The Heart of It All

Justin Courter Justin Courter is the author of the novel Skunk: A Love Story and a collection of prose poems, The Death of the Poem and Other Paragraphs. He lives in New York City.

John Ritter, a frustrated artist, demonstrates that self-destruction can be a form of protest-or maybe just the last resort for those who refuse to grow up. After years of adventure on the West Coast, he returns to Cincinnati to care for his grandmother, who suffers from Alzheimer's, and to protect her farmland from commercial development. Still in love with his ex-girlfriend and his youthful ideals, he lives in denial of the facts that she has moved on, that he is ill-equipped to serve as a caretaker, and that his life is in limbo. Unreliable, unstable, but hilarious and brutally honest, John's artistic sensibility and his job as a landscaper make his situation even more maddening. Wearing his wounded heart on his sleeve, he turns his life into a piece of performance art that involves late-night graffiti raids and car theft. He aims to illustrate how the forces of love, freedom and individuality can triumph over greed, conformity and corporatization. In the eyes of those around him his project is a failure, but for the reader it offers a dangerously veering joy ride.