Heart of Joy
Stories by
John Repp
Apart from John Wagner’s off-key performances at the Heart of Joy Café, it seemed all the Wagners did was wander. No matter the weather, they strolled streets and school grounds, their boy, Spirit, riding John’s shoulders or bouncing in the backpack his mother—Destiny? Mary? Season? Though John called her Bobo, she’d offered these names and more to the curious—carried as she ambled a few steps behind John. Sometimes the Wagners pulled Spirit in a red wagon up and down alleys, through parking lots, and along the public beach where the child tossed wads of stale bread at the geese. Sometimes they wobbled their rickety bicycles—Spirit rattling along in a wooden cart hitched to Bobo—around the town park or down the paved trails of the county game preserve or on the berm of the state highway.
Theories abounded, but no one seemed to know for certain the whys or wherefores of the Wagners. Some said they’d met in the Stonehurst Sanitarium and decided—if crazies can decide anything—to strike out on their own once the legislature shut it down. Some said John was due an inheritance his family had tied up in court. Others were convinced it was Bobo’s family that kept the purse strings knotted. Still others claimed they’d lived for years before Spirit’s birth in a bunker John had built after his two tours in Vietnam, a place furnished with log benches, phone-wire-spool tables, and railroad-tie chairs, a place deep in the woods where the Wagners cultivated a strain of marijuana that spawned its own cycle of legends, a place at last flooded out in one of the epic rainstorms for which our Novembers are rightly infamous.
Though some of us thought Spirit should be spared exposure to our bad weather, his parents’ jobless example, and the risks of the unvaccinated, most of us granted the Wagners’ integrity, their living out a philosophy—the songs John sang as he strummed his dulcimer at the Heart of Joy suggested a mixture of Buddhism and Rastafarianism—that had defeated our understanding but earned our respect. Even allowing for Bobo’s theatrics, they were courteous without fail. They didn’t stink, they didn’t trespass—at least not for long—and they didn’t harangue us about their particular brand of enlightenment. During the day, they wandered, naming for Spirit everything and everyone they saw. At night, they ate supper and fell asleep around a fire under the Black Creek Bridge, the police having long since lost the heart to shoo them along.
A little past dawn the day Bobo Wagner burned, Amos Sanchez tapped the brass gong to signal the end of a particularly satisfying stretch of zazen. He knew happiness was an illusion, a mere concept, another of the myriad ways the mind hid the essential nature of things, but it felt too marvelous not to sink into the liquid warmth for a few moments, indulging the pleasure of being entirely who he was: Amos Leaf Sanchez, student of Zen, owner of the Heart of Joy Café, founding member of the cadre of spiritual explorers putting their principles into practice in the otherwise benighted snow belt along Lake Erie. Since pain always followed pleasure—and preceded more pleasure, he was glad to remind himself—why not linger, why not luxuriate, why not gloat a little?
ISBN 1-59661-111-1
152 pages/$15
John Repp’s debut collection of short fiction, Heart of Joy, pulls off the monumental task of combining lush, lyrical language with compelling narratives. His stories create magical worlds that feel both believable and fantastical, fragile and tough. From the first page, we are immediately curious about the idiosyncratic characters and their strange circumstances. As each story plays out, we find ourselves considering more universal questions regarding the human condition—whether people create their circumstances or simply respond to the cards they have been dealt. Repp’s years as a successful poet undoubtedly have contributed to his first full-length book of fiction having such an authentic voice that, paradoxically, feels both fresh and seasoned.
—Garnett Kilberg-Cohen,
Distinguished Artist, Columbia College Chicago,
author of Lost Women, Banished Souls (stories, University of Missouri Press)
In this rich, compelling collection of stories, John Repp explores the tensions between belonging and separation, between individuals and their “families”: the communities they are a part of, yet apart from. Repp digs deeply into the intimacy and danger of secrets—-who we tell, who we hide the truth from, and what those decisions reveal about who we are. These are stories firmly located in the American landscape of social class and struggle, stories of people operating on the margins, struggling to get by, struggling to define what “getting by” means. In Heart of Joy, John Repp creates an amazing range of characters, and we care about each and every one of them. We know these people, and through these stories, we know their bruised hearts.
—Jim Daniels,
Thomas Stockham Baker Professor of English, Carnegie Mellon University,
author of Mr. Pleasant (stories, Michigan State University Press)
John Repp lives in Erie, Pennsylvania, with his wife, the visual artist Katherine Knupp, and their son, Dylan. Author of nine collections of poetry and one collection of short-short fiction, Repp is a Resident Artist at the Tom Ridge Environmental Center and teaches at Edinboro University of Pennsylvania.