A Step from Death: A Memoir [Paperback]

Larry Woiwode (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 17, 2009

In this deeply affecting memoir, Larry Woiwode addresses his son as heir to his emotional interior. With beautiful language and a poet’s sensibility, Woiwode begins his story by relating a near-death experience with a malfunctioning hay baler—the kind of mistake that can kill a novice farmer. This episode launches a delicately woven series of memories, from snippets of Woiwode’s days in New York as a young writer working with the late great William Maxwell, to his days as a young father, husband, and teacher trying to scrape enough together to buy a ranch in western North Dakota, and finally to the prospect of an empty nest and the step from death that he finds rapidly approaching.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. One August afternoon on his farm, North Dakota poet laureate and horse farmer Woiwode makes a novice farmer's mistake and almost loses his life in a farm accident. Using this near-death experience as his Proustian madeleine, Woiwode (Beyond the Bedroom Wall) brilliantly weaves strands of his writing life, his teaching life and his family struggles into a colorful chronicle of his journey from childhood to adulthood. In rich detail, he recalls his early days as a struggling writer in New York and his move to North Dakota in order to discover the mystery of nature and the mystic nature of place and its role in writing. As a young writer, when he read a novel a day, Woiwode remembers waking to the air of a Turgenev hunt, shaving with a razor like a character from Cather and brewing thick black coffee in honor of Colette. Woiwode regales readers with tales of parties with Roger Straus, Robert De Niro, Susan Sontag and John Cheever. At the center of these sparkling recollections of a writer's life, however, lies the relationship of the father to the son, and Woiwode addresses his memoir to his son, Joseph, as a way of coming to terms with his failures to recognize how deeply his own father's identity has become his own. (Mar.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Booklist

Guided by the now legendary William Maxwell, Woiwode reached the literary big time with his early novels, including Beyond the Bedroom Wall (1975). But after his first child was born, he left heady and gritty New York to return to the cleaner air and clearer mission of life on the land in North Dakota. Now in his sixth decade, Woiwode launched a memoir series with What I Think I Did (2001) and here presents a second potent, faith-centered volume addressed to his son, an army pilot serving in Iraq. A gripping storyteller as well as a ruminative thinker, Woiwode notes that the “most revealing aspect” of memoirs is the writer’s description of how “one mind . . . moves,” a subject he approaches with candor and precision, intent on learning from mistakes, mishaps, and loss, and on affirming his love for his resilient family. Woiwode’s chronicling of the inordinate number of farming injuries, car crashes, and fires his family has suffered is harrowing and darkly beautiful, lanced with portent and gratitude. Pain is Woiwode’s core subject, and as he recounts his breakdowns and struggles to do right by his loved ones, his farm, and his writing, he expiates his sorrows and offers hope in a dramatic spiritual memoir of adversity, rescue, survival, and achievement. --Donna Seaman --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: Counterpoint; First Trade Paper Edition edition (February 17, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1582434697
• ISBN-13: 978-1582434698
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.2 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,203,510 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Larry Alfred Woiwode (born October 30, 1941) is an American writer who lives in North Dakota, where he has been the state's Poet Laureate since 1995. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, The Atlantic Monthly, Harpers, Gentleman's Quarterly, The Partisan Review and The Paris Review. He is the author of five novels; two collections of short stories, a commentary titled "Acts," a biography of the Gold Seal founder and entrepreneur, Harold Schafer, Aristocrat of the West, a book of poetry, Even Tide ; and reviews and essays and essay-reviews that have appeared in dozens of publications, including The New York Times and The Washington Post Book World.

He has served as Writer in Residence at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and conducted summer sessions as a professor at Wheaton College, Chicago, and the C.S. Lewis Seminars at Cambridge; he has also conducted seminars and workshops in fourteen states of the U.S., all of the Canadian provinces but British Columbia, and in England, Lithuania, and the Scandinavias. He has published a dozen book sin a variety of genres, and his work has been translated into a dozen languages.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Meditation on the Poetry of Living, March 13, 2008

By 

M. Ross "messr_perkins" (Town of Ross, CA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: A Step from Death: A Memoir (Hardcover)

In an age such as ours, dominated by pop-manifestos writing about the temporal "buy now, think later," Woiwode's "A Step From Death" is a sobering necessity. I say sobering because it deals - in moving verse whose poetry I only begin to see in my third or fourth reading of the lines - life, love, marriage, children, and, of course (as its title indicates) death.

And Woiwode has some convincing experiences with it, writing this work after a near death encounter with a tractor. (Would-be farmers beware, farming is not for the faint -- or careless.) But this work is not really about Woiwode's individual existence, per se, instead its about existence as existence -- in other words, how does an individual make sense of this world? Or, as Woiwode, I think, gives beautiful shape to -- the one we create.

Above all though, I'd say that the work is a searing journey into the emotional interior of what makes live worth living: other people; mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, and friends -- and of how we deal when we lose them. It's also about navigating life -- the policies of stupidity and incompetence, drafted by legislatures, lawyers, and wannabes of those varieties, all the while returning to a spiritual understanding of the beauty and emotional integrity of living a life of value and meaning.

That makes sense, because the book is addressed to Woiwode's son, Joseph (now serving in the military) -- and seems to me, to be a story designed to give his son the benefit of his, Woiwode's, experience. (Throughout the book Woiwode suggests reading to his son Joseph, the books that have given the meaning, and fabric of logic and narrative qualities to his life -- and reading them in the context that Woiwode delivers them, makes me want to read them.) More fundamentally though, the book expresses frustrations at errors made as a father and husband, but more importantly, in an almost poetically uncanny way, it shows how, in the end, those errors are subsumed beneath a real spiritual awareness, grounded in the rivers, fields, and sky that is his, Woiwode's, chosen ecological landscape.

Anybody reading this book should be prepared for a tremendous story that covers a vast range of territory -- i.e. life -- and be prepared to meditate on certain lines, the way they're structured and written, to see the poetic qualities inherent in the language. (Woiwode, in the work, also confesses to a love of language, and after all, language is truly the heart of our individual lives.) Mostly though, as I mentioned earlier, in an age that seems dominated by the immediate, the sensory-perceptive, the "stuff" that just, really, doesn't "cut" it, this is a really thoughtful -- almost, like Gary Snyder's (one of the new Counterpoint's owners) qualitative Zen thoughtfulness -- well-written, beautiful, moving travel through an individual life, that in some way, through his experience or thoughts, relates to us all.

In searching for more information about Woiwode, I came across a review written by the famed, and for some reason I can't quite discern, revered writer, and counselor to writers, John Gardner, on Woiwode's "Beyond the Bedroom Wall," -- which he also talks about, under the moniker "IT" in this memoir -- where he said, "it seems to me that nothing more moving has been written in years." While I'm not a reviewer for the New York Times, I can say, as someone who likes books, that this is one of the most beautifully and honestly written book on love, relationships, and the inevitable end that comes to us all, that I have read in a long time. And, I am certain it will continue to move for years to come.

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An opportunity to reflect on life...., April 5, 2008

By 

Dick (Woodbury MN USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Step from Death: A Memoir (Hardcover)

Larry Woiwode and I go way back. But had my brother not sent me a review of "A Step From Death" I may not have ever learned of this marvelous book.
In 1940s Sykeston ND (pop. 250 soaking wet), our young lives intersected for four or so years, as did the lives of our parents. Larry once told me that I was perhaps "the tallest boy in the lower grades" in The Street, from his novel Beyond the Bedroom Wall.
The years since 1950 we've taken different paths. Only twice in those 58 years have we, as my Dad would have said, actually had a 'face-off', and those occasions occurred about 30 years ago.
I found A Step From Death to be a powerful book, reflective, written by (in no particular order) an author, husband, father, poet, farmer, son, neighbor....
I knew the bare basics of Larry's life, but A Step From Death, from it's first chapter, came not to be about his life, but about my own. Every page caused me to reflect on my own 68 years as a son; 44 as a father; almost 22 as a Grandpa, and on and on and on.
Did it make a difference if he went back from his front steps into his home to get a jacket? (The second sentence of the book). Of course it did.
But to me that vignette and all of the other snips from an abundant life drew me back into a review of my own life, now living as an "orphan" (both parents long departed), "on deck" in the natural order of things, moving towards my own inevitable end of life, now (and always) at my own "Step from Death".
Written as a long letter from father to son, A Step From Death might be seen as a man's book. I think not. "Care", Larry's spouse, and their daughters, are always present and integral, in all the roles family members play in each others lives.
I'll reread A Step from Death, next time slowly, only a single chapter at a sitting. It will be my Father's Day gift to my own son, now 44, and of the next generation.
Thank you, Larry.

9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A poignant, memorable memoir, March 22, 2008

By 

Monica McTavish - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: A Step from Death: A Memoir (Hardcover)

Larry Woiwode's A Step From Death is a wisdom-laden work of extraordinary quality. Woven throughout are engaging historical literary references and allusions, which tie a writer's life to the lives of others engaged in this worthy pursuit. Beautifully described are the spiritual and religious thoughts of a man in search of the right way to live with self, family, community, and the Almighty. As Woiwode addresses his son in a voice both fatherly and philosophical, he is drawing the reader toward the physical place where he resides, North Dakota, and toward a deeper understanding of family relations, faith, survival, death, and the afterlife. His thinking outloud about death is touching, thought-provoking, and faith inspiring. Within Woiwode's memoir lies a self-help path on this subject for any who are perceptive enough to grasp it.