By J Frank Jamison
The Town Upstairs
A novel
Young reporter Jesse Wickham opens a letter that takes him back to his childhood and a model railroad replica of the town of Paradise, located upstairs in Griffin Wynne’s funeral home. The letter sets Jesse on a quest to uncover the meanings of scenes embedded in the town by Griffin. His search brings him into contact with Bibi Durber, an old woman who seems to see into the essence of events. Could Bibi and the town upstairs reveal who killed Elbert Wiggins and Nathan Hanks? Was Nathan’s son, Mani Hanks, wrongly convicted of murdering a man named Bennie Hoskins? Was Hoskins connected to the Wiggins and Hanks murders?
The town upstairs may hold the answers.
Tennessee Author
J Frank Jamison
His shorter works have appeared in numerous literary journals, including Appalachian Heritage, Nimrod, Fox Cry, Poem, Red Wheel Barrow, Sanskrit, The Tennessee English Journal, South Carolina Review, Atlanta Review, Iodine, Confluence, Big Muddy, Illuminations, and others.
His poems have won the Robert Burns/Terry Semple Memorial Poetry Prize and the Libba Moore Gray Poetry Prize. He has also been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
A second short story, The Funeral, also an excerpt from the same novel appeared in The Penmen Review. You can read it here.
Frank’s story, The Violin recently appeared in Literally Stories.
Other Books
Marginal Notes
It is in the ‘in between’ that life is understood. Margins and interstices are the filters and lenses through which we see. They shape our understanding. In the edge worlds between light and dark, night and day; beside sea, stream and river where worlds of air, land and water come together, we find metaphors of life. If we care and dare to look, we may even see ourselves.
Songs of Unsung People
There is in each of us a fragment of the unsung, the discounted as well as the exalted. Like the people in these poems, we inhabit a landscape that is real and ancient and magical and filled with stories.