Embalming Mom

Embalming Mom PDF Author: Janet Burroway
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
ISBN: 1587294095
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 153

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Book Description
""Alternately clever, humorous, lively, sad, and charming, her book is recommended for both public and academic libraries with large women's collections."--Library Journal"Burroway, author of Cutting Stone and six other novels, is a pithy essayist with an inner compass that steers her to the ambiguity at the heart of the human condition."--Booklist"Sightline Books is an exciting and welcome promise of all the excellent nonfiction writing just waiting to come into view."--Vivian Gornick, author of The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative"These gathered-together autobiographical essays reveal a fascinating, honest, witty writer I thought I had known (briefly) thirty years ago. I am delighted to discover, in this charming memoir, that I was woefully ignorant of her extraordinary life. Now I feel privileged to learn of it in such an elegantly written fashion."--Doris Grumbach"The most lively, witty, uncensored celebration of the life of a writer, woman, lover, wife, mother, stepmother against the history of her time--and what a time it was and is! No 'futile cry of ME!' but bold and brilliant portraits of where we have been and where we are headed. Brava Burroway!o--Julia MarkusPast Praise for Janet Burroway"She writes like a robust Angel."--London Guardian on Raw Silk"A fine and complex novel, a comedy and then some."--New Yorker on Opening Nights" . . . a novel of rare and lustrous quality."--Newsweek on Raw Silk"What sets Raw Silk apart is Janet Burroway's superb stylistic gifts."--New York Times Book Review"Miss Burroway's gifts are those of a fine, intuitive actress . . . one of those rare, accomplished stylists whose art lies in the air of effortlessness, or near invisibility."--New Statesman on The Buzzards"For people like me, these essays on life are instructive. Their titles reveal their central themes, but Burroway feels confident and free to range wide from the main trunk, looping out into her life and her metaphors, then back again, probing through and confessing all because, for the real writer who has come so far, it seems now there is no point in not."--Fourth GenreJanet Burroway followed in the footsteps of Sylvia Plath. Like Plath, she was an early Mademoiselle guest editor in New York, an Ivy League and Cambridge student, an aspiring poet-playwright-novelist in the period before feminism existed, a woman who struggled with her generation's conflicting demands of work and love. Unlike Plath, Janet Burroway survived.In sixteen essays of wit, rage, and reconciliation, Embalming Mom chronicles loss and renaissance in a life that reaches from Florida to Arizona across to England and home again. Burroway brilliantly weaves her way through the dangers of daily life--divorcing her first husband, raising two boys, establishing a new life, scattering her mother's ashes and sorting the meager possessions of her father. Each new danger and challenge highlight the tenacious will of the body and spirit to heal."Ordinary life is more dangerous than war because nobody survives," Burroway contemplates in the essay "Danger and Domesticity," yet each of her meditations reminds us that it's our daily rituals and trials that truly keep us alive.Janet Burroway is the author of plays, poetry, children's books, and seven novels, including The Buzzards, Raw Silk, Opening Nights, and Cutting Stone. Her textbook Writing Fiction, now in its fifth edition, is used in more than three hundred colleges and universities in the United States; a further text, Imaginative Writing, is due out in 2002. She is Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor at Florida State University in Tallahassee."

Embalming Mom

Embalming Mom PDF Author: Janet Burroway
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
ISBN: 1587294095
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 153

