G. Pascal Zachary

Writing fiction is both response to the world as I find it, and also an activity I've engaged in, if not secretly then privately, across my four decades as a journalist, writer and teacher. I've engaged a wide variety of literary styles; I've published a memoir, a biography, a study of globalization and a a book comtemporary African affairs, based on some 50 visits I made to the region since 2000. Somehow I sandwiched writing fiction in between the spaces in my long publishing career. Below are the titles for 24 stories in my first fiction collection. The title of collection is drawn from the penultimate story, which is also the longest:

1.     The Tryout
2.     The Great Tenandeho White Water Derby
3.     Schopenhauer's Defeat
4.     Annals of Science: The Caldwell Farm
5.     Her First Job

6.     The Mike & Rozzie Show
7.     Esquire
8.     Goats
9.     Immokalee
10. The Pleasures of Pain
11. The Last Hack
12. Out of Print
13. From Chisinau, With Love
14. Leaving Kosovo

15. Ama
16. A Tro-Tro After Dark
17. The Women of Ghana are Trembling
18. The Harmattan
19. Amina's Dream
20. The Queen of Maasai Trio
21. The Elephant Man
22. Carrie Wore A White Bikini
23. Someone Left the Cake Out in the Rain
24. The Kidnapper's Lament

Since their initial conception, most stories in Someone Left the Cake Out in the Rain have been substantially revised, chiefly in the past five years (the year of first draft of each story is given at the end of each story). Under the influence of Maupassant, Conrad, Kate Chopin, Crane, John O'Hara and the Ugandan fiction writer Doreen Baingana, I came to adopt new (to me) approaches to storytelling and narration. The result was profound: I saw tales familiar to me in a new light, and identified more compelling, animating and pleasing ways to tell them. As an older writer – now in the autumn of my life -- I feel freed enough from past growing pains as a fiction writer to declare, modestly but insistently: I believe in these stories, and I passionately wish to bring them out of the "shadow world" of my private existence and into the public world of my non-fiction writing on history, technological change, computing, African affairs and our globalizing world. As the author of a book originally entitled The Global Me (on publication in 2000), I am not surprised that many of the stories collected here are set around the world and present, in part, the collision of diverse cultures, expectations and life practices. What unites these stories in my mind is suggested by the subtitle, "Stories of Eroded Innocence." In these stories no one ever gets everything he or she wants; no one behaves always well or badly, ethically or immorally, right or wrong. The harsh verdicts of experience – whether delivering the expected or the unexpected -- diminish, degrade and reshape the dreams of my characters, even when they triumph over adversity -- and find dignity, renewed hope and a fresh sense of purity and peace in their sometimes-dangerous, often-delicious lives.

the manual portable typewriter on which I wrote fiction in late 1970s. Demanded a great deal of pounding on tiny keys that struck actual paper!

Writers can't be too careful in an era where words and actions are often confused.

Someone Left the Cake Out in the Rain:
Stories of Innocence Lost

I've been writing fiction for nearly 50 years, and my forthcoming collection of stories represents my first fiction in print.

January 30, 2025

In preparing Someone Left the Cake Out in the Rain, I chose to order my stories according to the year of my first draft, starting with "The Tryout" in 1977 and ending with "The Kidnapper's Lament," which I began and completed in 2020.

Here's the shortest story in the collection, and one of the first stories I completed, entitled, "Annals of Science: The Caldwell Farm". Original draft, 1980:

   There, on the knoll looking over Beaver Valley, behind the trees and the small white farmhouse, Sven Johnson dismembered his wife with an electric saw. While incarcerated in the Jefferson County Jail, he bartered the property to his attorney, Charles Caldwell. With a fine Victorian residence of his own in nearby Port Townsend, Caldwell had little need for the farm and left it to his son.
     Only 24 at the time of his greatest discoveries, James Caldwell had never even visited a farm as a child. Yet at the University of Washington, where he taught zoology, Caldwell pondered the death of the self-sufficient family farm. Though he characteristically failed to record the place and time where he first seized on his radical insights into small-scale agriculture, his students contend that it happened here, in this farmhouse.
     Historically, we know, chickens and cows have been the mainstays of the family farm. The Caldwell farm was no exception, and James initially tested his theories on these ordinary animals. In later years, his husbandry methods were shown, by scientists around the world, to work with all domesticated livestock.
     Though he used sophisticated mathematics to prove his theories, anyone could understand the practical concerns that spurred his research: how much energy would be saved if hens could collect their own eggs, if cows could milk themselves?
     In less than two years, the young Caldwell divined the answers. An additional problem – inducing beef cattle to commit suicide, in order to greatly simplify the operation of the slaughterhouse – vexed Caldwell for six more years. He wrote bitterly to friends of his failure to be the be the first to perfect this seminal advancement. As the world now well knows, Albert Heald, the British zoologist and winner of the Nobel Prize in biology, patented the first "suicidal cow" a scant three weeks before Caldwell published his own work.

Writer, Teacher, Historian

Someone Left the Cake Out in the Rain:
Stories of Innocence Lost

I've been writing fiction for nearly 50 years, and my forthcoming collection of stories represents my first fiction in print.

From Eudora Welty, Preface to "Collected Stories," 1980:

In praise of Mark Kavanagh, my literary lodestar