Somewhere Geese Are Flying: New and Selected Stories

- A son (in the often anthologized "Sleepy Time Gal") competes with his parents to tell "a simple story" about a poor boy/rich girl romance that "happened many years ago in the woods by a lake in northern Michigan" . . . and the song he wrote her that became famous....- A champion pole-vaulter jumps out of an airplane in France on D-Day wearing a parachute that fails to open; he survives but, as his son says, "Imagine a man falling from the stars. It's a long way down..."..- Thrasher, in Paris, hears geese honking in the sky and Barbara all the way from Iowa saying, "Hold still . . . I'm going to kiss you now..."Stories in Somewhere Geese Are Flying were written in many places--Michigan, Paris, Iowa, Slovakia, Oregon, Greece, Idaho, and on the Isle of Skye. Gildner says, "For a time, I thought to call the book 'Foreign Stories'; but the title I use carries a sound I favor, a music both close and far away, something like stories trying to connect in what seem the only ways available to us: love and loss and that inseparable hold."