The work on the following pages grew out of a workshop on short story cycles in which I participated at the University of Iowa. I became aware of the continuity and loose relationship among a few of the stories I was then working on. I carried characters and their primary relation to one another forward into subsequent stories, written over several years, with the last completed in 2013.

The short story cycle is in some respects a hybrid form combining elements from the novel as well as the looser construct of short story collections. The short stories included here may be read in any order. They are intended to stand on their own as works of short fiction.

The position these stories have in the completed cycle is not chronological, but is based rather on how I felt they best illuminated one another in terms of a loose plot and the cumulative impressions of who the characters were.

The fourteen tales comprising this short story cycle are imbedded in a fifteenth "over-story" which is divided into brief connecting narratives serving to pull the threads of all the separate stories together. The last phrase of each section of the over-story, indicated by an ellipsis, is completed by the title of the story immediately following. The texture of this interwoven narrative and cycle of stories is coarse. There is nothing to prevent their being read and understood as independent works in whatever order the reader feels inclined to approach them.