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Joe Mackall has lived surrounded by the Swartzentruber Amish community of Ashland County, Ohio, for over sixteen years. They are the most traditional and insular of all the Amish sects: the Swartzentrubers live without gas, electricity, or indoor plumbing; without lights on their buggies or cushioned chairs in their homes; and without rumspringa, the recently popularized "running-around time" that some Amish sects allow their sixteen-year-olds. Over the years, Mackall has developed a steady relationship with the Shetler family (Samuel and Mary, their nine children, and their extended family). Plain Secrets tells the Shetlers' story over these years, using their lives to paint a portrait of S...
"The Last Street Before Cleveland chronicles Mackall's descent into his past - the story of how, looking for answers about his lost friend, he stumbles on larger questions about himself. With clear-eyed candor, Mackall describes the resurfacing of dormant demons, the opening of the old chasms of depression and addiction, and the discovery, at rock bottom, of a flickering faith that casts a surprising light over everything that has come before. Mackall's is, finally, a story about life - lived and lost, given and earned."--Jacket.
A guide to developing teamwork skills, particularly in the workplace.
As nonfiction writer Joe Mackall reaches age sixty-an age the novelist William Styron called "the hulking milestone of mortality"-he finds himself pinioned between past and future, struggling but mostly failing to abide in the present. Blindsided by his reaction to becoming a grandfather, he moves "toward the edge of a foreign land, the plains of an emotional dystopia. He knows these feelings are connected in ways he doesn't fully understand to life as a grandfather and as a man likely in the last third of his life. He worries about his country, an America increasingly polarized, fracked, outsourced, droned, downsized, teetering on the dream-edge of itself. When he's not agonizing over the f...
An acclaimed author reflects on his upbringing in a post–World War II blue-collar family and comes to terms with the racism, sexism, and other toxic values he inherited. Finalist for the 2014 New England Book Award in Non-Fiction Richard Hoffman sometimes felt as though he had two fathers: the real one who raised him and an imaginary version, one he talked to on the phone, and one he talked to in his head. Although Hoffman was always close to the man, his father remained a mystery, shrouded in a perplexing mix of tenderness and rage. When his father receives a terminal cancer diagnosis, Hoffman confronts the depths and limitations of their lifelong struggle to know each other, weighing the...
For centuries writers have used participatory experience as a lens through which to better see the world at large and as a means of exploring the self. Considering various types of participatory writing as different strains of one style--immersion writing--Robin Hemley offers new perspectives and practical advice for writers of this nonfiction genre. Immersion writing can be broken down into the broad categories of travel writing, immersion memoir, and immersion journalism. Using the work of such authors as Barbara Ehrenreich, Hunter S. Thompson, Ted Conover, A. J. Jacobs, Nellie Bly, Julio Cortazar, and James Agee, Hemley examines these three major types of immersion writing and further ide...
"This is a book I love."--Bret Lott, author of Jewel and Before We Get Started: A Practical Memoir of the Writer's Life From a Minnesota book award-winning author, an essay collection that explores what is most essential to him, from the difficult lives of jazz musicians, to trout fishing, to the shifting population and mores of suburbia. “Here’s the thing,” Richard Terrill writes. “There’s always the thing, isn’t there, and most often, not just one?” Terrill, an award-winning poet and memoirist, asks through this series of wide-ranging, funny, and sometimes gut-punchingly vulnerable essays, what is essential? Maybe trout fishing, the music of Bill Evans, or the whys of dog own...
?Insouciant? and ?irreverent? are the sort of words that come up in reviews of Dinty W. Moore?s books?and, invariably, ?hilarious.? Between Panic and Desire, named after two towns in Pennsylvania, finds Moore at the top of his astutely funny form. A book that could be named after one of its chapters, ?A Post-Nixon, Post-panic, Post-modern, Post-mortem,? this collection is an unconventional memoir of one man and his culture, which also happens to be our own. ø Blending narrative and quizzes, memory and numerology, and imagined interviews and conversations with dead presidents on TV, the book dizzily documents the disorienting experience of growing up in a postmodern world. Here we see how th...
In this remarkable collection of essays, acclaimed writer Brian Doyle offers “resurrections, restorations, reconsiderations, appreciations, enthusiasms, headlong solos, laughing prayers, imaginary meetings with most unusual and most interesting men.” Geographically and chronologically diverse—Plutarch of Greece; William Blake of England; Robert Louis Stevenson of Scotland; James Joyce and Van Morrison of Ireland; and others—Doyle sees them as men of “immense spiritual substance, prayerful fury, enormous grace,” men concerned with “the moral grapple” and “the sinuous crucial puzzle of love.” In telling the stories of these talented, troubled, and extraordinary men, Doyle discerns clues about how to be a good man, headlong in the pursuit of love and capable of greatness.
It’s been fifteen years since Gideon Miller ran away from his Amish community in Carlisle, Pennsylvania as a boy of fifteen. Gideon arrives in the Smoky Mountains town of Twin Branches and settles in at the local auto mechanic's garage. He meets a host of interesting characters –the most recent acquaintances are Kiki, an autistic teen, and her sister Mari. Known as the "Getaway Savior" he helps other Amish boys and girls relocate to life in modern America. One day the phone rings. On the other end is his brother Moriah calling from Florida. Of course Gideon welcomes his brother to stay with him and offers him a job. But Moriah is caught in a web which ends in his death and forces Gideon to return to the town of his youth, with his brother’s body in the back of a hearse and Mari and Kiki at his side. He must face not only the community he ran away from years ago but also his own web of bitterness. Will he be able to give his anger over to God and forgive his father?