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JUST RUNAWAYS
Fragments From The Correspondence To My Mother - Chicago to New York, 1970/71

First 40 signed/numbered copies sold out.

Can be personalized — request when purchasing.

The collection of stories that make up what we call our identities is made up of numerous, somewhat cohesive, larger histories. Within these mythic sections there are smaller chapters, whose various segments are interlocked with spun tales, adventurous episodes, dramatic scenes, romantic chronicles and mundane reports.
Held together by memory, that carnival house mirror, we adjust the pages and polish the cover, adding new pages with every passing day. Very few events, only those on the scale of births or deaths, truly shake up that basic narrative we carry of who we are.

In March of 2017, two tightly intertwined stories from many decades past, ones that the author had assumed he would never know the resolution of, were suddenly pulled like rabbits from a hat. The revelations brought with them perspective-shifting joy, as well as shades of unresolved profound horror dating back to 30 December 1982.

This small book was created to hold together those experiences, with tendrils reaching into the past as well as the future, to bind their altering of perspective to the author's larger collection of life stories.

Assembled from shuffled non-linear fragments, culled from the letters he wrote to his mother during 1970 and 1971, it is a simple glimpse into the innocence, fear, joy and quotidian diversions of two young people.

The story begins on 8 February 1970 when the runaways leave New York City - the author fleeing the Selective Service draft, his girlfriend Gail an abusive father - and ends, with a door open to an unknown future, in March 2017.

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Goodreads review by author, artist Stefan Szczelkun

This short text based artists book is about the limits of truth, or a particular kind of truth. The bookwork is made up of excerpts from real letters home from an 18 year old runaway who is evading draft in the USA at the start of the Seventies. This covers a two year period. He is with a young girlfriend who is evading her abusive father. The letters to his mother are recognisable as the writing of a person leaving home for the first time. They are on the whole mundane and affecting, although the parts about being a conscientious objector give the whole a dramatic edge, as the prospect of a prison sentence bears down on the mundane accounts of these teenagers finding their first rented flats and cash-in-hand jobs.

What raises this to an examination of truth is that the inner cover announces that there is a powerful story that is NOT told the parent. In fact the account cleverly evades any suggestion of it happening. This hidden story is that the young girlfriend becomes pregnant and has a baby, which they decide they have to give up for adoption. As readers we search in vain for any evidence of this personally momentous event, which must have emotionally dominated at least six to nine months for the two of them. Sadly, at the end of the two year period the relationship ends.

So although what is told the mother is all ‘true’, the facts paper over an enormous existential experience and subsequent loss. Parental emotions are overbearing and often controlling. This is perhaps especially hard to manage in the period in which we enter adulthood. In this bookwork the whole archetypal scenario is ramped up by the revealed drama of draft evasion and the hidden story of loss of teenage parenthood. Most of us have experienced holding back on what we could tell our families.

This dual dynamic of truth in action is repeated in many other theatres of human communication. The limits of truth telling are human self-interest and the emotionally narrow spaces we have to talk to each other about our situations. So this work has an existential resonance.

The inner back page of ‘Just Runaways’ reveals a moving and a shocking denouement. These two things heighten the impact of what we have just read and underline its importance.