Filling Up In Cumby is a collection of stories about matters of the heart: the bonds and trials of lovers and friends, fathers and sons, even strangers in the midst of chance encounters. Carefully crafted and set in vividly described places, the stories reveal the interiors of everyday people working through dilemmas readers will recognize as much like their own. The author describes the situations with nuance and realism through the eyes of his main characters, revealing their struggles with the gentle touch of compassion, their lessons and reasonable triumphs with scrupulous honesty. The reader is welcomed into richly detailed evocations of very personal situations. In the title story, when a father's ex-wife appears at an inappropriate time, he struggles to protect their son from his difficulty keeping a healthy distance from the woman who still fascinates him. In "That Girl," a mother cooking dinner for her live-in boyfriend must persuade him to soften his harsh approach to her pregnant fifteen-year-old daughter. In "Uncle Eno's Bad Day," a gas station attendant with more wits than meets the eye delivers an important lesson about what matters and what does not to a man worried about being late for a meeting. In "Highway 47," a man stuck in a diner by a snowstorm, hoping for the fulfillment of a long-held fantasy that he has never thought possible or wise, finds something of much greater importance than a night with a lovely woman. He moves on, unsure of what happened, what did not, and what he will do when he gets home. In "An Apple Totem," a father preparing to take his ten-year-old son to live with his ex-wife in a distant town receives an unusual gift to commemorate their seven years together. Then it is time for the journey and the parting. In "Moschovitz And Pasternak," a man standing in line in a polling place gazes at an older man with a most pleasant countenance. Then he has a few moments of deep introspection and a brief encounter of unusual depth and satisfaction. "In The Middle" presents the reader with a man asked to mediate between his housemate, a woman with a young child, and the visiting father of her child. In a most difficult situation, the narrative character must struggle against his conflicting feelings and his biases in order to do the right thing for everyone. "The Blue Note" describes in extraordinary detail a couple's effort to begin repairing their marriage broken by an up-close infidelity. Like the title story, it is filled with a finely rendered backstory. Last, in a single page, Brotherhood In Beijing" describes a touching moment between strangers who cannot speak the same language. These are simple stories. Each is a fresh, clear, moving depiction of people in emotional situations. They are meant to be savored one at a time.
About the Author: Jim Steinberg writes stories to scratch the itches that rise up from within him, to answer the impulses that ask him to visit them and lay them in places of greater repose. When these impulses arise, he finds himself at the beginnings of trails that he knows he will follow without a plan, with no thoughts of synopsis, plot, timeline, or character description. He jumps right in and finds the story, making each a discovery for him, the first reader. Jim is the author of a second collection of stories, Last Night At The Vista Cafe, and a novel, Boundaries, and has begun work on his second novel, Reunion. His stories have appeared in Clapboard House, The Greensboro Review, The New Renaissance, Sensations Magazine, Cities and Roads, The Lone Wolf Review, The Bishop's House Review, Voices From Home - A North Carolina Prose Anthology, and Best Of Clapboard House. Jim is a Fellow of the Redwood Writing Project of Humboldt State University and a founding member of the Lost Coast Writers' Retreat, a six-day gathering along the Mattole River on the remote Northcoast of California. He has taught English and Social Studies in public schools, practiced law, and worked with legal studies and law enforcement training programs in community colleges in the West and the South. For the last twelve years he has been a mediator specializing in helping couples separate, divorce, and settle child custody concerns and property division in a peaceful, collaborative manner. He does this in the reassuring setting of his home and in tribal courts in Northern California. Mediation is his loved vocation, but his avocation, writing fiction, has first place in his heart, save for the family and friends who fill his life. Jim lives close to his children, grandchildren, and friends on the Northcoast of California in beautiful Humboldt County.