The Bark of the Dogwood

“When I was six years old I became locked inside the home of Helen Keller.”

So begins a series of articles written by Strekfus Beltzenschmidt, a transplanted Southerner living in New York City. When that particular magazine assignment unintentionally leads him to examine such delicate topics as race, sexual orientation, family dysfunction, mid-life crisis, and a haunting remembrance of things in his not-so-distant past, the metamorphosis of the assignment into short stories eventually brings us into the present where the line between fiction and reality becomes blurred. As he digs deeper into his memory of people, places, homes, and gardens of the South, he is led down a tangled and sometimes uncompromising road of emotions. The end result culminates in a series of remembrances, nightmares, and flashbacks that lay out before him the very reason he has become the person he is. By the time he remembers the most horrific event in his life—the incident having been obscured by age and a layering over of everyday happenings—he is well on his way to piecing together remnants of his family’s past in an effort to explain how things got so deranged in the first place, trying to make sense not only out of his life, but the lives of those in his damaged memories.