Robert Vander Lugt

Robert and his wife live near Grand Rapids, Michigan where he and his family operate a retail hardware business. “Onslaught,” the first story in the collection, Sand, Smoke, Current, received editor’s choice honors from Relief and was featured in issue 7.1. His fiction has also been selected for publication in two short story anthologies. Vander Lugt’s non-fiction has appeared in The Other Journal, Perspectives, Catapult, and The Banner.

Reviews of Sand, Smoke, Current

"Like letters of encouragement penned by a divine hand, the best of these stories read like parables of a parallel universe, one which is still being shaped by the grace of God and not by popular culture. Wise, unearthly, and other-worldly stories by an author with feet planted squarely on the ground and an eye cocked toward heaven." 
--Mark Richard, author of The Ice at the Bottom of the World and Charity, and a bestselling novel, Fishboy

"Robert Vander Lugt’s characters share a certain uncertainty in a fashion that not only makes them shadowy, somehow less (or more) than real, but also lends the stories a fable-like feel, both compelling and mysterious. Don’t get me wrong.  Time and place is very real in these stories—we’re with him on the lake front, often in the company of boys becoming men. But the outlines are indistinct enough for all of us to find a place beside them on the beach, in the home, with the family.  Vander Lugt’s people are never anti-heroes, unusual in this era; but neither are they fanciful. It wasn’t hard to find myself in this compelling collection of tales. Once there amid the shadows, I didn’t want to leave." 
--James Calvin Schaap, author of Romey's Place and Touches the Sky

"Award-winning author Robert Vander Lugt presents Sand Smoke, Current, an anthology of short stories set in the Midwest, a land known for its long winters punctuated by brief, vibrant bursts of spring, summer, and autumn. Populated with ordinary, salt-of-the-earth people who grapple with both common, practical problems and the far-reaching big questions, Sand, Smoke, Current has a lyrical, muse-like quality to its everyday for the everyman narratives. Highly recommended." 
--"Reviewer's Choice," James A. Cox, Editor-in-Chief, Midwest Book Review