And what's been tossed up on the beach lately?

Here's how good Dianne Eberett Beeaff can be:

The narrator is a young woman who's been sleeping around as a way to protect herself from commitment and potential pain. She's agreed to go out with a man who is both right for and interested in her:

"As a rule, I avoid Seaport Village. Too much unmanageable romance. Too many overstimulating sea breezes, babbling brooks, and so forth. Tonight, a riot of last summer flowers and mellowed lamplight suffuse the place with a fairy-tale expectancy, and calf-eyed couples drift down the cobblestoned walkways, meandering past balloon stalls and soda fountains, carousels and book niches. All of this threatens my objectivity."

In one paragraph we learn a great deal about the character and her feelings, the place and the time (late summer, evening), and the author's done it without breaking a sweat.

The author's book is On Tràigh Lar Beach, a collection of stories. You can visit Tràigh (pronounced "try") Lar beach on the west coast of Isle of Harris in the Outer Hebrides. Beeaff writes that flotsam is carried on the Gulf Stream from the New World and dots the sand.

She says, "I have written professionally for many years beginning in the area of magazine journalism. I self-published two books: the memoir A Grand Madness, Ten Years on the Road with U2 and Homecoming. More recently, I had two other books traditionally published: Power's Garden and Spirit Stones. I was always inspired by some personal experience that lead me to explore a specific area, era, subject or personality."

She says that years ago she visited the Outer Hebrides. "We stayed just down the road from Tràigh Lar Beach, in the hamlet of Rodel. Walking on beach one afternoon, I noticed several items tangled in the seaweed and jotted them down in my journal. Years passed and, as I finished up the sequel to my memoir [A Grand Madness, U2 Twenty Years After], I began working on these stories."

It's an interesting book, unusually well-designed and attractive. It consists of 14 short stories—some very short—and a novella. As a framing device, an unnamed narrator is vacationing in the Outer Hebrides with her husband. She has just won a prize for her novella and had "a two-book contract flung across my shoulders like a length of chain mail." Casting about for a subject she visits the beach and inspiration is waiting in the sand.

Each story involves a different object, character, and (mostly) place. The objects include an empty ketchup holder, a packet of arthritis pills, the handle of a child's bucket, a disposable syringe, a wine bottle cork, a plastic laundry basket. (It struck me that this could make a writing class assignment: Write about a jar of pickled onions . . . a camera lens cap . . . an artificial lotus blossom.)

These stories are mostly short, six or eight printed pages, and they are as different from one another in form and voice as the objects that inspired them, and while I responded more positively to some than others they are all well-written. For example: 

"Adelaide, Eden's mid-forties owner, usually buzzed around the room in a short-skirted power suit at least one size too small, her long rust-colored hair free as flames. She radiated a sensuality as juice and seductive as her neon-red lip gloss, and when the mail-dominated dive club was in session, she struck me as honey to a swarm of bees."

At times, however, her ability to create metaphor can get away from her. "He had a face like polished driftwood." That's fine, but half a page on the same character's eyes "gleamed like buffed sandalwood," which is a bit much. Still, many of us wish we could do as well.

The second half of the book is novella, Fan Girls. An unnamed narrator introduces the reader to four young woman at a rock concert. Annie, Emily, Dana, and Chelsea are all Datha fans, one of whom is dangerously fanatic. Their individual stories are all very different but all linked to the band and their music in some way. Given Beeaff's experiences as a twenty-year U2 fan, which must have exposed her to other fans, their stories and obsessions, I have a sense she's writing from the inside and the reader benefits from it.

On Tràigh Lar Beach is an engaging collection by a writer who's been around the block more than once and seems to have recorded the most intriguing people and sights along the way.