Retired editor Gary D. Mawyer has been writing for over five decades, and to date has published five novels, Rockfish, The Southern Skylark, Exemptions, Shad River, and The Adventures of Reese Macaque, P.I., a biographical history, Sergeant Wolinski and the Great War, and a short story collection, Dark and Other Stories. He lives with his wife Karen and two cats in Albemarle County.
Contact Gary at garydmawyer@gmail.com.
Contact Gary at garydmawyer@gmail.com.
GARY'S BOOKS
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Shad River
History—where does it come from? What is history anyway, but the stories of peoples’ lives? People begin as members of families, then as members of communities. Families and communities are the raw sources of history. In Shad River, place is the protagonist. Individuals and families come and go while time melts and reforges a river-crossing community that began before history in the Virginia mountains and has had many faces since. Shad River is a picture of that history’s American moment. |
The Southern Skylark
When Augustus Hingely, poetical dilettante and acquaintance of the Romantic expatriates Byron and Shelley, comes ashore in America, he expects to be introduced to polite society in drawing rooms and lecture halls where he might express his thoughts on "The Lives of the Poets." The Americans, however, find entirely new and unexpected uses and identities for Mr. Hingely in a picaresque of gothic manners, as Hingely makes his way up the James River toward the Springs of Virginia, a would-be apostle of freedom in a land of slavery. |
Dark and Other Stories
The twilight of the 20th Century seeps into this collection of haunting tales set in the mountains and small towns of Central Virginia. Computers were new and telephones were not yet old, and electricity was coarse and unrefined. As in the otherworldly riddle stories of Jorge Luis Borges or the dark imaginings of Ambrose Bierce, fact and fantasy are not so easily separated in the architecture of Dark and Other Stories. |
Sergeant Wolinski and the Great War
Sergeant Wolinski and the Great War tells the story of one man's experiences on the Western Front during the last climactic months of the First World War, as the newly-formed American Expeditionary Force met the veteran German Army in France. Visitors of the Argonne Forest battlefield today see little evidence of the destruction that visited this region in 1918, but the signs of war remain for those who look. The causes and consequences of the Great War, as it was then called, are very much alive and still with us today. The actual events of the Great War are largely overshadowed by the later disasters of the 20th Century, but we can still, in a limited way, sometimes reconstruct what happened and what the soldiers of the A.E.F. experienced. |
Exemptions
Phil was an undergraduate and Marsha was a nurse. Andy was an SDS dropout, Leandra was an escapee from The Patch, and Tori was a townie chick. It was 1969 and acid cost 60 cents a tab. Things got wild but, as William Wordsworth liked to say, "the world is too much with us." |
The Adventures of Reese Macaque, P.I.
A World Where Genetics Ran Mad … 2296 C.E. A distant future. Or is it? Reese Macaque, Private Investigator, doesn’t think so. Because that’s when he’s alive. If you call a career investigating Shady Land Transactions, Shadowy Usufructuary Rights, and Tortured Titles being alive. Unfortunately Reese does call that a living, because being a detective is the only career he knows. And there’s plenty of work, because the rule of law has taken some hard knocks after the disastrous Sea Change and the often-inconvenient Secession Era. There’s more than a whiff of anarchy in the air, grimly compounded by the unexpected outcomes of genetic experimentation run wild at the end of the Federal Era—our experimentation—and Theirs—whoever They are... |