Get Book Here

Book Description
""Alternately clever, humorous, lively, sad, and charming, her book is recommended for both public and academic libraries with large women's collections."--Library Journal"Burroway, author of Cutting Stone and six other novels, is a pithy essayist with an inner compass that steers her to the ambiguity at the heart of the human condition."--Booklist"Sightline Books is an exciting and welcome promise of all the excellent nonfiction writing just waiting to come into view."--Vivian Gornick, author of The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative"These gathered-together autobiographical essays reveal a fascinating, honest, witty writer I thought I had known (briefly) thirty years ago. I am delighted to discover, in this charming memoir, that I was woefully ignorant of her extraordinary life. Now I feel privileged to learn of it in such an elegantly written fashion."--Doris Grumbach"The most lively, witty, uncensored celebration of the life of a writer, woman, lover, wife, mother, stepmother against the history of her time--and what a time it was and is! No 'futile cry of ME!' but bold and brilliant portraits of where we have been and where we are headed. Brava Burroway!o--Julia MarkusPast Praise for Janet Burroway"She writes like a robust Angel."--London Guardian on Raw Silk"A fine and complex novel, a comedy and then some."--New Yorker on Opening Nights" . . . a novel of rare and lustrous quality."--Newsweek on Raw Silk"What sets Raw Silk apart is Janet Burroway's superb stylistic gifts."--New York Times Book Review"Miss Burroway's gifts are those of a fine, intuitive actress . . . one of those rare, accomplished stylists whose art lies in the air of effortlessness, or near invisibility."--New Statesman on The Buzzards"For people like me, these essays on life are instructive. Their titles reveal their central themes, but Burroway feels confident and free to range wide from the main trunk, looping out into her life and her metaphors, then back again, probing through and confessing all because, for the real writer who has come so far, it seems now there is no point in not."--Fourth GenreJanet Burroway followed in the footsteps of Sylvia Plath. Like Plath, she was an early Mademoiselle guest editor in New York, an Ivy League and Cambridge student, an aspiring poet-playwright-novelist in the period before feminism existed, a woman who struggled with her generation's conflicting demands of work and love. Unlike Plath, Janet Burroway survived.In sixteen essays of wit, rage, and reconciliation, Embalming Mom chronicles loss and renaissance in a life that reaches from Florida to Arizona across to England and home again. Burroway brilliantly weaves her way through the dangers of daily life--divorcing her first husband, raising two boys, establishing a new life, scattering her mother's ashes and sorting the meager possessions of her father. Each new danger and challenge highlight the tenacious will of the body and spirit to heal."Ordinary life is more dangerous than war because nobody survives," Burroway contemplates in the essay "Danger and Domesticity," yet each of her meditations reminds us that it's our daily rituals and trials that truly keep us alive.Janet Burroway is the author of plays, poetry, children's books, and seven novels, including The Buzzards, Raw Silk, Opening Nights, and Cutting Stone. Her textbook Writing Fiction, now in its fifth edition, is used in more than three hundred colleges and universities in the United States; a further text, Imaginative Writing, is due out in 2002. She is Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor at Florida State University in Tallahassee."

Mothers Through the Eyes of Women Writers

Mothers Through the Eyes of Women Writers PDF Author: Judtih Shapiro
Publisher: Conari Press
ISBN: 9781573245678
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 378

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Book Description
Fifty daughters, from literary luminaries to award-winning voices of the next generation, take on a topic at once tender and challenging -- mothers. They offer essays, stories, and poems that explore how perceptions of mothers have changed. Contributors include Natalie Angier, Zora Neale Hurston, Erica Jong, Edwidge Danticat, Margaret Mead, and Anna Quindlen.

The Truth About the Final Care Industry

The Truth About the Final Care Industry PDF Author: Jack A DiGiacomo II
Publisher: Xlibris Corporation
ISBN: 1984550721
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description
Why Doesn’t the Federal Government Step In? Dead Men Tell No Tales and They Sure Don’t Vote Why Choosing Cremation Won’t Save You: From the Final Care Industry’s Failures Ripped from the headlines of our American newspapers and broadcasted by the national news affiliates across the free lands of the United States of America are the accusations, the pictures, and the stories of the ghastly mistakes, mishandlings, and misplacements of deceased Americans. Every American will die. The dead cannot bury themselves. As a result, you and I will end up in the hands of at least one glove-gripped final-care provider. Inevitably, death will place each one of us at the mercy of deathcare machines. Therefore, this issue affects every men, women, and helpless children. For your own sake, stop and don’t wait to read The Truth About the Final Care Industry, and may the end-of-life industry have mercy on your body!

Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction

Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction PDF Author: Lex Williford
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1416545115
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 578

