IT'S LIKE A HUMAN PETRI DISH

Inspired by an intimate knowledge of the people on isolated Tangier Island, VA, in The Monday After Father’s Day: Revelations, A Parable, author Pete Fortenbaugh has conceived a tale of the innocence and sustaining power of hope despite the challenges that the people of Johnsontown face — discouragement and the failing economics of the rural working class, wresting a living from a beleaguered Bay, the loss of regional micro-dialects, traditions, and the cultures they reflect, all colored by conflicts of race, class, and identity. These challenges have been a part of our nation from its beginnings, yet all are surging in these turbulent times of tremendous change and the inevitable backlash that always accompanies such change.

“I feel,” Fortenbaugh says, “that Johnsontown is a perfect petri dish to explore the complex dynamics of small community life in the face of an ever-changing world.”

The rich cast of characters is fully realized, from kind, steady Uncle Furry, who relies on The Lord to guide him and is convinced that climate change is bunk, to Calhoon Greenhawk and his sometime girlfriend Marsha, who is called ‘whore’ by the island's church women as casually as hanging out laundry, to black Mr. Abe Johnson, the island’s librarian and only accountant, whose grown son, Rodney, has the mind of a five-year-old.