Sometimes at night when the wind moves in the trees and the moon skips from cloud to cloud I get to thinking. Where now is Jennifer, or Eileen, or Christina? Why did I do that? Why didn't I do this instead? How could I have been so stupid? I remember faces, names, moods of moment. And maybe another story is born. Most of us remember defining moments in our own lives. That's what I tried to do in these ten stories. Go back. Examine. Wonder. There's regret here, and humor, ugliness, sex. There's the sheer joy of writing. I feel it. I want you to feel it too. "To write -- for me those two words justified everything," thinks 28-year old Larry wandering Europe in my story "A Friendly Game." This juggling of memories and present occurred also in my first volume of short stories, "Good Looking Bloke and Other Stories." But in this volume I think I cut closer to the bone. Hard things happen in "Heartless," "Teresa the Ennobler," and "The Broken Bow." Sex hovers, and plays its role. There's enthusiasm, the joy of adventure. In "So This Is New York," Dave Janssen, 24, on his first trip to Greenwich Village, walks into the San Remo bar on Bleecker Street after a long drive from Virginia. He sees a young man carrying three beers and a lemon. "Hey, you need all those beers?" somebody calls. "Don't speak to me," the young guy answers. "Speak to the lemon." Dave, rapt, feels he as ridden many miles and arrived at the right place. We visit Montana, Vermont, North Carolina, the beaches of the Hamptons. We wander Europe. I began "A Friendly Game" years ago in Paris. "So This Is New York" and "Mountain Music" graduate, with some changes, from my novel "Mountain Girl." I wrote the other seven stories between October, 2011 and August, 2012. Some gestated in memory or as "memos for future stories" for years. We'll see in these pages the Island of Ibiza, raw, before the jet airport and the crowds came. We'll visit the net-stockinged waitresses and coffee houses of Greenwich Village in the 1960s, play football in Montana, join a bridge gang on a railroad in Iowa. We'll walk tobacco fields with North Carolina tenant farmers and court a heartless young lady at Westhampton Beach. We'll hear a fundamentalist preacher troll for money and hike the Appalachian Trail. We'll meet, at a singles party, a young black woman with a cure for what ails a 31-year old divorced Midwesterner beginning a new career in New York. Life. Might we have lived it better? Or we might have done worse. Let's pull back the curtains and tussle with what we see. # # #

Wade Talbot relishes the chaos of journalism. He starts as editor of weekly newspaper in North Carolina and becomes a reporter in New York just as the civil rights struggles explode in the 1960s. Becky Anderson leaps from her little southern town to college, to New York and then to Europe, where through sheer grit she becomes a force in the movie business. Wade romanticizes his boyhood in the hills of home. Becky, perennially short of money, can't wait to break away. But something clicks between them. They compete, they quarrel, they savage each other, and one day in the deep, rolling hills of old Virginia they come together. MOUNTAIN GIRL is a history of the Amercian civil rights movement, a gritty travelogue with stops in Paris and an island in the Mediterranean, and a sexual duel in which both partners learn and grow. Becky loses a baby. She and Wade begin to hike the 2,200 mile Appalachian Trail. Wade finds, finally, a theme for the novel he wants to write. But at a cost. He walks alone at the end to keep a promise, to climb a special mountain.

Recently divorced, hoping to jumpstart his journalistic career at the prestigious Washington Herald, Kyle Hansen returns to Montana to write a series of articles on the upcoming Lewis and Clark Bicentennial, and on his first day back he meets Ginny Foster, the tall, striking wife of a football coach he hated. Pursue, Kyle thinks, for lust, for revenge, but he has only two weeks. Then five white men assault two Indian kids in a bar and in retaliation Montana's Blackfoot Tribe blockades roads in and out of Glacier Park. Kyle's editor, Jack Leventhal, assigns him to stay and cover the story. Kyle wanders haunted battlefields. He seeks a mysterious Holy Road. He climbs Bear Butte in South Dakota, a mountain sacred to many Indian tribes. He dances the legendary ghost dance. He asks to be absolved of his wrongs, He asks to see his dead brother again. Kyle's college football teammate Salmon Thirdkill, school principal on a God forsaken Indian reservation, becomes dangerously involved. Someone masterminds a series of cattle killings. Politicians mangle things. Charles Rodenbough, author of several books, writes in his review, ..".Kyle Hansen discovers he can not be a savior. He can use his newspaperman's shell of insensitivity to get to the story, but is he using his friends or are they using him?" David Aronson, author of a guide to sophisticated stock market investing, says in his review: "Ken writes, 'Like most reporters over thirty, Kyle Hansen had little faith in human nature.' Yet he gives us a man who on the darkest of nights can glimpse ahead the lights of Twodot or the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation and drive on with anticipation..." We see the importance of sports in little prairie towns. We see the loneliness of great spaces. Ever in the background is Kyle's memory of his brother drowning on the Blackfoot River, on a college raft trip Kyle organized. Charles Rodenbough says: "This is not a story of 'you can't go home again.' It is the story of the introspective exercise that most of us go through some time in life when performing our lives, we step on a rake.'" The Lewistown, Montana News Argus, in its review of the book, says: "Ken's deep Montana roots are evident in the landscape and story of the novel. He vividly captures the texture of growing up in Montana in the second half of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st...The real-life near drowning of his brother haunted Ken through the decades since that day on the Blackfoot on Western Montana. 'I asked myself years later, 'What if he did drown?' and that's when I began writing the book.'" Kyle Hansen perseveres. Magnetism propels him and Ginny Foster together. Violence rears. Choices must be made. "Sports," Kyle learns, can break your heart.

