Stoneport
by
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"On the drive home, Eli watched the wind slice the last of the leaves away from the bones of trees, relieved to be on the far side of the glass bead curtain. He had become a psychotherapist because he wanted to understand emotional pain and how people cope with it. He was drawn to couples work by the mystery of the ways male and female relate. After his presentation, he was praised for his insight. He had kept his promise to himself to become a scholar of the interpersonal relationship. But as he drove, the elation was wearing off , and he became uneasy. Something was missing.... He could not take students or patients along paths he had not traveled. Unbeknownst to them, his own journey was on a parallel course, just out of sight, as if behind those trees over there with the ravens in them. He found comfort within the structures of academia, but he was still no better at formless wandering than he had been years ago in the T-group. Who was he to lecture on human interaction? What did he know about love?"
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About the Book
“An eye-opening look at the world of psychology told through a complicated romance…. A substantive, multilayered story of sexual tension and betrayal.”
– Kirkus Reviews
“ ‘Wind and water and shoreline can’t be changed. We have to work with the elements as they are.’ So writes longtime Buddhist practitioner and social worker Hill Anderson in Stoneport, a sophisticated novel that explores the figurative shorelines, or borders, between men and women, thought and emotion, and truth and fiction.
Intricate without unnecessary complexity, Stoneport weaves several story lines together to create whole cloth. When first introduced, Eli Fox is a young man. Eventually, he becomes an experienced therapist and supervises a bright young doctor named Meagan Rush. The story follows their unorthodox relationship, along with the traumas of the patients they counsel and ground-shaking changes in the field of behavioral medicine itself.
Anderson’s decades of experience is evident in his refined descriptions of his characters’ deepest doubts and highest hopes. His language is precise and evocative. For instance, he summarizes Eli’s childhood memories with lines like, “He remembered his childhood with a sense of defeat and the awareness of a wound that did not bleed.” Anderson’s imagery brings thoughts and emotions vividly to life.
Sea metaphors are central to Anderson’s storytelling, and his tale fittingly moves like a gently bobbing boat in a quiet harbor before he unleashes a storm of conflict. Eli, Meagan, their confused clients, and eccentric colleagues become familiar friends, and then the questions begin. Is Eli and Meagan’s relationship inappropriate? Will its exposure ruin Eli’s career? Are the therapists being forced into unethical treatment methods by the encroaching insurance industry? Anderson skillfully paces the action so that these conflicts almost simultaneously reach peak tension.”
– Five Star Clarion Review by Sheila M. Trask
About the Author
HILL ANDERSON MSW has been a psychotherapist and a student of Eastern philosophy for decades. He has worked full-time in places as varied as a state mental hospital, a community mental health center, and on the faculty of an Ivy League department of psychiatry, with first hand knowledge of all the settings portrayed in this story. He has had a lifelong meditation practice in the Tibetan and Shambhala Buddhist tradition, and presently resides, writes, and practices in the hills of rural Vermont.