“The Circus Train” is an essay of novella length—something for which we have no term. But nevertheless it is meant to stand on its own. Even with the two additional companion essays, The Circus Train is a short book. Its intention is to explore, to argue, and to contemplate. Confronting memory and mortality, Judith Kitchen finds abundance in her own front yard.

The Circus Train (Ovenbird Books)

Literature & Fiction

Kitchen, Judith

Essays & Correspondence

Ovenbird Books

How many lives do we create in one lifetime? In her latest collection of innovative, shape-shifting essays, Brenda Miller evolves through childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood to enter the wry maturity of middle age. Whether traveling from synagogue to sweat lodge, from the Arizona desert to a communal hot springs in California, she navigates the expectations placed on young girls and women at every turn. She finds guidance in her four major creeds (Judaism, Home Improvement, the Grateful Dead, and Rescue Dogs), while charting a course toward an authentic life. Each stage demands its own form, its own story, sometimes as a means of survival: “No straight line between here and there, between past and future; instead, many small rifts open between where you stand now and where you are trying to go.” “Further proving herself as the master of the short essay, Brenda Miller’s latest collection deep dives into her past, taking a sepia-tinged world and offering it anew in Technicolor. Each essay’s a revelation, an untangling, an epiphany whispered in our ears. Listen carefully or you’ll miss it: the way our lives expand when we distill them.” —B.J. Hollars, author of This is Only a Test

An Earlier Life

Biographies & Memoirs

Miller,Brenda

Arts & Literature

In this lyric memoir of loss, the narrator's relationship with a beloved brother disintegrates against the backdrop of her mother's mental illness and, ultimately, her brother's death. Part poetry, part elegy, Dear Boy grapples with the universal issues of human longing and grief while praising the unexpected beauty to be found in the wake of such sorrows.

Dear Boy,: An Epistolary Memoir

Weber, Heather

Memoirs

In the early 1970s, Tarn Wilson’s father quit his job as the Brookings Institution’s first computer programmer, packed his family into a converted school bus with “Suck Nixon” painted on the side, and headed for the Canadian wilderness. He planned to give his two young children an Edenic childhood, free from the shadows of war, materialism, and middle class repression. Between each lyric chapter, told from the child’s point of view, Wilson incorporates “artifacts” that reveal larger cultural forces shaping her parents’ decisions: letters, photographs, timelines, newspaper clippings, excepts from radical approaches to child rearing. In the space between the child’s vision and the adult context, readers are invited to consider the gifts and burdens of a counterculture childhood.

The Slow Farm

Wilson, Tarn

The Book of Knowledge and Wonder is a memoir about claiming a legacy of wonder from knowledge of a devastating event. In some ways it has the feel of a detective story in which Steven Harvey pieces together the life of his mother, Roberta Reinhardt Harvey, who committed suicide when he was eleven, out of the 406 letters she left behind. Before he read the letters his mother had become little more than her death to him, but while writing her story he discovered a woman who, despite her vulnerability to depression, had a large capacity for wonder and a love of familiar things, legacies that she passed on to him. 
The book tackles subjects of recent fascination in American culture: corporate life and sexism in the fifties, mental illness and its influence on families, and art and learning as a consolation for life’s woes, but in the end it is the perennial theme of abiding love despite the odds that fuels the tale. As the memoir unfolds, his mother changes and grows, darkens and retreats as she gives up her chance at a career in nursing, struggles with her position as a housewife, harbors paranoid delusions of having contracted syphilis at childbirth, succumbs to a mysterious, psychic link with her melancholic father, and fights back against depression with counseling, medicine, art, and learning. 
Harvey charts the way, after his mother’s death, that he blotted out her memory almost completely in his new family where his mother was rarely talked about, a protective process of letting go that he did not resist and in a way welcomed, but the book grows out of a nagging longing that never went away, a sense of being haunted that caused the writer to seek out places alone—dribbling a basketball on a lonely court, going on long solitary bicycle rides, walking away from his family to the edge of a mountain overlook, and working daily at his writing desk—where he might feel her presence. 
In the end, the loss cannot be repaired. Her death, like a camera flash in the dark, blotted out all but a few lingering memories of her in his mind, but the triumph of the book is in the creative collaboration between the dead mother, speaking to her son in letters, and the writer piecing together the story from photographs, snatches of memory, and her words so that he can, for the first time, know her and miss her, not some made up idea of her. The letters do not bring her back—he knows the loss is irrevocable—but as he shaped them into art, the pain, that had been nothing more than a dull throb, changed in character, becoming more diffuse and ardent, like heartache.

The Book of Knowledge and Wonder

Harvey, Steven

The winner of the 2016 Oregon Book Award for creative nonfiction and the Lambda Literary Award for memoir, these essays chronicle some of life's biggest dramas: marriage, divorce, and the quest for the perfect fashion accessory. On the surface, Kate Carroll de Gutes’ debut collection of essays considers her sexuality, gender presentation, and the end of her marriage. But, as editor Judith Kitchen says, “peel it back, begin to take it apart, semantically and linguistically and personally, and it all comes clear.” Kate Carroll de Gutes invites readers to become collaborators in essays about issues we all face: growing up, identity, love, loss, and sometimes, the quest for the perfect fashion accessory. With wit matched by self-compassion and empathy, the essays offer a lesson on the inevitable journey back to the places we all began. "On every page, de Gutes reminds us that we all traverse life’s roads with one eye fixed on the receding and mirrored past.” – Stephanie Kallos, best-selling author of Broken for You.

Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear

de Gutes, Kate Carroll

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