Roamers and Wanderers: A Collection

by Frances Webb

Overview

This mixed genre of short stories and poems set in the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s have one thing in common: They show how travel opens the world to new ideas, yet expresses the universality of mankind.

Roamers and Wanderers is a collection of short stories and some poetry set in different countries or cities and written over a period of about forty years. Each is about travel and the effect the trip has on the traveler. Characters may react in negative or positive ways. In one case, memories surface, resulting in emotional turmoil. Primarily in the poems, political issues are visited.

In the first short story, “Markers,” a newly married woman confronts the controlling behavior exhibited by her husband.

The poem “Take Off” reveals the universal fear of flying. In the poem “Nobody Knows,” a woman reflects on how she appears to others – looking crazy? – in the airport as she walks back and forth looking for the ground transportation sign.

In “Remembering Caracas,” the narrator is waiting in a Rhode Island train station and notices a provocative sentence built into the tile floor: “I travel not to get someplace but travel for travel’s sake.” This exemplifies all the stories in this collection.

(About the Author)

Retired teacher Frances Webb has written many short stories over the years and plans her next book to be another short story collection. She grew up in a small town in North Jersey in a house built in the 1890s by her grandfather.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781948858908
Publisher:	Strategic Book Publishing
Publication date:	05/02/2019
Pages:	112
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.44(d)

Editorial Reviews

2019-08-23
A dozen poems and short stories about people in transit and the interpersonal dramas that emerge in the course of travel.

Webb (A Short Joy for Alma Hedman, 2018) offers a collection of cursory tales and vignettes, set between the 1950s and 1970s. In each of these stories, characters are on the move from one place to another. There's a woman in "Getting to Verdun" who accompanies her father and husband to Holland, where her dad had fought in World War I. In "The Convention," Sally joins her husband, Harold, at a business convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey, where she witnesses the trivialities of business dinners and happy hours. "On a Bench in the Amtrak Train Station" centers on the thoughts of a woman as she closely observes a mother and child: "She is standing still and itching to hold that baby again!" Stories like this one, as well as "The Guide and the Boy"—set during a guided tour of the Teotihuacán area in Mexico—and poems such as "Really, Isn't it Strange" read more like vignettes, with their close attention to detail and lack of resolution. Overall, Webb writes in a crisp, casual style that emphasizes mundane details and interactions. In "The Convention," for example, she describes a dinner attentively: "Harold fiddled with his fork. / Janet drank her water. / I drank my water. / Ed shook out his napkin." Familial themes also loom large, with tales featuring married couples, father-daughter relationships, and thoughts of childbearing. "Norway," one of the collection's most successful stories, describes the disorienting experience of traveling and encountering new languages: The protagonist thinks in response to a Norwegian man's attentive questioning over a business dinner, "Was this a list of prepositions?" Some readers may be frustrated by the lack of narrative development; indeed, Webb's description of a Tupperware demonstration in "The Convention" could apply to the collection as a whole: "No final outcome. No outburst." Still, readers will find plenty of detail and emotional complexity here.

Descriptive, understated stories of characters in flux.

Kirkus Reviews