Title: Sometimes Creek

Author: Steve Fox

January 2023 | 234 pp

Paperback  979-8-986144764

Publisher: Cornerstone Press

To pre-order (at a 20% discount), email cornerstone.press@uwsp.edu

5-Star Review - A Stunning Short Story Collection

Steve Fox’s debut collection of seventeen short stories is a moving compilation of prize-winning works. Each story often led this reader to unexpected places while delving into nature, pets, and personal relationships in a combination of stark reality and magical realism. There’s humor too. For example, in one story, a COVID-19 survivor has a discussion with a Kafkaesque human-sized rodent who insists in an “Upper-Midwestern accent” that it is the biggest mouse the protagonist will ever see—it is not a rat.  Fox uses his Midwestern background to lace his storytelling with delicious details of boyhood as he explores themes of rejection, alienation, and grief. My favorites were “Exile,” “Larmet Lunker,” and the title’s namesake, “Sometimes Creek.” There’s something exhilarating about the experience of reading a short story where within only a few pages and in less than an hour or so, you're left stunned and delighted by the story's impact.

Reviewer Michelle Caffrey’s travel memoir, Just Imagine: A New Life on an Old Boat details cruising the waterways of France aboard her 1906 Dutch barge. She is the author of Bring Jade Home: The True story of a Dog Lost in Yellowstone. Her award-winning picture book Jade-Lost in Yellowstone was published in 2020. She is working on a novel set in Wisconsin’s Dairyland, where she and her husband Paul now reside.

www.MichelleCaffrey.com