Denny O'day

Voices from the Valley Denny O'day

The stories in this book are, for the most part, taken from my childhood in the Naugatuck Valley, in western Connecticut. They are simple stories. Stories about the everyday working people I knew as a boy, tales gathered from faltering images and increasingly dim impressions in my mind. They are collected here, for one, final time as their voices, those voices from the Valley, slip away into the mists of time. Voices from the Valley is loosely based, as a literary model, on the collection of short stories, Dubliners, by James Joyce. Voices, like Dubliners is intended to be a naturalistic depiction of ethnic Catholic working class life. Joyce based his work, in the early years of the 20th century while Voices is set at the end of that century. Dubliners was written at a time when Ireland, at a cultural crossroad, was searching for its national identity and purpose. Voices is set in the years after Southern New England had lost its industrial base and it too was at a crossroads, searching for a new identity. Dubliners narrator is child protagonists, while the central character in Voices is man-child war hero and like Dubliners, Voices is loosely set in tripartite divisions, childhood, adolescence, maturity, breakfast lunch, etc. Dubliners is told in sixteen short stories, Voices in fifteen. Just as Joyce reused his characters, so have I. My characters Shaqunda, Gabriel and Gretta, Sal and Shelly and Jimmy Doyle all made their first literary appearances in my stage plays. Unlike Joyce's characters, my characters (Many of whom share names with the characters of Dubliners) in Voices do not experience an epiphany, one glowing moment of self-understanding. I believe that most of us do not have many moments of self -Illumination so I thought that an idea book of epiphanies would be just a bit over the top. The stories purposely lack moral judgment and in some cases dramatic resolution, since I intended the readers to make those judgments and draw those conclusions. Unlike Joyce, I used a touch of hyperbole in the war scene in Local Orphan is Hero and in the heart attack scene in Anna Belle Lee and the Charge of the Light Brigade and The Best Laid Plans.