Baron Wormser's New Novel

Baron Wormser's new novel, Songs from a Voice will be available in the spring of 2020. Baron is the author of fifteen books, including the novel Tom o’ Vietnam and the memoir The Road Washes Out in Spring. He has been poet laureate of the state of Maine (2000–2005) and received an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree from the University of Maine at Augusta in 2005. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He also is the Founding Director of Frost Place Conference on Poetry and Teaching in Franconia, New Hampshire. He offers workshops throughout the United States, teaches in Fairfield University’s MFA Program, and lives with his wife Janet in Montpelier, Vermont.

No one can speak for Bob Dylan except Bob Dylan. Fiction, however, has other thoughts and in Songs from a Voice, Being the Recollections, Stanzas and Observations of Abe Runyan, Song Writer and Performer Baron Wormser has created a narrator who offers a first-person take on the years that begin in the spaces of the upper Midwest and wind up in the streets of Greenwich Village. As a parallel figure, Abe puts forward a chain of circumstances, influences and predilections that lead the reader into the mystery of where one era-changing artist came from. The story that is told by Abe is not a shadow dance with facts but an evocation of what went into the making of a musical soul, right down to the quatrains that he writes as part of his tale and as lyrical notes to himself. As a novel, Songs from a Voice is a homage, investigation, sly nod and, ultimately, an affirmation of the strength of one man’s imagination.