Can a Lutheran stockbroker from the Midwest and a Jewish financial headhunter from Great Neck find happiness? Well, maybe, if they climb New York State's biggest mountain together. We're talking Fire Island and the Hamptons and group summer houses and art parties on 57th Street. It's summer, 1972, two new World Trade Center towers reach for the sky and the Dow Jones Industrials bid to top 1000 for the first time. But people are people and problems are problems and Scott Lehmann and Jennifer Cohen encounter their share. Scott pictures himself, in the end, like Gary Cooper in High Noon, flinging his badge to the dust and striding away. But it's not that easy. There's the elusive Jennifer, and the glitter of Wall Street, and the yellow-green, ever-moving translucent numbers...

I did not set out to write about sex, though in some of these stories it does appear that's what makes the turkey trot. Rather, the beginning was mundane enough. Not long ago I discovered two boxes of old letters in the basement of our house in Vermont, letters I received and saved between the ages of 18 and 31. For reasons I can not explain, these crinkly typed and written pages ignited a creative frenzy. I rewrote four old short stories and over the next several months created seven new ones. Do I have a favorite? I like them all, but it struck me in my final run-through for this volume that there was only one story, My Friend, in which I did not change a single word. Here they are, hormones and all. I hope you enjoy.

Wade Talbot relishes the chaos of journalism. He starts as an editor of a weekly newspaper in North Carolina and becomes a reporter in New York just as the civil rights struggles explode in the 1960s. Becky Anderson leaps from her little southern town to college, to New York and then to Europe, where through sheer grit she becomes a force in the movie business. Wade romanticizes his boyhood in the hills of home. Becky, perennially short of money, can't wait to break away. But something clicks between them. They compete, they quarrel, they savage each other, and one day in the deep rolling hills of old Virginia they come together. Carolyn Pfeiffer, producer of many movies including The Whales of August, said of Mountain Girl, "It takes us to worlds lost and changed, to placed marked in the heart and wistfully remembered, as told through the eyes of an author who lived it and remembered and now asks us to live it with him." Wyatt Durrette, trail lawyer, author and 1985 Republican candidate for Governor of Virginia, wrote, "Ken takes us places you've never been and makes you feel that you were there. You catch glimpses of your own life, special moments when the coincidence of love and passion set sail, what is, what might have been. I am grateful I read this novel." Mountain Girl is a primer on the American civil rights movement, a gritty travelogue with stops in Paris and an island in the Mediterranean, and a sexual duel in which both partners learn and grow. Becky and Wade begin to hike the 2,200 mile Appalachian Trail, and Wade finds, finally, a theme for the novel he wants to write. But at a cost. He walks alone at the end to keep a promise, to climb a special mountain.

GHOST DANCE, About the Book Recently divorced, hoping to jumpstart his journalistic career at the prestigious Washington Herald, Kyle Hansen returns to Montana to write a series of articles on the upcoming Lewis and Clark Bicentennial, and on his first day back he meets Ginny Foster, the tall, striking wife of a football coach he hated. Pursue, Kyle thinks, for lust, for revenge, but he has only two weeks. Then five whites assault two Indian kids in a bar and in retaliation the Blackfoot Tribe blockades roads in and out of Glacier Park. Kyle's editor, Jack Levanthal, assigns him to stay and cover the story. Kyle wanders haunted battlefields. He seeks a mysterious holy road. He climbs a sacred mountain and alone on its summit performs the legendary ghost dance. He asks to see his dead brother again. Kyle's college football teammate, Salmon Thirdkill, school principal on a God forsaken Indian reservation, becomes dangerously involved. Someone masterminds a series of cattle killings. Politicians mangle things. Magnetism propels Kyle and Ginny together. Violence rears. Choices must be made. Sports, Kyle learns, can break your heart.

I didn't set out to write about sex, though in some of these stories it does appear that that's what makes the turkey trot. Rather, the beginning was mundane enough. In August, 2008, I discovered two boxes of old letters in the basement of our house in Vermont, letters I received and saved between the ages of 18 and 29. For reasons I can t explain, these crinkly typed and written pages ignited in me a creative frenzy. I resurrected and rewrote four old short stories and over the next eight months created seven new ones. Have I a favorite? I like them all, but it struck me in my final run-through for this volume that there was only one story, MY FRIEND, in which I did not change a single word. Here they are, hormones and all. Enjoy.

Can a Lutheran stockbroker from the Midwest and an ambitious Jewish financial headhunter from Great Neck find happiness? Well, maybe, if they climb New York State's biggest mountain together, We're talking Fire Island and the Hamptons and group summer houses and art parties on 57th Street. It's summer, 1972, two new World Trade Center towers reach for the sky and the Dow Jones Industrials bid to top 1000 for the first time. But people are people and problems are problems and Scott Lehmann and Jennifer Cohen encounter their share. Scott pictures himself, in the end, like Gary Cooper in High Noon, flinging his badge to the dust and striding away. But it's not that easy. There's the elusive Jennifer, and the glitter of Wall Street, and the yellow-green, ever-moving translucent numbers...