THE VETERAN

"Joe Dover survives WW2 with a tremendous sense of possibility, only to become lost in America's moral landscape. Owens offers a poignant and beautifully detailed portrait of his veteran balancing freedom and responsibility in a rapidly-changing society." -- Rod Val Moore, author of A History of Hands.

Ex-marine Joe Dover comes home in 1946 from the war in the Pacific, marries young, and begins cheating immediately. From marriage to divorce, and again to marriage; from fatherhood to estrangement; from being shot at to an accident on the water, Joe’s career is anything but uneventful. Negotiating all dangers with a canny fortitude, he hangs on as best he can to love, to his children, and to life, but in the end, everything may well seem a fluke of contingency.

Paperback: 144 pages
Publishing date: March 19, 2020
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1951896890
ISBN-13: 978-1951896898
Product Dimensions: 6 x 0.4 x 9 inches

Clarke W. Owens was born in 1951 and raised in Sacramento, California, the grandson of Mexican immigrants and Anglos from the Pacific Northwest. Clarke’s family was musical on both sides, and his first meaningful job was as a musician. He later got undergraduate and graduate degrees in English from universities in California, and a Ph.D. from The Ohio State University, where he met his wife, Deborah Fleming, a poet/writer. He became a lawyer in the 1990s, more at home in the courtroom than a classroom. His creative writing has appeared in many literary journals.