Jonathan Corcoran was at P&T Knitwear on Wednesday to celebrate the launch of his memoir No Son Of Mine with a full house. He was joined by his former professor and friend Alice Elliott Dark.
It’s April and I’m on the road jumping across the country promoting my debut book, a story collection about the residents of an economically-challenged small town in West Virginia. A large number of the stories in the book focus on the sometimes hidden and sometimes exposed lives of the gay men who live in the little town. It was an interesting concept for me—to juxtapose the lives of those stuck economically against the lives of those stunted emotionally. I modeled the setting on my hometown, a once prosperous place built with the big money of coal, timber, and railroad barons who built mansions that towered over the boomtown downtown. In the book, everyone’s clamoring—to stay, to leave, for a reprieve. In the book, and in real life, there’s this beautiful past to which everyone clings. It’s the past where the downtown streets were filled with the friendly faces of people with things to buy, where the future seemed bright and open.
Jonathan Corcoran launched his debut collection of short stories, The Rope Swing, earlier this month at AWP. He was joined by Tayari Jones at Greenlight Bookstore in Brooklyn to discuss the story collection. The collection was published by West Virginia University Press. Corcoran studied under Jones at Rutgers Unviersity-Newark where he attended the Creative Writing MFA program and where Jones is a professor.