The Timekeeper's Son - Baker, Sara

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Résumé :
T he Timekeeper's Son, a moving father-son tale, explores middle-aged grief and youthful yearnings, the price of hidden disabilities and wounds, and the claims and limits of community. In the small town of Milledge, Georgia, aspiring teenage filmmaker Josh Lovejoy hits a jogger while driving late at night. But this is not just any jogger: the victim is prominent local activist and historian David Masters. The accident not only puts Masters in the hospital in a coma, it shatters the fragile Lovejoy household. Adrift from friends and family, a shocked Josh reluctantly takes up his court-ordered community service work at the Good Shepherd School for Disabled Children. Meanwhile, the comatose Masters is visited by the ghost of the singer Peggy Lee, and his childless wife Meg, consumed with grief, fantasizes that Josh is the son she might have had. In love with an unstable girl, and estranged from his angry father and preoccupied mother, Josh escapes to New York City. Things there do not go as planned and, overwhelmed, Josh makes a fateful decision that puts him beyond the help of his family. Facing physical and spiritual annihilation, he must choose between the death of the heart and the acceptance of the imperfect good that is his life. Josh's story reminds readers that while our lives may be flawed, they can still be embraced with love.

Biographie:
Sara Baker's fiction has been widely published in literary journals, including the Crab Orchard Review, Cleaver, Confrontation, H.O.W. Journal, China Grove, theintima.com, The Examined Life Journal, The New Quarterly, The Lullwater Review. Her work has been shortlisted for the Bridport Prize and the Fish Short Story Contest. Her poetry has been published in Stone, River, Sky: an Anthology of Georgia Poetry, The 2011 Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine, The Apalachee Review, The Healing Muse, Ars Medica, and elsewhere. After teaching English literature and writing at the college level for fifteen years, Sara's own experience with illness and loss spurred her to design and facilitate a writing-to-heal workshop for cancer patients and caregivers at the Loran Smith Center for Cancer Support in Athens, Georgia. Over the eleven years she ran those workshops, she presented and published extensively in the field of expressive writing. Her passion to share the healing that can emerge from writing comes directly from her own experiences.Sara lives in Athens, Georgia, with her husband, physicist and author Todd Baker. They have four adult children. When not writing or teaching, Sara is an avid gardener, dancer and dog lover.