Description
Colleen’s Count
by Rick Henry
$19.99, Novella, paper
978-1-64662-316-7
2020
Thirty-three-year-old Colleen O’Shea sits in the park, assigned to count the vehicles driving through a rural town in 1933. Her count is interrupted by friends, secrets, and an unplanned pregnancy.
Perhaps because half of his family comes from the Mohawk River Valley, from the footpaths, waterways, and old military trails, from the building of the Erie Canal and the laying of rail, from the paving of Route 5 and the thruway. Perhaps it is the steady stream of smoke tumbling out his grandmother’s nose as she tilts her head back and laughs.
Much of his fiction is set in the region around Rome in the fictional town of Homer. Colleen, in Colleen’s Count, sits at the main intersection in the town in 1933 counting cars and worrying about an unplanned pregnancy. In Letters (1855), a doctor is called from one emergency to the next until arriving in the mountains at a home for girls who are suffering a variety of complaints, all reported in daily letters home. His wife takes care of their practice and sends letters of her own, midst reports of the ordinary are extraordinary stories of babies stolen, a runaway slave, a hidden pregnancy, a fake birth, and a mistaken baby, who vanishes after a mishap at the fair when a lantern tips during a Fox sisters’ séance. The central character in Lucy’s Eggs is a woman beseiged by loss, but sustained by her flock of heirloom chickens through the latter half of the 19th-century. With the turn of the century, she realizes that she has become another person.
Rick Henry has lived across the United States, but always returns to the sensibilities, landscapes, and histories of upstate New York. He was editor of Blueline: A Literary Magazine Dedicated to the Spirit of the Adirondacks from 1998-2009, is co-editor of The Blueline Anthology, and directs the BFA program in Creative Writing at SUNY Potsdam.
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