Theodore Jerome Cohen

Mementos Theodore Jerome Cohen

People ask: "Why do you use photographic prompts when you write short stories and flash fiction?" Larry Sultan, an American photographer from the San Fernando Valley in California, provides one answer: "Photography is there to construct the idea of us as a great family and we go on vacations and take these pictures and then we look at them later and we say, 'Isn't this a great family?' So photography is instrumental in creating family not only as a memento, a souvenir, but also a kind of mythology." Beyond the physical, however, lie our memories and in them, the pictures stored in our minds' eyes. As writers, aren't these memories-both the physical and the "mementos of the mind"-the essence of our works, the prompts we use to spin words and phrases into literary tapestries our readers can use to discover something about life, a bit about us, perhaps, and, in the process, maybe even a little about themselves? In this volume, you'll find a story inspired by a 1973 PBS television show in which a steam bath is presented as the afterlife; here, however, the afterlife is a bowling alley overseen by the shoe attendant. In another story, we read a Civil War soldier's last letter home to his father, a letter filled with horrible descriptions of his imprisonment in Andersonville and his concern for the steamboat journey upon which he is about to embark. And not to leave you without something of the paranormal, there's even a story about the deep South and the superstitions that abound in Cajun Country. In short (pun intended), there is something in this book for almost every genre and taste.