One story tells of a woman trapped in an abusive marriage in a remote cabin on the Indiana frontier.
Another one centers on a miracle that occurs during a Christmas pageant at an elementary school during the Great Depression.
In the title story, a meek bank clerk undergoes a dramatic change in personality after he begins to study the movement of planets and other objects in the night sky.
In his second book, “Henry and the Night Sky and Other Stories,” Joseph Persinger of Seymour included these short stories and six others.
The nine fictional stories were written at various times throughout the decades, starting when he was still in his teens and continuing until his official retirement in 2016.
“They are so varied and so different. I’m just hoping that most people will find that at least two or three maybe make an impression on them in some positive way,” Persinger said.
And if all nine stories make an impression, even better, he said.
For nearly 50 years, Persinger made his living as a journalist, writing news and feature articles for newspapers in southern Indiana. That included serving as a reporter and news editor at the Seymour Tribune and later as editor, managing editor and eventually owner/publisher of The Banner in Brownstown.
Most of the stories in his new book are set in the area and are deeply rooted in his lifelong fascination with the people, language and folklore of rural small town America.
The first story, “The Dreamer,” and “The Darkroom” both take place on the Jackson County Courthouse square in Brownstown, although it’s not stated.
When he was a kid, the carnival was set up around the square. Persinger wrote “The Dreamer” — his oldest story in the book — when he was in his late teens.
“It was all real when they were still doing it, so I wrote that just to get that all down about the carnival because when you’re 9 or 10 years old, that was such a big deal,” he said. “Over the years, I go back and revisit it and edit and do things to it.”
On the opposite end of the spectrum, “The Darkroom” is one the newest tales he wrote. It came from a dream about a newspaper photographer.
“In the dream, he develops a roll of film that he had just taken. It’s new film,” Persinger said. “When he develops it, the pictures were all from the 1970s. I thought, ‘Huh, that was an interesting dream,’ and then I thought about it more and I said, ‘Well, it would be more interesting if he developed film and the pictures showed things that haven’t even happened yet,’ so that took off into that.”
In Alfred Hitchcock and “The Twilight Zone” stories, the author tries to set it up so the really weird stuff may have happened or maybe the main character is losing it. Persinger said that’s what “The Darkroom” is.
“He’s descending into psychosis because he’s hooked on amphetamines, which back in the 1970s doctors prescribed as diet pills and didn’t really realize how devastating that could be,” he said. “So that all came from a little dream idea.”
The second-oldest story in the book is “Luther’s Love,” written when Persinger was in his early 20s in the early ’60s. At the time, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine included short stories with an ironic twist at the end.
“So I wrote that, sent it off to them and of course, they said, ‘No thanks’ and sent it back,” Persinger said, laughing.
In 1990, he and friends from Jackson County Community Theatre made a short dramatic film with Fred Lewis playing the role of Luther and showed it along with another movie.
“People seemed to like the little movie,” Persinger said.
In the story “Big Break,” a country music singer clings to his dream of a big break even as everything is falling apart around him. It’s set in Tybee Island, Georgia, where Persinger and his wife, Judith, like to go in the winter.
“This big break is a fast-talking guy from Nashville that probably isn’t going to work out,” he said. “I think people who have been around music will get it.”
Persinger himself has been a singer-songwriter for years. He began performing in college during the folk music craze, took time away from it during his working years and raising a family and returned in the early 2000s when he “sort of retired.”
“During the ’70s, I sent a lot of songs off to Nashville, but I didn’t want to perform. I don’t like my voice,” he said, laughing. “I knew I wasn’t a great guitar player. I just wanted to sit out there on the ridge and write songs for Willie Nelson and George Jones, people like that.”
One day, he shared that with somebody and they asked, “Well, how’s that working out for you?” and he replied, “Not too well, but I had some close calls.”
“Then I gradually just got too busy with work and everything, and I didn’t do anything (musically) for quite a few years,” he said.
The most difficult story for Persinger to write was “No Redemption.”
“It’s a western basically, but I don’t spell it out, and it’s not even geographically accurate or anything, but it’s happening in southern Indiana because they thought the Reno Gang, this was a wild and woolly place at one time, so I wanted to do it here,” Persinger said.
Initially, he wanted to make it a novel, but he found out how much work that is.
“I worked on that probably off and on for three years and finally got John and Maureen (Pesta) to read the first draft,” he said.
Persinger said he wrapped the story up quickly and reread it and realized there was a big gap in it.
“I finally came to the realization that it didn’t need to be a novel,” he said. “It is the longest story. Then I went back to work on it and fixed some of the things that I had been struggling with. When I finally decided to just keep the western as a story I guess is when I really decided I might as well put them all together and make a decent size book.”
“Henry and the Night Sky and Other Stories” is available locally at The Magic of Books Bookstore and the Jackson County Visitor Center in Seymour and online at amazon.com.
Persinger said the Pestas offered some very helpful suggestions and encouraged him to complete the project, while their son, Jesse Pesta, walked him through the process of getting the book into print.
Another local connection is the cover photograph of the book was provided by astrophotographer Forrest Willey and depicts a solitary figure staring up into the night sky and the Milky Way.
“It couldn’t be more perfect if he had taken it specifically for this,” Persinger said.
Persinger’s first book was “The View from Poverty Ridge,” a collection of essays and color photographs of southern Indiana landscapes. It’s available online at xlibris.com.
“The essays in that book were nonfiction — accounts, often humorous, of things that happened when we moved from town to the country,” he said. “It also contained some reminiscences about growing up in Brownstown in the 1950s.”
“Henry and the Night Sky and Other Stories” by Joseph Persinger of Seymour is available locally at The Magic of Books Bookstore, 113 W. Second St., and the Jackson County Visitor Center, 100 N. Broadway St., both in Seymour, and online at amazon.com.
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