The stories and the novels that form this trilogy, The Real and the Imagined, were written over many years. Some stand alone. Others share landscapes, images, and characters. A few became the seeds from which larger works grew. Together they form a conversation between the real and the imagined, between memory and invention, between what was written first and what came later.

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As a young man, I wrote a screenplay called Urram Hill. Decades later, it became the novel The Fiddler in the Night. Characters arrived. Rivers. Roads. Children. Violence. Strange figures walking out of the trees. The moon. They arrived too.

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At the time, they were fragments. Only later do you see they were speaking to each other.

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We rarely understand our own lives while living them. Meaning often appears in the looking back. And maybe that is the role of imagination: not to escape reality, but to help us bear and understand it.

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The works in this volume are not presented in the order of their publication, but in the order in which they speak to one another. Read together, they reveal recurring fragments of a larger landscape and the paths by which one story sometimes becomes another.

Including our own.