Salt Water and Other Stories

Loves and lives that almost were, once had been and could have been are the substance of this collection of nine stories from Seal Press cofounder Wilson (If You Had a Family). The various protagonists--academics, an aeronautical draftsperson, an heiress--are all lesbians, and their sexual orientation is the issue that pervades their consciousness. The underlying motif is a meditation on and a hankering after a certain slice of time, wedged in between the silence that preceded it and the uncertainty that followed from it: the decade roughly between 1973 to about 1982, during which the acceptance of lesbianism in our society seemed a certainty. It's a period now evoked as a time of possibility, of mostly unrealized and often ambivalent potential. The long, well-constructed and affecting title story chronicles a love that never achieved fruition, that of an American professor of art history and a German-Swedish artist. The backgrounds--a drab college town in Minnesota, a sun-drenched island off the coast of Sweden--are effectively contrasted and emblematic of the emotional, geographical and cultural distance that separates the women. In the end, the tone of aching nostalgia is succeeded by one of quiet acceptance. The remaining tales are shorter, the most effective being lesbian spins of folk tales from Grimm, Egypt and Ireland. Though sometimes a little too self-conscious about Identity and Community, the stories are infused with emotion and insight. (Jan.)