Make It Good

The Stories in My Early Life

"I remember looking up at my grandmother's back-lit face from my baby carriage on a late-summer day in the minute front garden of our four-family home on Rockaway Parkway in Brooklyn," says novelist and poet Barry Sheinkopf. "I could not have been more than a year old. And I remember creeping stealthily at the age of three through the tall weeds of the empty lot next door, in search of Japanese submarines. "But so what? I have been a poet for most of my life and a photographer for an awful lot of it, and I can appreciate the evocative power of images. They're not stories, though, and never can be. They have no beginning, middle, and end. As such, they contain no upshot, no behavioral denouement, and I think a person can learn very little from them about the endlessness of human nature. "I therefore decided early on in embarking on this book that I wanted to avoid mere chatter and to ask of every chapter in it, 'But so what?' What did it mean to me, and what will it mean to a reader? If I couldn't answer the first question, the second wouldn't be worth asking. "The result may seem a patchwork. Some people who spent a lot of time with me and knew me well don't appear in it at all; others, whom I came to know only glacingly, do. But this is, for better or worse, a tale of aha! moments that together offer the whole of what I think my life taught me in my early years. I offer it for the amusement and entertainment of my readers, of whom I hope my grandson may be one. But who knows—and so what if he isn't?"