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Book Description
This indispensable anthology brings together works from fifty contemporary writers including Cheryl Strayed, David Sedaris, Barbara Kingsolver, and more. Selected by five hundred writers, English professors, and creative writing teachers from across the country, this collection includes only the most highly regarded nonfiction work published since 1970—from memoir to journalism, personal essays to cultural criticism. Contributors include: Jo Ann Beard, Wendell Berry, Eula Biss, Mary Clearman Blew, Charles Bowden, Janet Burroway, Kelly Grey Carlisle, Anne Carson, Bernard Cooper, Michael W. Cox, Annie Dillard, Mark Doty, Brian Doyle, Tony Earley, Anthony Farrington, Harrison Candelaria Fletcher, Diane Glancy, Lucy Grealy, William Harrison, Robin Hemley, Adam Hochschild, Jamaica Kincaid, Barbara Kingsolver, Ted Kooser, Sara Levine, E. J. Levy, Phillip Lopate, Barry Lopez, Thomas Lynch, Lee Martin, Rebecca McClanahan, Erin McGraw, John McPhee, Brenda Miller, Dinty W. Moore, Kathleen Norris, Naomi Shihab Nye, Lia Purpura, Richard Rhodes, Bill Roorbach, David Sedaris, Richard Selzer, Sue William Silverman, Floyd Skloot, Lauren Slater, Cheryl Strayed, Amy Tan, Ryan Van Meter, David Foster Wallace, and Joy Williams.

Hospice

Hospice PDF Author: Rebecca Malcolm Schubert
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1666782467
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 155

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Book Description
This book is a selection of a chaplain’s experiences of how hospice can serve the families and patients who enter this special journey. It contains patient stories told from the chaplain’s view. When Chaplain Beck is with patients, she often shares one of her stories to help ease their fears. It is her hope that sharing these stories in this book will prepare readers and lessen their anxiety when hearing the word “hospice” in relation to themselves or a loved one. Experiencing these holy moments may even help on one’s own spiritual journey. Hospice does not mean death is imminent, but rather it is a transition of care that focuses on the patient’s physical, emotional, and spiritual needs as they approach the end of life, which may be days or months away. From Schubert’s first visit made as a chaplain resident to her last day thirty years later as a hospice chaplain, she has been honored to serve the dying and their loved ones. She hopes that readers will hear the love and grace and see that through hospice, the end can be as beautiful as the beginning.

Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath PDF Author: Peter Steinberg
Publisher: Infobase Learning
ISBN: 1438148445
Category : Reference (Philosophy) in literature
Languages : en
Pages : 175

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Book Description
Often considered an iconic figure to feminists, Plath is best known for her novel;The Bell Jar;and her controversial poetry, which collected won the Pulitzer Prize in 1982.

Teaching Creative Writing

Teaching Creative Writing PDF Author: Graeme Harper
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 9780826477262
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 204

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Book Description
Featuring a collection of twelve teaching-focused essays, this work includes an introduction to the subject of creative writing by Graeme Harper. Each chapter draws on key points about the nature of teaching and learning creative writing, and covers vario

Currency of the Heart

Currency of the Heart PDF Author: Donald Nichols
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
ISBN: 1587294257
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 221

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Book Description
In 1998, Don Nichols returned regularly to Iowa from his life and job in Washington, D.C., to be with his dying father and to oversee his parents’ investments. A veteran investor and investment author, Nichols found that managing the portfolio entrusted to him brought a larger understanding of mortality, family, love, work, and the choices he had made as “an agri-kid who took the road out of town and kept going.” In this insightful and money-wise book that grew out of that experience, he merges the emotions of a dutiful son with the actions of a knowledgeable investor. Nichols uses money in myriad forms—a grandfather‘s silver dollar, stocks and bonds, salaries, pallets of coins at the U.S. Mint, on-the-job dealings with coin collectors—as touchstones for reflections on relationships, motives, and a career "like one of those moving walkways in airports." His father's health is measured, tested, and evaluated in part by the health of his finances; at the same time, the turmoil and mystery surrounding both money and relationships are reflected in this memorable story. Wry, unsentimental, and financially savvy, Currency of the Heart is about rediscovering family, managing a portfolio, honoring promises, grieving, and healing; it is about a father and a son who once “fought like medieval villagers in a Thirty Years‘ War” and the deepening bond between a middle-age son and his aging mother. It is a multilayered story for everyone who will manage, financially and emotionally, a parent's death.

