Bøger udgivet af Ovenbird Books

The Book of Knowledge and Wonder is a memoir about claiming a legacy of wonder from knowledge of a devastating event. In some ways it has the feel of a detective story in which Steven Harvey pieces together the life of his mother, Roberta Reinhardt Harvey, who committed suicide when he was eleven, out of the 406 letters she left behind. Before he read the letters his mother had become little more than her death to him, but while writing her story he discovered a woman who, despite her vulnerability to depression, had a large capacity for wonder and a love of familiar things, legacies that she passed on to him. The book tackles subjects of recent fascination in American culture: corporate life and sexism in the fifties, mental illness and its influence on families, and art and learning as a consolation for life's woes, but in the end it is the perennial theme of abiding love despite the odds that fuels the tale. As the memoir unfolds, his mother changes and grows, darkens and retreats as she gives up her chance at a career in nursing, struggles with her position as a housewife, harbors paranoid delusions of having contracted syphilis at childbirth, succumbs to a mysterious, psychic link with her melancholic father, and fights back against depression with counseling, medicine, art, and learning. Harvey charts the way, after his mother's death, that he blotted out her memory almost completely in his new family where his mother was rarely talked about, a protective process of letting go that he did not resist and in a way welcomed, but the book grows out of a nagging longing that never went away, a sense of being haunted that caused the writer to seek out places alone-dribbling a basketball on a lonely court, going on long solitary bicycle rides, walking away from his family to the edge of a mountain overlook, and working daily at his writing desk-where he might feel her presence. In the end, the loss cannot be repaired. Her death, like a camera flash in the dark, blotted out all but a few lingering memories of her in his mind, but the triumph of the book is in the creative collaboration between the dead mother, speaking to her son in letters, and the writer piecing together the story from photographs, snatches of memory, and her words so that he can, for the first time, know her and miss her, not some made up idea of her. The letters do not bring her back-he knows the loss is irrevocable-but as he shaped them into art, the pain, that had been nothing more than a dull throb, changed in character, becoming more diffuse and ardent, like heartache.

In this coming-of-age memoir, Tarn Wilson explores the gifts and burdens of a counterculture childhood. In the early 1970s, Wilson's hippie parents packed the family into a converted school bus with "Suck Nixon" painted on the side and aimed for the Canadian wilderness. They planned to raise their two young children close to the earth and free of shallow middle class values. When they settle on a remote island in British Columbia, their idealism smacks up against reality and threatens to tear apart the family. Between each short lyric chapter, Wilson incorporates "artifacts" that illuminate the cultural forces shaping her parents' decisions, such as letters, recipes, photographs, timelines, newspaper clippings, and provocative excerpts from A Radical Approach to Child Rearing. With both empathy and clear-eyed honesty, Wilson deconstructs the simplified narratives of the counterculture movement by sharing the story of one young, eager, flawed family's efforts to live the ideal. The book celebrates the power of the natural world, invites us to ask questions about how we raise children, and takes us on a journey of forgiveness. Ultimately, Wilson's story, although unusual, is all of ours: the path "from the world as we wish it were to the one that exists," with all its beauty and imperfections. Stanford Magazine says, "Tales of her youthful fits and starts could spark nostalgia even in those who didn't grow up romping around in the words with near complete freedom."Lia Purpura, award-winning poet and essayist, writes that Wilson "reconstructs the powerful atmosphere of a past era, its magic, contentment and freedom, its restrictions and losses." The genre-defining essayist Judith Kitchen says, "Tarn Wilson deftly turns memoir into an interactive project." Brenda Miller, co-author of the bestselling guide to creative nonfiction Tell It Slant, praises "a textured memoir of childhood that captures the zeitgeist of the 60s . . ."

In this lyric memoir of loss, the narrator's relationship with a beloved brother disintegrates against the backdrop of her mother's mental illness and, ultimately, her brother's death. Part poetry, part elegy, Dear Boy grapples with the universal issues of human longing and grief while praising the unexpected beauty to be found in the wake of such sorrows.

The Last Good Obsession: Thoughts on Finding Life in Fiction is a collection of hybrid essays that get personal about reading. Open to possibilities and insights, Sandra Swinburne settles into some of her favorite books to savor the way fictional characters spark her imagination and raise the past. She wonders over too real manifestations of her own vulnerable self in women named Oedipa or Joanna or Amy, and she prods family and friends for answers when she finds them "creeping about between paper covers." Book by book and essay by essay, memoir accumulates under a thin lens of literary criticism.

"The Circus Train" is an essay of novella length-something for which we have no term. But nevertheless it is meant to stand on its own. Even with the two additional companion essays, The Circus Train is a short book. Its intention is to explore, to argue, and to contemplate. Confronting memory and mortality, Judith Kitchen finds abundance in her own front yard.

The winner of the 2016 Oregon Book Award for creative nonfiction and the Lambda Literary Award for memoir, these essays chronicle some of life's biggest dramas: marriage, divorce, and the quest for the perfect fashion accessory. On the surface, Kate Carroll de Gutes' debut collection of essays considers her sexuality, gender presentation, and the end of her marriage. But, as editor Judith Kitchen says, "peel it back, begin to take it apart, semantically and linguistically and personally, and it all comes clear." Kate Carroll de Gutes invites readers to become collaborators in essays about issues we all face: growing up, identity, love, loss, and sometimes, the quest for the perfect fashion accessory. With wit matched by self-compassion and empathy, the essays offer a lesson on the inevitable journey back to the places we all began. "On every page, de Gutes reminds us that we all traverse life's roads with one eye fixed on the receding and mirrored past." - Stephanie Kallos, best-selling author of Broken for You.