FOMITE

The characters in these thirteen stories set in the mountains of east Tennessee struggle with both regret and renewal. Three children confront the reality of death, and the possibility of a returning, during a family camping trip; a lonely teacher endures both condemnation and forgiveness from a challenging student; a missionary's wife makes a surprising discovery about the true definition of love; a widower regains his confidence thanks to some unexpected help; an unlikely interchange between a depressed car salesman and a neglected housewife sparks a revival in them both. These and other characters discover unexpected turns even along the most familiar trails. They often find that where there are two or more, there is the potential for clarity and rebirth, even in the wilderness of lives they never saw coming.

 

About the Author:

Elizabeth Genovise is a graduate of Hillsdale College and of the MFA program at McNeese State University in Lake Charles, Louisiana. Her first collection of stories, A DifferentHarbor, was published in 2014 by Mayapple Press. She currently lives near Knoxville, Tennessee, where she is happy to be teaching English while spending her weekends on the trails in the Smoky Mountains.

 

Praise

“Water and ghosts, love and loss--the stories of Where There Are Two or More will haunt you just as Elizabeth Genovise's characters stand haunted, story after story. But there's something else here, something beyond the haunting, and that thing is hope.”

—David James Poissant, author of The Heaven of Animals

 

"Elizabeth Genovise is a first rate short story writer, plain and simple, but she's at her best when her clear-eyed sense of place is blended with richly imagined characters to create emotional landscapes of remarkable depth. Her women, like all good women, are wise and strong, but what's truly startling here is how well she knows her men, the good of us and the bad and everything in between." 

—Michael Knight, author of The Typist 

 

"Elizabeth Genovise makes the seemingly ordinary magical and mesmerizing. She lulls you in and then blows you away with those tiny but telling details which in lie Heaven or Hell depending. Using places you've been and people you could know, Genovise lights up American life, making us feel that our story is worth telling too.” 

—Amy Willoughby-Burle, author of Out Across the Nowhere