Flesh and Stones: Field Notes From a Finite World

by Jan Shoemaker

Overview

In this book of creative nonfiction set in Michigan, Jan Shoemaker shares her quest and her vision. The lovely writing is also poiinted in its questioning. Pieces treat Nature, relationships, teaching, age, love. Most of these essays have been previously published in fine literary magazines.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781933964027
Publisher:	Bottom Dog Press
Publication date:	10/27/2016
Series:	Harmony Memoir Series
Pages:	176
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Jan Shoemaker grew up in Saginaw, Michigan. Shortly after finishing her B.A. in English at Michigan State University, she moved to Seattle where she waited tables at the Pike Place Market and wrote poems while she rode ferries around Puget Sound. In the years that followed, she wrote poems while waitressing on the Maine coast and in Rhode Island. Eventually, she returned to East Lansing to be closer to her family and make a career in education.

She has been teaching high school in mid-Michigan for twenty-seven years, first for the Diocese of Lansing and currently at a public high school outside the city. She sees her real imprint on her school's curriculum in the World's Religions class affording her students field trips to synagogues and churches and mosques, as well as a Hindu Temple, and a Buddhist monastery. She is a recipient of the Greater Lansing United Nation Association's Loy LaSalle Award for outstanding contributions to Global Education and International Understanding. In addition to teaching, she is a part-time bookseller at independently owned and run Schuler Books in Okemos, Michigan.

Her work has been featured on public radio, anthologized, and published in many magazines and journals including River Teeth, The Sun, Fourth Genre, Colorado Review, Upstreet, and Sufi Journal. She earned an MFA at Ashland University. This is her first book.

Read an Excerpt

From...Ellora

Careening along National Highway 211 in the dust of western India’s Deccan plateau, I was quietly directing Anna when to let me die. “If I lose both hands,” I whispered, gripping the back-seat door handle. “If I’m paralyzed from the neck down. If I’m badly burned.”

“What?”

“If I’m burned.” I was speaking low to spare our mad driver’s feelings. Despite the fact that he was apparently trying to kill us—or was, at best, indifferent to that outcome—I adjusted my volume to “culturally sensitive, non-judgmental,” a diplomatic decibel we liberal Americans try to effect while traveling—when in Rome, die like the Romans. My terror, however, had no dial and as he pulled right again and tore down the packed highway toward an oncoming truck, jerking left at the last second to avoid collision by cutting off a bus, then veered back into approaching traffic I gasped, “What about you?”

“Me?”

“When do you want me to pull the plug?” Not a question I’d ever considered asking my 20-year-old daughter, but as our driver sped down the road from Aurangabad to the Ellora Cave Temples, death—or worse—seemed imminent. A small, gay idol swung from the rearview mirror: Ganesh, the remover of obstacles, who seemed redundant the way our driver simply dived and wove among them.

“We’re not going to die, Mom.” That was youth; I knew better.

Table of Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS
BOOK I IMPRESS OF VANISHED LIVES
ELLORA
A WEDGE OF LIGHT
PUSHING BACK
BIG SHOT
ONE BREATH
LETTING GO
A PEBBLE AT A TIME
KOANS FROM MY MOTHER
THE PRESENCE OF ABSENCE
THIS DEAR GOOD WOOD
BOOK II THE HIGH AMBITIONS OF LOVE
ZEALOT
A DECENT NUMBER OF ATHEISTS
THE FALL
BIOPHONY
WEIGHT
POWERLESS
BOOK III MUSINGS FROM THE SOFT TISSUES
FLESH AND STONES
THE ENORMITY CLUB
A DELICATE CALLIGRAPHY
TENEBRAE
UNDER THE MINARETS
AUTHOR PHOTO AND BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Reading Group Guide

Author and dog Grace

Preface

Flesh and Stones: Field Notes from a Finite World

Editorial Reviews

Jan Shoemaker may be the finest crafter of sentences working in the essay today. Her prose displays remarkable humor and wit, an intelligence that never grows brittle because it is based on a lively reading and teaching life and placed in the service of life's imponderable questions. Her probing of our common mysteries and her affection for others opens great depths of feeling as well. In Flesh and Stones heart and mind and words meet. --Steven Harvey, author of a memoir, The Book of Knowledge and Wonder

Jan Shoemaker leads you into the darkness (a mother dying of Alzheimer's, another faithful dog gone, the stark recognition that we get to keep nothing we love in this world), and then lets in the light, shows you the dance of the sun on the water, and says something so funny, so perfect, you'll just have to laugh. Together, you will move into the questions that matter: When you can't be the person you want to be, what then? Together, you will remember that our largest lives are lived in the tinniest moments --Jill Christman, author of Darkroom, A Family Exposure

From the Publisher