The Long Way Home: Stories

by Ron Lands

Overview

Ron Lands writes beautiful stories about the messy life of sickness, death, loss, confusion, and compassion. In his work, his two worlds of doctor and writer seamlessly overlap. Most of the men and women who populate these stories are facing the end—either their own, or someone else's— and the medical, practical, emotional, and spiritual complexities that develop in the final hours and days intertwine to create moving and memorable conflicts between, and within, the characters.

These stories take place in the homes, doctor's offices, and hospital rooms of a small Tennessee town, where doctors intimately know their patients, and patients exist in a generational no-mans' land between house calls and contemporary medicine. As doctor and writer Lands' ability to explore their humanity as his characters navigate the unfamiliar makes these stories shimmer. Beautifully rendered sentence after sentence, THE LONG WAY HOMEThe is the work of an expert in his fields. —Susan Perabo

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781947504127
Publisher:	Bottom Dog Press
Publication date:	01/18/2021
Series:	Appalachian Writing Series
Pages:	170
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.34(d)

About the Author

Ron Lands grew up in a small East Tennessee town with a five generation Appalachian pedigree containing a host of farmers and preachers, but no writers or physicians. As he states, "The first indication that I might break that mold was the day after President Kennedy's assassination when, in an attempt to process that tragedy, I wrote a very bad poem and gave it to my second-grade teacher. The teasing I endured from my peers after she read it to my class squelched any desire to share work for the next twenty-five years."

His earliest interest in the medical profession occurred a year later after he developed appendicitis. As he recalls, "A small-town general practitioner performed emergency surgery late one night without a specialist's consultation, abdominal CT scan or anything else considered standard today. I was enchanted by the whole process, the doctor who visited me at random times, the nurse who changed my bandage daily, and cleaned my fingertips with alcohol so I could feel the thick silk sutures."

Over five decades later, now a retired cancer doctor in Knoxville, Tennessee, he confides how he was drawn to that specialty because "the art of medicine has remained relevant even as the science has unfolded in breathtaking waves." He still works part-time because he enjoys learning new things from his young, smart colleagues, and he still enjoys clinical medicine. "I still find myself writing to find clarity about my patients. Writing and medicine are my vocation and avocation, impossible to do one without the other."

He lives and writes near his hometown, still married to the nursing student he met while in medical school. He is the proud father of a son and daughter, and delighted father-in-law to the mother of his two granddaughters.

He is an MFA alumnus of Queens University of Charlotte. His short stories have been published in several small literary journals. His clinical vignettes and poems have been published in the humanities sections of medical journals. His first chapbook, Final Path, was published in the spring of 2020. A second poetry collection, A Gathering of Friends, is forthcoming in the fall of 2021.

Read an Excerpt

The Rebellion of Katie Lane



For the first seventeen years of our lives we were friends, not a couple, just next-door neighbors in one-story white-frame dwellings left over from when the coal companies provided housing for their employees. Ours were the last two on a dead-end street that was marked on the far side by Black's Creek, and on the other by a cracked, concrete sidewalk that rolled and swelled past our tiny yards then stopped in a vacant lot as if it had reached the end of the world.

From the outside, my house looked the same as Billy's: tiny windows with soot-stained white paint chipping off the sills, a little porch that swayed in the middle and gave the false impression of a smile, a gravel driveway just big enough for one car, and a bare lightbulb by the front door.

On the inside, we couldn't have been more different. My mom wore a homemade cotton dress, sat all day at our upright piano, and played slow mournful hymns. Billy's mom came home from her job waitressing at the Peggy Ann Truck Stop, put on cutoff blue jeans, a "See Rock City" tee shirt, and mowed their yard in her bare feet. My dad was somber, strict, given to dissecting the King James Version at the supper table long after Mom and I had brushed our hair, put on our nightgowns, and gone to bed. Billy didn't know his dad.

On Sundays, my dad drove us so far back into the mountains that the gravel roads turned to dirt, to a renovated house with a sign out front that said, "Church of

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the Mighty God." Inside, we sat on hard benches while an old man yelled a sermon at us. Billy's mom took him to the Peggy Ann, where I imagined him lounging all day immersed in the thick, heavy smell of fried onions and hamburgers.

"What do you do while you wait?" I asked.

"Read," he said showing me a Zane Grey Western all dog-eared and yellow. "The truckers leave these in a box. They take one and leave the one they just read. You can read 'em, too. I'll bring you one."

I wasn't old enough then to be surprised that Billy could enjoy a novel about the wild west or that he thought a seven-year-old girl would, too.

Editorial Reviews

Ron Lands' luminous meditation on the physical pain and suffering of the residents of Oak Grove, Tennessee, inhabit the fifteen linked stories in The Long Way Home. It is an astounding literary triumph that will break your heart and then mend it with its deep abiding affection for small towns and the closely-knit souls who live, love, and die in them. Deeply resonant stories touched with humor, filled with grace.



-Sheryl Monks, author of Monsters in Appalachia (Vandalia Press, 2016)





In riveresque prose, Ron Lands carries us with fearless grace over the eddies and jutting rocks of lives in small-town Tennessee. We are in our very own homes in these stories, but in the metaphorical attics and basements—places where lights are too often kept turned off. The Long Way Home surely offers a sense of place, but more than that, invites us to reconsider how we navigate what's found there: the breathing of lives lived, lives lost, our own mirrors of life and death. I salute the hard craft of these stories, the earned victory—the further you delve into them, the more they become your own.

—Timothy Dodd, author of Fissures, and Other Stories (Bottom Dog Press)

From the Publisher