The year is 1962 and young Weldon Thatcher, caught between two worlds (boyhood and manhood, cartoons and raging hormones) is coerced by his mother and the local preacher into attending Edenfield College, a Protestant icon and a place straightaway paranoid about influences from the outside world. Though Weldon is fashioned from a childhood of perfect Sunday school attendance, he brings to Edenfield a determined curiosity to know what lies beyond the boundaries of God’s moral code and the stuff of religion. It is in this context, and in a world beyond his adolescent experience, that he is awakened to a centuries-old chasm of religious dogma.
At its deepest level, Edenfield is an all-embracing, coming-of-age account of a young man in transition and caught up in the most intricate aspects of faith-based academia grounded in the narrowed tenets of fundamentalism: from classroom to dorm room, from prayer meeting to revival meeting, from spirituality to sacrilege, from lust to love—its affects holding sway even after thirty years and well beyond what Weldon thought was his last goodbye.
Done as a flashback, Edenfield’s overall structure is a first-person narrative; character driven with rich insights into the world of faith-based academia. The site of the principal action is Edenfield College, which, in itself, takes on the part of a character; that is, it is not merely a backdrop against which the action occurs—and which forms the borders of Weldon Thatcher’s world—but one that acts upon him as well.
Justice describes what his goals were when writing Edenfield, “In the telling of Edenfield, I wanted to shed light on the pitfalls inherent with coming of age—a time when the pain of self-introspection takes up the bigger part of one’s reality. In hindsight, I’m hoping these Edenfield experiences will, in some emblematic way, become part of someone’s survival guide.”
George Justice holds a B.A. in English Literature from the University of Detroit. He has been published five times for short stories, three times for poetry, and was a long-time movie critic for Michigan’s Oakland County Daily Tribune. During his enlistment with the U.S. Army, he wrote numerous articles (from human interest to military) for Stars and Stripes. While at the University of Detroit, he was honored by being one-of-twelve chosen from a field of over 300 for a semester-long advanced creative writing symposium conducted by then writer-in-residence, John Gardner. His first novel Greezy Creek was published in September 2019. He and his wife reside in Ferndale, Michigan.