Author Interview

Collateral damage

January 15, 2014 | 12 Comments

My father’s first heart attack when he was 49, on Thanksgiving Day 1968, marked one of those before and after divisions in a family’s life.

The orange-and-white ambulance in our driveway heralded Dad’s long hospitalization and Mom’s palpable fear—her lecture about having to prepare him a special diet was itself a scary rift to me at age 12—and then his Schwinn for exercise that replaced our family boat. A new nomenclature, too: angina, myocardial infarction, dietary cholesterol, building collateral blood vessels, congestive heart disease. Dad suffered another heart attack in 1979, as a hurricane hit our county in Florida. In 1984, up in Illinois, my half-brother, age 44, sustained his own infarction. In 1989, Dad, his scarred heart barely beating, succumbed at age 71.

No help from Mom’s genetics. She got bypass surgery for four blocked arteries in 1993. “The Rounsaville blood,” she told me, “is like sludge.”

With my family’s doom-laden cardiovascular history, reading Thomas Larson’s new book was a visceral experience. As a good memoir will, The Sanctuary of Illness: A Memoir of Heart Disease makes real one person’s inner and outer experience—gives you that experience. It both inspired me as a writer and animated my natural desire to escape, for as long as possible, the saving but cold ministry of the medical establishment.

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Choosing love, as person & writer

October 22, 2013 | 7 Comments

In my recent review of Blush: A Mennonite Girl Meets a Glittering World I noted how author Shirley Hershey Showalter wrote interestingly about her happy childhood for a wide audience, though she grew up in the specific, narrow, and intertwined agrarian and religious world of Mennonite rural Pennsylvania in the 1950s and ‘60s.

Her parents’ firstborn, she was heir not only to their accomplishments but also to their unrealized ambitions. Obviously a smart, positive, and attractive child, she also had her own gifts and desires to express. The result, set against the backdrop of the changes sweeping America and her church, provides more than enough tension for a good story.

Showalter explains in a short video about the book:

“The book’s title—Blush—refers to my discomfort in that place between the church and the world. It also means that I tried so hard to be sophisticated. It took me a long time to discover that God made me a feisty, curious, plain Mennonite farm girl for a reason. When I am vulnerable and wholehearted, I am much more aware of God and my community can come in and support me, even in times of conflict and pain and doubt.”

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Lindbergh, 1927

Ray Bradbury: “Style is truth”

August 3, 2013 | 6 Comments

I’m on the road as I post this, headed for Berkeley, California, where our son is entering graduate school; one of my sisters just moved across the way, to San Francisco. My wife and I are driving cross country from Ohio. An adventure! We’ve stopped for the night in Miami, Oklahoma, which is hot and crowded with casinos. I feel at home, though, because the folks are friendly and because my Mom was from Oklahoma. This afternoon in central Missouri I knew we were getting into the West because when we stopped in the backwater of Buffalo for a soda, I noticed in the McDonald’s a row of stools had real leather kids’ saddles for seats.

We reserved a modest vehicle for this trip, but the guy at the rental company said we’d probably be uncomfortable crossing the desert and might have difficulty getting over the mountains. In fact, he implied, we might die. So we rented, for only $20 more a day, a huge (to us) Lincoln Navigator. It is black, and terrifying. We feel like real Americans at last. But will we be safe in San Francisco ensconced in such an SUV? We look like Secret Service, or drug dealers. Or both.

I’m working on a book review on the road, and meantime here is a summer roundup of stuff I’ve found interesting.

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Taking the risk of being heard

July 30, 2013 | 5 Comments

A traumatized woman and her traumatized dog go for walks. This is the spine of my friend Janice Gary’s new memoir; its many layers make for interesting reading. She’s conveying experience as it unfolds, trying to understand her past, and taking risks in life and in her story’s telling. At first I worried about Gary’s putting her beloved dog under the spotlight with her for most of the book—he’s difficult, and the book’s structure puts relentless narrative pressure on her voice, outlook, and experiences. But Short Leash soon had me collared.

First, the dog. Barney is a big, goofy, smelly, allergic Lab-Rottweiler cross. He was attacked by another dog when he was a pup, and he’s become terribly aggressive to other dogs. But Gary skillfully depicts Barney’s basic good nature and his mellowing as he ages. Gradually I found myself forgiving and then liking him. He’s already an older dog and Gary is in her mid-forties when they venture out. And soon you realize what a brave act it is, beyond his aggression, for her simply to take him for a walk.

Once ambitious, artistic, and headstrong, Gary was raped when she was 19, and has spent too many years feeling scared. So the book’s major setting, a lovely park on Chesapeake Bay near her suburban Maryland home, seems safe until you look at it through her eyes. Those lonely paths. The pools of dark shade. Other dogs that Barney might attack. The mysterious bend of a trail into the woods. That rustling in the bushes. We gradually learn, too, of an earlier trauma, the suicide of her manic-depressive father when she was 15.

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Joe Bonomo on sex, spirit & implication: ‘Living is complicated.’

June 23, 2013 | 3 Comments

Memoir is made of memories, by definition; some theorists assert memoir must be about memory. Yet it’s notable how much Joe Bonomo explores memory and takes it as his subject. His new collection of essays, This Must Be Where My Obsession with Infinity Began, summons and examines a wide range of memories, expressed in often lyrical sentences. He’s had an ordinary suburban boyhood and adult life, but he makes this material interesting because—as he tells stories, and muses interestingly on their meaning—we find ourselves catching our own cast-off thoughts and doubts, thinking about our own stories.

Here’s this reflective person in the present trying to make sense of his life: what every adult does, one supposes, and it’s satisfying being privy to another’s subjective reality and party to his grappling with memory and meaning. His blog, No Such Thing as Was, its title taken from Faulkner’s remark about the past’s persistence, testifies to his steady inquiry into the memories that live inside him.

Some of his essays are strongly narrative, with personal experience dramatized in scenes; others are models of the classical ruminative approach (as run through a poet’s sensibility) and some are short prose poems. Since he’s got all the chops and deploys them artfully, slapping a label on his creative nonfiction is difficult and would be misleading.

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Q&A with memoirist Liz Stephens

April 21, 2013 | 6 Comments

The Days are Gods author on braids, voice & earning your story. After reviewing The Days are Gods, I asked its author, Liz Stephens, for an interview, and she has kindly obliged. Stephens, Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at Glendale College, California, earned a PhD in creative nonfiction at Ohio University, where she served as managing editor of Brevity. You’re very reflective about your ongoing experience as the story moves forward—and it does move forward, The Days are Gods combining …

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Lore of a gravedigger’s daughter

March 24, 2013 | 15 Comments

It takes a village to raise a child, and my village was the graveyard.—from Rachael Hanel’s memoir We’ll Be the Last Ones to Let You Down: Memoir of a Gravedigger’s Daughter by Rachael Hanel. University of Minnesota Press, 177 pp. Rachael Hanel grew up in a sleepy Minnesota town where old people “have more faith that cars will stop for them than they have in Jesus Christ.” But where her gravedigger father could joke, with a darker edge than any …

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