The Twelfth Year, and Other Times: Stories

In his powerful debut collection Twelfth Year and Other Times, Randy Hendricks paints each of his characters with a few meticulous strokes. Characters in search of identity, in search of the right path, in search of answers, drive each story and the questions each poses. In "The Stove," Joby Johnson must contend with the weight of his own pride and the questions it raises about who he is and who he wants to be. Sitting in a hospital waiting room, Caleb Vance must confront his own regrets as he looks back on his wife and their life together in the story "D & C." The narrator of "Ruins" moves us through his search for the real man behind his grandfather and the real man behind himself, seeking in his memories what he could not find in the actual experiences themselves.

Randy Hendricks was born in 1956 in Madisonville TN, the county seat of an area from which he draws much of his fiction. He has been a high school and college English teacher for most of his adult life as well as a writer, editor, and critic. He lives in Carrollton GA with his wife Cher and has two children, Amanda and Derek