Leaving Centralia and other stories

Abstract

In the eight short stories within this collection, we encounter characters against a variety of backdrops, from the mundane--middle school shop class, and a short road trip--to the more bizarre--a town with an underground fire predicted to burn for two hundred years, and a forbidden island potter's field. Many of the protagonists are adolescents, positioned between their childhood, when they played a more passive role in their own lives, and adulthood, when they more deliberately make decisions about their own actions and lives. However, in all of these settings and regardless of age, the characters find that it is not under exceptional circumstances but through the course of the ordinary moments in their daily lives that they encounter testing points for their maturity and integrity.