Anthropologies

Anthropologies PDF Author: Beth Alvarado
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
ISBN: 160938038X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 182

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Book Description
A vivid archive of memories, Beth Alvarado’s Anthropologies layers scenes, portraits, dreams, and narratives in a dynamic cross-cultural mosaic. Bringing her lyrical tenor to bear on stories as diverse as harboring teen runaways, gunfights with federales, and improbable love, Alvarado unveils the ways in which seemingly separate moments coalesce to forge a communal truth. Woven from the threads of distinct family histories and ethnic identities, Anthropologies creates a heightened understanding of how individual experiences are part of a larger shared fabric of lives. Like the opening of a series of doors, each turn of the page reveals some new reality and the memories that emerge from it. Open one door and you are transported to a modest Colorado town in 1966, appraising animal tracks edged into a crust of snow while listening to stories of Saipan. Open another and you are lounging in a lush Michoacán hacienda, or in another, the year is 1927 and you are standing on a porch in Tucson, watching La Llorona turn a corner. With vivid imagery and a poetic sensibility, Anthropologies reenacts the process of remembering and so evokes a compelling narrative. Each snapshot provides a glimpse into the past, illuminating the ways in which memory and history are intertwined. Whether the experience is of her own drug use or that of a great-great-grandmother’s trek across the Great Plains with Brigham Young, Alvarado’s insight into the binding nature of memory illuminates a new way of understanding our place within families, generations, and cultures.

Fauna and Flora, Earth and Sky

Fauna and Flora, Earth and Sky PDF Author: Trudy Dittmar
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
ISBN: 1587294427
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 237

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Book Description
"[Fauna and Flora, Earth and Sky] is, in fact, the most intelligent, thoughtful, original, challenging, and highly entertaining work of nature writing since Barry Lopez's Artic Dreams. . . . It is her broad scope of contemplation, combined with her fiercely beautiful and detailed renderings of passion, natural and human, that give Trudy Dittmar's first but fully mature book its remarkable originality and considerable power." --Robert Finch,Los Angeles Times Book Review "Honest self-scrutiny is irresistible, especially when told with a knack for diction of place, as this author demonstrates on every page. She is both of the landscape and an informed observer of it, willing to examine her conflicts between the experiences that play in her imagination and the scientific knowledge she's gleaned through training and reading." --The Bloomsbury Review "Trudy Dittmar is an elegant stylist and an acute observer. She's read everything there is to read about the physics of rainbows, the habits of the porcupine, the winter survival skills of the moose and the orbits of the planets, but even her learning is outdistanced by her patient powers of looking, smelling, hearing, touching and tasting. Her originality arises out of this patience. And, magically, she is able to read into and out of the rich, endangered natural world an Emersonian understanding of self. This is at once the most objective and subjective book I have ever read." --Edmund White, author of A Boy's Own Story "Dittmar writes about life with the precision of a scientist and the introspective lyricism of a poet, illuminating for us those parts of the world we barely remember to notice...from the complex emotional lives of cows and pronghorns to the dazzling leaves of a silver maple to the teeming hidden pools of bright salamanders. Reading this book is like finding a geode in a stream bed--crack it open and it sparkleso--Jo Ann Beard "Dittmar, who won a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer' Award in 2000 and whose writings have appeared in numerous publications . . . provides a fascinating look at natural and personal history in these ten essays on animals, plants, and other natural phenomena. . . . An excellent choice for both public and academic libraries." --Library Journal In essays with settings that range from the Wind River Mountains of Wyoming, to the mountain town of Leadville, Colorado, to the Pine Barrens of New Jersey, Trudy Dittmar weaves personal experience with diverse threads of subject matter to create unexpected connections between human nature and nature at large. Life stories, elegantly combined with mindful observations of animals, plants, landscape and the skies, theories in natural science, environmental considerations, and touches of art criticism and popular culture, offer insights into the linked analogies of nature and soul. A glacial pond teeming with salamanders in arrested development is cause for reflection on the limits of a life that knows only bounty. The hot blue lights of celestial phenomena are a metaphor for fast, flashy men--he loves of a life--and a romantic career is interpreted. Watching a pronghorn buck battling for, and ultimately losing, his harem leads to a meditation on a kind of immortality. Fauna and Flora, Earth and Sky is testimony to the bearing and consequence of nature in one life, and to the richness of understanding it can bring to all human lives. Trudy Dittmar was born and raised in New Jersey farm country. In addition to holding an MA in English literature from the University of Chicago, she is a graduate of Columbia University's MFA program in writing and the founder and former director of a writing program at Brookdale Community College in New Jersey. Her work has appeared in such publications as The Norton Book of Nature Writing, Pushcart XXI, Georgia Review, and Orion. She divides her time between her family home in New Jersey and her cabin in Wyoming.