In my essays on the writing life, I’ve touched more than once on how weird it can be to reread an earlier book. I find myself in a state of weirdness once again.

I’ve had the pleasure of working with four publishers since 2011 when my first title, a collection of short stories called All the Roads That Lead From Home came out. One of these publishers changed its distributor and the new outfit reviewed my sales figures and felt the two titles in question could be taken out of print. The publisher offered to keep the electronic versions alive, but it was hard to think of the hard copies disappearing forever. I quickly reached out to my current publisher, Unsolicited Press, to ask if they could bring out a second edition of these titles and was met with an enthusiastic yes.

The books are a collection of short stories and my first novel. This is a two-part essay, and I’ll begin with the story collection, Our Love Could Light the World.

The title story introduces the Dugan family. They’ve shown up in several books afterwards, the same cast of characters moving through time, evolving here, sliding backwards there. My favorite is Lavinia, the hard-working sharp-tongued mother of five with a useless husband named Potter. This first story is about a time when she goes away on a business trip and leaves her eldest daughter, Angie, fourteen at the time, in charge. Quiet disaster ensues, the details of which I won’t share. The time away is key for everyone, mostly for Lavinia, because she decides to leave Potter and his love for the bottle and put in with her boss, a much older man named Chip (short for Charles) Starkhurst. Money and moderation mean a lot to her and she’s tired of struggling.

The Dugans live in the fictional town of Dunston, New York. It won’t take most readers long to realize it’s modeled closely on Ithaca, where I was born and lived until the age of fourteen. What strikes me now is how much of my fiction is set there, as if those early years were a hook that never worked its way out of my psyche. I write about the snowstorms, the long blue lake, the university, and the town down below. I write of sad families, people looking for a way out, broken marriages, cruel siblings. All of this draws, understandably, on my experience. My parents split up when I was ten. The year after, my father married a former student of his and moved into a house three blocks away from where my mother and I still lived. My sister was off at school. She was six years older and suffered from a personality disorder that made living with her then and afterwards both difficult and dangerous. My mother never recovered from my father’s disaffection, which would have carried more tragic weight had I not later learned that she never loved him in the first place.

The Dugans have similarities to my own family, but they differ in terms of their genuine affection for each other. The five kids more or less stick together. And while Lavinia can be harsh, she never forgets that she’s at the helm, responsibility is hers, and she takes that responsibility seriously, unlike my mother, who made it a habit of abandoning me when she needed a break.

Rereading the stories in Our Love Could Light the World also sharpens my editorial eye. I’m not in the same place as a writer; my obsessions have changed. That’s okay, inevitable really. To write is to navigate a river that speeds and slows but never runs dry.