Flesh and Stones: Field Notes from a Finite World: 6 (Harmony Memoir) - Softcover

Shoemaker, Jan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1933964022 ISBN 13: 9781933964027

Publisher: Bottom Dog Press, 2016

Synopsis

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. 

About this title

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.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

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.

Edition details

• Publisher: Bottom Dog Press
• Publication date: 2016
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1933964022
• ISBN 13: 9781933964027
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 176