Silent passenger larry woiwode8/28/2023 ![]() Woiwode published his first novel at age 28, What I’m Going to Do, I think, and it always humbles me to read of people who’ve published books when they were younger than I currently am. This is a father who cannot understand his son, and therefore fears him in some way. Here the boy tries to sleep as the father watches: “He stares into Will’s eyes, past irises of interleaved silver and blue, and tries to smile, fighting back an irrational fear that the boy is possessed.” The “irises of interleaved silver and blue” is particularly striking, but even in this small passage we gain an inkling of where the story is going. ![]() In the movement towards the story’s revelation we discover that the family has moved to a remote eastern Montana farm and the boy, Will, has difficulty sleeping he’s absorbing his parents anxieties. In this story a father comes to the understanding that he’s been “trying to supplant his own son.” His son is 4 years old. These are not stories that are stripped bare of muscle: these are stories with an extra layer of muscle. As someone who begins each day with a tall glass of OJ, I can’t tell you how much I appreciate the richness of pleasure I gain from language like this, from “Wanting an Orange”:Įach one, stripped of its protective tissue, as vivid against the purple as a pebbled sun, encouraged you to envision a whole pyramid of them in a bowl on the dining-room table, glowing in the light, as if radiating the warmth that arrived through the windows from the real winter sun.Īll the stories in this collection are meditative in the sense that there’s a lot of meat on the bone of each sentence. John McPhee’s brilliant history of the orange, Oranges, is at 152 pages a monstrous tome by comparison. The first story, “Wanting an Orange,” is a meditation on the joys of eating oranges. The book was a trim collection of stories called Silent Passengers. I first came across the work of Larry Woiwode as a graduate student in Kansas. That Wikipedia site deserves to be longer. Which is exactly why he’s the subject of this post. His Wikipedia page is rinky dink, and that’s both unfortunate and unsurprising given that he’s fallen off the radar. Woiwode (his surname is pronounced WHY-woody, according to this New York Times article that Leslie Pietrzyk sent me after reading this post–thanks Leslie!) is a North Dakotan who has written eight novels, a book of poetry, and a bunch of essays. His response? You change your name–I’m bigger than you.Īnyway, Larry Woiwode. But in his time he was so big that the Winston Churchill of England, the one everyone remembers, asked him to change his name. Wikipedia doesn’t know him, which practically means he didn’t exist. The famous American author, a bestseller in his day? I bet you didn’t. Remember Winston Churchill? No, not that Winston Churchill. Publishers that Accept Unagented SubmissionsĪnother new and semi-regular feature I’d like to introduce here on First Person Plural is “Whatever happened to?” In this feature, we will publish a post on a writer who once was a name but who now has (or seems to have) fallen by the wayside.The Writer’s Center COVID Safety Policy.Curated Conversation(s): a Latinx Poetry Show.Readers familiar with his work will be delighted with this novel, but it isn't a particularly good place to start reading Woiwode, as its pace and setting can become relentlessly claustrophobic for those not sufficiently initiated. A toughness, a brusqueness pervades the oblique forms of communication in Michigan's northern woods, and Woiwode has an uncanny ability to go from mystical transcendence to slapstick in the course of a page. 22) is the center of the fictional universe, while Ellen floats at the edges. As in Woiwode's first novel, Chris (still armed with his. ![]() ![]() He seems conscious of his Native American heritage for the first time, but even as it starts to accrete significance for him, he blunders through a series of awkward encounters with local Native Americans, antagonizing a malevolent few. But before he can come to terms with Roethke, Chris must reckon with his own identity. Chris is struggling to finish his dissertation on American poetry. It is seven years after the events of What I'm Going to Do, and Chris and Ellen are in her grandparents' cabin in northern Michigan. Now, having written the distinguished novels Born Brothers and Beyond the Bedroom Wall, Woiwode has returned to his first novel's characters and setting in a sequel that matches the intensity of his early work while showing the finesse of his more recent books. More than two decades have passed since Woiwode exploded onto the literary scene with the novel What I'm Going to Do, I Think. ![]()
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