By Jack Greer
Dryad Press, 2009

JACK GREER'S STORIES are peopled by characters who are ocean sailors linked by their love of the sea. All of them, for different reasons, have left the U.S. mainland for the open waters of the Atlantic and the islands of the Caribbean where they face inner fears and outside threats from storms, strangers, and their own failures of judgment. In the title story, a cardiologist sailing among the islands by himself is stranded one night and confronted by a menacing islander; in "Souvenir's Last Passage," an aging woman faces a hostile boarding in the dead of night. Greer's stories are strikingly realistic, their lean narrative style graceful and exact, anchored in a sailor's competence that is always attentive to the sea and its beauty, but also alert to its dangers.

Director of Communications and Public Affairs at Maryland Sea Grant, Greer has worked on and written about Bay issues for nearly three decades. During all these years, on his own time, he has also written fiction and poetry, twice winning awards from the Maryland State Arts Council for his fiction.

Greer will read from Abraham's Bay & Other Stories on Sunday, March 29, 2009, at the bookstore Politics & Prose on Connecticut Avenue in Washington, D.C.

Merrill Leffler