And if I am to stay in the water of this skybound bay, looking for an anchor attached to nothing, I hope you will believe me that at a wedding by a pond, I was not a romantic or a sap to see in the consummatory kiss a flicker of the metanarrative’s grandeur, or a straining into the absence that suggests it could still have a place, the first lone voice that rises up to answer the dithyramb, the bondage of our curiosity, this, here, after a moment’s quiet for the life of the pond, the choral frogs and boatmen, the turtles and skimmers, the dragonflies that skitter, the vipers, the doves.
Acknowledgments
Thank you:
Ann Beattie, Georges, Anne, and Valerie Borchardt, Rachel Brooke, Deborah Eisenberg, the Fine Arts Work Center, Nina Frieman, Laird Gallagher, Elizabeth Gordon, Debra Helfand, Yuka Igarashi, Jonathan Lippincott, the MacDowell Colony, Matthew Neill Null, Andrew Palmer, Jon Parrish Peede, Sigrid Rausing, Sarah Scire, Peng Shepherd, Lorin Stein, Christopher Tilgham, the University of Virginia MFA Program, VCCA, Allison Wright.
This book owes a singular debt to the wisdom, labor, and encouragement of Eric Chinski, Bella Lacey, Alexis Schaitkin, Samantha Shea, and Deborah Treisman.
It is my great fortune to count you as readers and friends.
A Note About the Author
Greg Jackson’s work has appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, and the Virginia Quarterly Review. He has been a fiction fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and a resident at the MacDowell Colony, and he holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Virginia. Prodigals is his first book. You can sign up for email updates here.