The Only Sounds We Make

by Lee Zacharias

Overview

These twelve deeply metaphorical essays are both intensely personal and vitally concerned with the larger world, including the kingdom beyond our ken. Exploring subjects as diverse as her father's suicide, the great migration that changed the racial composition of Chicago's south side, the nature of light, the geology of the Grand Canyon, or the landscape of writers' desks and offices, Lee Zacharias writes with grace, precision, and candor about the experiences that shape our humanity and our relationships, to our parents, to our children, and to past, present, and future.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781938235009
Publisher:	Hub City Press
Publication date:	04/01/2015
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	224
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Lee Zacharias was born in Chicago. A graduate of Indiana University, Hollins College, and the University of Arkansas, she teaches at the University of North Carolina Greensboro. Her nonfiction has appeared in such journals as Shenandoah, The Southern Review, and The Gettysburg Review, has been reprinted in Best American Essays.

Editorial Reviews

12/23/2013
With grace, charm, and insight, Zacharias (Lessons) shares personal stories that explore how we make sense of memory, our histories, and our connections—to family, the past, and the wider world. Filled with revelatory observations and relatable situations, the 13 essays cover the author's Midwestern childhood, her fraught family history and first marriage, and her interactions with nature, among other subjects. The engaging cast of characters includes her first husband, for whom she put her own future on hold; and the second husband and son of a happier second marriage; her taciturn, disapproving father, whose suicide looms large; and her demanding, but loving mother. Throughout, the author reflects on the natural world, from insects and scavenger birds to natural light. Some essays have heavy-handedness moments, and with a mix of new and previously published works, stories occasionally repeat themselves. Overall, readers will be drawn into Zacharias's world, which she studies with candor and elegance. (May)

Publishers Weekly

02/01/2014
Zacharias, who is best known for her fiction—Helping Muriel Make It Through the Night and Lessons—has written a collection of 13 essays about nature, family, literature, and language. She takes topics as diverse as spiders, the dissolution of her first marriage, her parents' marriage, the Grand Canyon, photography, writing rooms, and her father's suicide and turns them into meditations on living. She succeeds in giving the reader a sense of her time and place (the early 1970s to the present in the Deep South (Virginia, Arkansas, and North Carolina), the changes that occur in her life, and the difficulties of balancing writing, teaching, marriage, motherhood, and the demands of aging parents. Reminiscent of Kelly Cherry's Girl in a Library, this book is a lovely, quiet, and meditative offering. Zacharias joins other regional authors celebrated for their work's emphasis on culture and history. VERDICT Recommended for all collections, especially those highlighting women writers and Southern memoir.—Pam Kingsbury, Univ. of North Alabama, Florence

Library Journal

2014-03-06
A novelist and professor's essay collection that almost coalesces into a memoir. Zacharias (Creative Writing/Univ. of North Carolina, Greensboro; At Random, 2013, etc.) recounts how, after the publication of her first novel (Lessons, 1981), she spent 10 years writing her second, only to see it rejected, as was her third. "You write well, but you won't sell," editors and agents told her. "Today's reader wants a high concept plot and an upbeat message. Your work is literary. It's dark, but not Oprah dark. There's no market." Though the author didn't exactly buy the explanation, she does write well, and she has since found a home in literary journals. The chronological continuity here and the thematic interweaving of family, place, art and mortality give this collection a cohesiveness that makes some of the lesser pieces—e.g., "Geography for Writers," which mainly catalogs the spaces where various writers have written—seem intrusive. Yet the format also undermines the strength of some of the strongest pieces, such as the collection-closing "Buzzards," in which her memories of her father's life and suicide would have more climactic power if she hadn't already shared these with readers in earlier essays. "A Grand Canyon" finds the writer working on many levels, as she fulfills her mother's dream to travel there, a trip that reveals an emotional chasm between her teenage son and his grandmother and presages "the heartbreaking canyon that will open between us, because in that part of the story the generation gap isn't between my mother and son but between my son and me. One day the love affair ends for the child, though it never does for the parent." And then there's the canyon itself, which the author illuminates as more than a metaphor. Zacharias shows a keen eye for detail (she's also a photographer), a strong sense of place, and an ambivalent, unsentimental examination of blood ties and family legacy.

Kirkus Reviews