded an Individual Artist Award from the Maryland State Arts Council. In addition to writing, she has also served as an Associate Editor and a Contributing Editor for O-Dark-Thirty, the literary review published by the Veterans Writing Project. Presently, she resides in Washington, D.C. with her husband, Daniel. Geographies is her first collection of stories.

About the book

Does where we are shape who we are? Do the places we know or dream of make our memories? Can the map we hold in our hands awaken the landscape inside us?

Geographies is a captivating collection of stories that explore the profound impact of places on the human experience, delving into the complexities of aging, childhood and family life and the scars left by war.

A man returns to the shores of Dover, England, where decades earlier he experienced his first awakening of adolescent desire and longing. A pair of orphaned siblings face off with a rattlesnake in the West Texas plains. In the title story, an aging father visited by his daughter holds close the frail maps that recall his experience as a wounded WWII paratrooper and give rise to a painful dreamscape that renders him a helpless witness to loss while in a companion story the daughter is touched by the realization that for her long-divorced parents their wartime bond remains a deeply felt imperative.

Traversing the post-war decades from the tumultuous sixties to the present day, Geographies takes readers on a poignant and evocative journey across diverse landscapes, exploring the mysterious interplay of place and memory, loss and grief. These are stories imbued with lyricism and warmth, with characters whose vulnerabilities and resilience shine as they navigate the twists of fate and hidden regrets that shape their lives.

Events

Book Launch for Geographies, November 29, 2023 at the Writer’s Center in Bethesda, MD:
- https://writer.org/event/carmelinda-blagg/

Takoma Park Book Fair & Busboys & Poets, Washington, DC, December 16, 2023:
- https://www.facebook.com/TakomaParkBookFair?comment_id=Y29tbWVudDo2ODIzODM0MTQwNDAwNDRfMTA3Mjc1MzAzMzc1MzY1MA%3D%3D

Spec Sheet

ISBN

979-8-89132-025-3

Page Count

212

Retail Price

$17.99