Foreword from Above Neil Rock by James Ross Kelly
This book is original in terms of being new stories in part, but with stories and poems, from two other books of mine. So, I must offer this introduction as a descriptive menu of sorts. This work is a collection over time, of my writing beginning in 1973. I started college in 1971 to get out of the U.S. Army three months early. There was no other motive. I had done well in English and Journalism classes in High School—and little else. College was very different, but I gravitated to these arts none-the-less and did well. I was encouraged to graduate and seek an MFA. I didn’t, finding after recovering from injury making ends meet between terms, that life was happening, and it mostly happened outside academia. That decision might not have been well-considered.
I worked as a journalist, editor, grant writer, as well as bartender, tree planter, briefly as a logger, and various trade jobs from cabinetry and floor finishing to factory work. Life happens to us all. Eventually life caught up with me and like High School and College I ended up with a career in writing. I retired as a writer editor in the Federal sector, mostly the U. S. Forest Service where I advanced to a team leader of Environmental Interdisciplinary Teams for Environmental Impact Statements in Alaska.
I had written short stories and poems in college and after. Over time the notion of attempting literature was always there but it was seemingly as a form of cosmic microwave background radiation. Before 2000 I had a few pieces published and a slim chapbook of poems that came out from a literary Handset Letter Press in Vancouver, BC in 1984. So mostly it was jobs in sawdust and sweat, with interludes of running a keyboard putting words on paper. When I had children, seeking a day job with insurance sent me back to use my English skills to make a living but with no thought of the element of literature. That said, of course other people will decide if this is literature or not. I ended my 20 years in Federal Service, (half of which had been in Alaska) and retired. Having settled in Northern California, I pulled all my journals and notes and short stories and poems out of a couple cardboard boxes and began the effort writing and rewriting the contents there. The creative non-fiction essays about the U.S. Army I wrote on a legal pad in San Francisco while visiting a friend with a day job and drinking in an Irish bar in the evenings where the IRA hunger strikers’ portraits were displayed on a special table. This was in 1981, and I had been out of the Army for a decade.
The memoir of my childhood in Kansas and Southern Oregon just gravitated into the cardboard boxes over the years as well. About four decades of my life was in Southern Oregon so that setting is the lion’s share of this book. I wrote some speculative and fictional reality too. None of those stories are in this book though they are in And the Fires We Talked About available on book seller sites.
I brought over a couple of other stories written in the third person in this book, “The Fire Itself,” being one of them that I absolutely could not get down on paper as a first-person account.
“Both Men Were Heavyweights,” I heard over a warming fire on a cold late season deer hunting trip in Southern Oregon and filled in the necessary background. I include these stories with memoir and non-fiction here with no apologies.
While these stories and poems have flown into place with reflection, I have made only a slight attempt to adhere to a linear presentation although some of them are interrelated to one another and are placed contiguously. A good number of the stories here started out as poems. After the third editor that told me they should be stories I began the work to do that—not the easy task I first thought it would be. These are all simply stories and descriptions of profound and poignant intermezzos and relationships in my life that I found I had to put on paper.
My book of Poems, Black Ice & Fire, which was published in 2021 has poems here as well, because they seemed to want to be in here—for no better reason. And I decided to not corral them in their own fenced in section.
The other reason for this collection is that after the 2020 book of stories I began to get more acceptance in periodicals and Journals. And perhaps this book is coming out now because it is the collection I wanted out there. I decided to use my own abilities with book design and self-publish this collection. So, I end this missive as a kind of train conductor, and if you have bought a ticket by a purchase of this book and read on from here—it is my hope you enjoy the ride.
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Some of the stories and poems from Above Neil Rock have been published in the following Journals:
“The Other Night at the Log Cabin,” Rogue Valley Weekly War Whoop & Moral Volcano, 1978; “The Forester,” Rogue Valley Weekly War Whoop & Moral Volcano, 1978; “Demoiselle,” The Red Gate & Other Poems Cowan & Tetley 1984 and WILDsound Writing Festival 2025; “The Red Gate,” The Red Gate & Other Poems Cowan & Tetley 1984; ‘Two voices from a campfire long ago,” Poetry Motel 1983; “Death & Poetry,” Poetry Motel 1983; “Above Lyman’s Riffle,” Fiction Attic 2015; “My Car,” was published in “When I was Seventeen,” by Silver Birch Press, 2018; “Now Let Me Tell You This Story,” The Purpled Nail 2019 and The Galway Review 2022; “Pacific Yew,” Silver Birch Press 2019; “That’s a Mad Thing to Look At!” True Chili 2020; “How They Kept Geronimo in a Cage,” True Chili, 2019; “Caught Up in the Air,” True Chili, 2020; “We All called Him Pappy,” True Chili, 2021; “Surely Goodness and Mercy,” Blood & Bourbon, 2022; “The Fire Itself,” Still Point Arts Press, 2023, “The Farm,” “The Flood,” “Why the Fairy Shrimp Left,” Lost Lake Folk Opera Magazine, 2023; “Both Men Were Heavyweights,” The Raw Art Review, 2024; and “No Greater Love,” The Purpled Nail 2025
The book has received several positive reviews:
Two reviews from Publisher’s Weekly: from their Annual Contest “Booklife Prize—2024” for Non-Fiction Memoir here where they kindly post other reviews of this work as well. While I did not win the big prize the book garnered praise “The reader may be reminded of Bret Harte’s work, if Harte had lived in ‘the bloodiest century of human existence’ and experimented with LSD.” They went on with “James Ross Kelly’s masterful storytelling and departure from a traditional memoir model makes the author’s experiences come alive for readers.”
Above Neil Rock also received an “Editor’s Pick” category in this noted periodical when it was published in 2024 where they wrote: “Lyric and moving, both prose and poems are shot through with an unnamable pain, a longing for something intangible. Kelly compares the evil in this world to a minotaur trapped in a maze, often breaking out and causing untold destruction. Kelly’s honest and unsparing gaze doesn’t absolve his own countrymen too, but he sees hope in the philosophy of universal love. A poignant read.”
Above Neil Rock received three Five Star Reviews from Readers Favorite in 2024 that are available on the above-mentioned Publisher’s Weekly Booklife site.
The cover below is from the Barnes and Noble edition of Above Neil Rock out in 2025:
Here is a YouTube video of one of the Poems in the book. This one relates the tragic Tsunami caused by massive earthquake in Anchorage, Alaska that hit Crescent City California in 1964. I had a boss who was on the logging crew that went into town to drink beer at a tavern in Crescent City. He had opted for staying in Camp. His mates on hearing a Tidal wave was about to hit Crescent City harbour foolishly decided to buy beers and go to the dock and watch it come in. Two of the men were never found.
Kelly’s piercing collection of memoir pieces and poems leaves the reader with a vague ache in the heart. Jim, orphaned after his parents separate, is raised by his uncle and aunt in Southern Oregon, where his grandfather also comes to live with the family. In some ways it is an idyllic childhood, roaming the woods and working the farm, hunting and listening to his grandfather’s tales. But as he tries to live “an honorable life,” Jim also feels an undercurrent of loss as he yearns for his father, mother, and brother. As a veteran who is ultimately discharged with “no medals, no wounds, no horrific nightmare memories, but with a sense of the machine of military mind that operated on fear and redoubled itself with vast sums of money,” Jim contends and tries to come to terms with collective guilt, often doubting if humanity was humane enough.
Poems & Stories by James Ross Kelly-- 