|
ONCE UPON A TIME, before Atheneum in New York took a chance on an unknown
author and published Staggerford (1977), Jon Hassler wrote twenty-some short
stories. He remembers exactly the day he began writing. It was September 1,
1970. He was thirty-seven years old and a teacher at Brainerd Community College
in central Minnesota. "I finished teaching my nine o'clock freshman English
class and went to the library. I took out a notebook and pen, and began [my
first] story."
Only a handful of these early stories ever made it into print (mostly in
small literary magazines), and Jon stored them away "in an old wooden
filing cabinet I bought for $25 at a now-defunct department store in
Brainerd."
That cabinet later accompanied Jon to Collegeville, Minnesota, where he was
writer-in-residence at St. John’s University for seventeen years, and to his
current home in Minneapolis.
In 1999 the Afton Historical Society Press published seven of these stories
in KEEPSAKES & Other Stories to overwhelming public response. This companion
volume, RUFUS AT THE DOOR & Other Stories, brings to print seven more,
beginning with the heart-wrenching tale of a good-natured, slow-witted man of
about thirty-five named Rufus. Many of the characters in Jon's stories,
including Rufus, are based on people he has known. You’ll find out which ones
in the Publisher’s Note preceding the stories.
SIX YEARS AGO, Jon Hassler was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. In a
holiday letter to Jon's friends in 1999, his best-known character, Agatha McGee,
wrote that the novelist’s dreadful companion, Dr. Parkinson, "has begun
to behave in cruel and irritating ways." This moving letter from Agatha
appears at the end of this book as a postscript to Jon’s stories.
Back
to Fiction
|
