The Wink of the Zenith: The Shaping of a Writer's Life [Hardcover]

Floyd Skloot (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 1, 2008

In his three previous memoirs, Floyd Skloot grappled with the brain-ravaging virus that struck him at forty-one. He was, as the San Francisco Chronicle noted, “shaping the experience of crippling illness into dazzling literature.” How such alchemy is performed—where, in fact, the magic comes from—is the subject of Skloot’s new book, a memoir of the making of a writer.
 

Sifting through memories and observations to discover how circumstance and nature conspired to make him the writer he is, Skloot enacts in this book the very process he describes, the shaping of a writer’s life. Among the influences of family and close friendship, experience and popular culture, he uncovers a unique and telling perspective on the forging of a writer’s individual sensibility. At the same time, his book explores fundamental questions about how life shapes the creative spirit—and how, in turn the writer makes sense of it all and gives life a new and meaningful shape in the form of literature.

(20080901)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Skloot had been writing poetry for 20 years, short stories for 15, with three novels on the way, when he was struck with a brain disease that ravaged his memory. Fiction became impossible. Only memoir could help him reassemble his past; two he wrote in this phase, In the Shadow of Memory and A World of Light, have received great praise. This latest memoir moves away from the illness theme to explore what has made Skloot a writer, the sort of person who could only deal with what happened to him by writing about it. He first explores what he calls external influences forming him as a writer—the discovery that he could fulfill school writing assignments with his baseball mania, that his television heroes like Peter Gunn were cooler as observers than as doers, even that the rituals of cooking could bring comfort. Then he focuses on how his writerly sensibilities have shaped his life—from how he jogged listening to hear the hidden cadence to the way he communicated with his aging, memory-impaired mother through song. Skloot is such a fine writer that he can—and does—write about eating baloney and eggs and makes it seem fascinating. Writers at any stage of their careers will treasure this volume of clean, expressive prose that delights without ever showing off. (Sept.)
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From Booklist

Novelist and poet Skloot was struck by a brain virus in 1988, which left him unable to write novels. The memoir form “saved” him, and in his latest he ponders the proclivities and circumstances that led him to become a writer. As a boy, Skloot had a vivid imagination that was fueled by his love for reading, the advent of television, and obsessions with both sports and rock ’n’ roll. Television—especially a “small black-and-white Zenith”—became, Skloot writes, “a means of affirming that what I fabricated in my head could have a life of its own.” Going away to college enabled him to escape from his cold, abusive mother, while a job reading to a blind professor showed him how dialogue establishes character and moves the narrative along. Now that his mother suffers with “the wreckage of dementia” at 94, Skloot finds similarities between their brain patterns, where “threads binding past and present have frayed.” Memoir may not be his genre of choice, but Skloot’s newest is wise, thoughtful, and gently humorous. --Deborah Donovan

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 252 pages
• Publisher: University of Nebraska Press (September 1, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0803211198
• ISBN-13: 978-0803211193
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 5.7 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,544,779 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Floyd Skloot is a creative nonfiction writer, poet, and fiction writer whose work has received three Pushcart Prizes, a Pen USA Literary Award, two Pacific NW Book Awards, an Independent Publishers Book Award, and two Oregon Book Awards. His writing has appeared in such distinguished magazines as The New York Times Magazine, Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, Poetry, American Scholar, Georgia Review, Sewanee Review, Southern Review, Hudson Review, