After some 50 years of asking his paternal grandmother questions regarding their family history and recording her responses in notes, the early wire recorders, a Sony reel-to-reel recorder, and later cassettes, Fredrick Zydek has finally selected some of those conversations in this memoir of those sessions. The reader will quickly appreciate that his grandmother, Bertha Zydek, could be poignant, evasive, opinionated, funny and sometimes disapproving of the family history she related him. To her credit, his grandmother refused to answer some of his questions because she felt the answers were none of his business but neither was she intimidated by some of the scandal that rippled through the family over the years. Through the years she would even talk about some of the disappointments she experienced because of her children and an in-law or two she didn't really care for. But overall, The Button Box is a celebration of an American family so typical it will often remind you of your own clan.
Learning the Ways of Coyote is a fictionalized story of the last Quinault woman to live in the old ways and what it took to move her from her traditional home along Lake Quinault to government housing in the upper village. It is a story of tenacity that is rich with Northwest Indian lore and tradition, a story that endears us to Grandmother Redwing and her grandsons who are being mainstreamed into American culture. It is a novel of pathos and humor, a story of cultural conflicts and spiritual maturity.
Author's Statement: I have been making retreats and visiting Conception Abbey, a Benedictine monastery and seminary in Northwest Missouri, since 1956. It continues to be one of those places on the planet that energizes my spirit and clears my vision. I must extend thanks and gratitude to the good monks of the Abbey whose hospitality has always participated in my urges to return to the place. These poems are spun from those experiences. I am grateful to Winthrop Press for permitting me to revisit and expand this group of poems with others spun from the Abbey's influence since the publication of the second edition.
A poetic journey from small town America in the 1940s to the evolving life and death of its inhabitants into the 21st Century. These are poems of place that have a universal appeal.
A poetic journey from small town America in the 1940s to the evolving life and death of its inhabitants into the 21st Century. These are poems of place that have a universal appeal.
The forty meditation poems of Fredrick Zydek's Journey to the River, inspired by David Wagoner's Straw For the Fire, a collection of poems, half poems and fragments David gathered from Theodore Roethke's notes and notebooks in the Roethke archives at the University of Washington, first came into being in the 1960s when Wagoner, Zydek's teacher, recommended Zydek spend some time in the Roethke archives. Soon after, Zydek wrote "18th Meditation: Journey to the River," followed by additional meditations. The poems collected here represent decades' worth of rumination on the human condition by one of America's finest and most prolific poets.
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