Rumors and stones

by Wayne Karlin

"In the summer of 1993 I began a self-imposed journey into the blurred space between memory, story, and reality when I rented a car from Warsaw Avis and drove to the village in Poland in which my mother had lived before immigrating to the United States.". So begins Wayne Karlin's Rumors and Stones, the haunting narrative of a writer's journey into his family's past in the small Polish town of Kolno whose 2,000 Jewish inhabitants were machinegunned in ditches in 1941. Karlin explores the tension in the role of the storyteller as a witness and keeper but also as shaper; it is a journey in space that becomes a journey into the past and into the truth that can only be found in the imagination; it is a journey into Karlin's own origins as a veteran of the Vietnam war and as a writer compelled in his work to always come back to that conflict and the net of connections from it he feels like a "cicatrix just under the skin of the brain."