“ On certain nights when the moon was full and Lavis was on his way to his way to getting blind drunk, he would drive Zeb out to his old homeplace on the Choctoosie River .”

So begins the story of Zeb Dupree, a musician struggling to find his spiritual and emotional bearings in the wake of his father's suicide and his own failed marriage.

Zed's father, an alcoholic aharecropper, had been obsessed with the loss his gamily's farm. This obsession became, for Zeb, a “parable about the destruct-tion of dreams. “

During his teens and early twenties, Zeb managed to rise above his impoverished background. However, through a series of losses, his life spirals downward until he finds himself living in a bus behind a junkyard-lonely, confused, with only his beloved fiddle for solace.

Against a richly textured Southern back-ground, Stephen March has fashioned a story of one man's search for redemp-tion and his escape from his father's legacy.

In nominating Catbird for the Marmdouha S. Bobst Literary Award, novelist and poet Fred Chappell wrote, “ Mr. March has ability to portray a bleak reality in unflinching terms and yet motivate his character with such inner strength that his eventual betterment-one cannot quite call it a victory-is warmly convincing.”

 

STEPHEN MARCH lives and works in Elizabeth City, North Carolina. He is the author of a novella, Armadillo, and winner of the Clay Reynolds Prize in the Novella. His story collection, Love to the Spirits, won the 2005 Independent Publisher's Award in Short Fiction.