Overview

With keen observation and deep reflection, Pamela Carter Joern probes her life. No topic is too small or too sacred, from gutting chickens to GaudÍ’s cathedral. Through a range of experiences-growing up in rural Nebraska, raising children, surviving cancer, becoming a writer-she explores the tenuous link between memory and truth. Joern displays a gift for mining wisdom through surprising connections, juxtaposing her father’s life to the discoveries of Isaac Newton or the writer’s task to the ancient art of alchemy. She weds philosophical insight and spiritual imagination and laces this amalgam with candor and wit, resulting in a work that is engaging, intimate, and illuminating.

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9781496242785

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Reviews

“The Nebraska voice of Pamela Carter Joern shines like the stars in the vast dome of her natal sky, at once lyrical and straightforward. With sharp observation, tenderness, and wry humor, her collected stories and essays carry us irresistibly from a three-year-old’s memory of a red couch by a window to wise and surprising meditations on mortality in a wider world. It’s a wonder and a gift.”—Gayla Marty, author of Memory of Trees: A Daughter’s Story of a Family Farm “Pamela Carter Joern delivers what I want from a well-crafted memoir in essays: emotional honesty, unstinting candor, lyrical writing, artful storytelling, attention to context, and a deep and fearless questioning of what she knows, or thinks she knows, about herself and her place in the world.”—Lisa Knopp, author of What the River Carries and The Nature of Home “Pamela Carter Joern shows us the big sky in this affective and eloquently written collection. The big sky of a Great Plains childhood. The big sky of flying leaps, finding meaning, and facing mortality. The big sky of Nebraska itself, a necessary landscape that pulls her home, holds her steady, and keeps letting her leave and return again. These heartrending essays about place, personhood, and the passage of time invite us to bask in all our big skies of troubled and ecstatic living.”—Barrie Jean Borich, author of Body Geographic and Apocalypse, Darling

Author Information

Pamela Carter Joern is the author of four works of fiction: Toby’s Last Resort, In Reach, The Plain Sense of Things, and The Floor of the Sky, all published by the University of Nebraska Press. She has written six plays that have been produced in the Twin Cities of Minnesota and taught writing at the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis for ten years.  

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