What would you be willing to do to save someone, perhaps someone you loved? On a moment’s notice, for instance, would you lunge between that person and an assailant’s knife strike? In that same situation, what would you be willing do for yourself? And what if there were nothing, ultimately, to be done? These and other such questions live in the untouched minutes—questions most of us are, fortunately, never compelled to answer, though the media exposes us daily to the stories of those who are. In February 2001, on what started out as a typical Sunday afternoon, Donald Morrill and his wife Lisa Birnbaum became the victims of a home invasion and found themselves faced with the specter of ultimate contingency. In The Untouched Minutes, Morrill recounts and examines the events of that day and its aftermath as well as the circumstances surrounding the murders of Dartmouth professors Half and Suzanne Zantop, which occurred the same week.Set against the unfolding drama of post-9/11 America, The Untouched Minutes explores how violence and the threat of violence color and recast one’s assumptions and can plot the course of people facing the unknown, the unknowable, the irredeemable. Morrill presents a memorable portrait of what it means to take back the life that, finally, wasn’t taken, and in the process he offers a powerful meditation on terror and security, home and travel, art, race, luck, and our individual places in the wider world.

The Untouched Minutes (River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Prize)

Biographies & Memoirs

Morrill, Donald

Regional U.S.

University Of Nebraska Press

Literature & Fiction

Essays & Correspondence

A Stranger's Neighborhood (Emerging Writers in Creative Nonfiction)

Travel

Travel Writing

Duquesne Univ Pr

Offers a collection of essays and sketches based on the author's experiences growing up in a working class neighborhood in Des Moines and teaching in Changchun, China, during the 1980s, and descibes the people and places he knew.

Sounding for Cool is about self-transformation, about growing up on one’s own as a product of contemporary America, and about how to become not just a man, but a contributing adult in society. Donald Morrill presents the day-to-day lives of seven young men (white, black, Hispanic, immigrant, middle-class, thick-headed, poor, and smart), who for various reasons have become homeless. Placed in a Transitional Living Program facility (TLP) by the courts, these men must learn to navigate in the world of “normal” values and reasonable rules. Streetwise and callow, trained to seek shortcuts or to make excuses, they struggle with the structures and assumptions inherent in living a law-abiding, bill-paying life. While sorting out their souls, they learn how to connect with others. In turn, Sounding for Cool scrutinizes the staff of the TLP, one woman and three men, who variously come to terms with their lives by settling accounts from the past. As a TLP volunteer, Donald Morrill often finds himself bridging the gap between staff and client. In the process of telling their stories, he chronicles his own journey to understand the past. Ultimately, Sounding for Cool asks the enduring questions, “Who am I in the world and what can I become?”

Sounding for Cool

Politics & Social Sciences

Social Sciences

Michigan State University Press

At the Bottom of the Sky

Poetry

Mid-List Press

"The monster called my cell phone this morning, demanding money." So begins Jill Lundgrove, the unforgettable protagonist of Beaut. Secluded in a cheap apartment on a ring road of Des Moines after a fire has destroyed her house--a blaze "the Monster," her drug-addicted, adult son might have caused--she confronts her precarious circumstances. "I'm in great need of reckoning," she writes, partly to herself and to another initially unnamed. What of that fire, the Monster's criminal companions, and the surprising prospect of a love affair after years of widowhood? And what of her three other children, who have variously sought to protect her, flee her, dominate her? The haunting story that follow vividly illuminates the discordant accords of marriage and madness, the ambivalence in motherhood, and the mysteries of inheritance--and bestows a strange, unexpected gift on those closest to her.

Beaut: A Novel

Literary

Blair

Poetry. Donald Morrill's new collection, WITH YOUR BACK TO HALF THE DAY, circles unexpected, compelling questions, intent on transporting their full measure to the reader (as if it might be revealed only in that company). Avid to understand how we get human every day, Morrill's poems meet Basho's challenge not to follow the footsteps of the old poets but to seek whatthey sought. This book rushes and retreats, feints and decides, tests and welcomes, and always branches. Distance joins things, Morrill writes, and, indeed, he is a poet of broad contact. The result is a volume laden with rambunctious splendors and meticulous reflections brought forth in Morrill's own hard-earned voicemusical, witty, perceptive, affecting.

With Your Back To Half the Day

Anhinga Press

Poetry. "…It is a feast to follow these evocations and beholdings, their clarity and sweep, where even grit on a ripening orange comes to resemble 'the night side of planets.' How rare it is to find so sure and accomplished a meditative eye."—Daniel Tobin, author of The Net and Belated Heavens

Awaiting Your Impossibilities

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Books by Morrill, Donald