The Dana Point Stories

“Jug Chablis” is the second story in my story blog.

http://storiesofdennislittrell.blogspot.com/

This story actually won a third place prize some years ago in a literary magazine competition. I don't recall what magazine it was. However the story has never been published. It is one of the “Dana Point” stories that I wrote in the late seventies and early eighties. The are perhaps a dozen of them, some of them pretty good. This one is, by all accounts that I have heard, the best of them all.

The idea was what I called “participatory journalism” after the manner of Hunter S. Thompson, Tom Wolfe and others except that it would be fiction. I did some on the street research but I imagined all the action. Nonetheless all fiction has a factual basis in some respects and the Dana Point stories are no exception.

In “Jug Chablis” Dana has placed an ad in the "SoCal Singles Tabloid" looking for “ordinary extraordinary people.” I won't spoil the story by saying any more. As I said, it's a very good story.

I tried for years to market the stories as a book, first as a collection of short stories and then as a kind of episodic novel. I called the novel, after the song by the Mamas and the Papas, California Dreaming. The plot centered on Dana Point who felt overshadowed by his very successful wife who worked for a New York fashion magazine. They were living in New Jersey and he was trying to “write.” He decided that he needed some experience in the world and they tried a trial separation. In one sense it was a test of their marriage; in another it was a chance to sow some wild oats. I won't anticipate the ending, but the central part of the tale involved his adventures in participatory journalism in California.

I'll be posting more of the Dana Point stories in the story blog along with other stories.

--Dennis Littrell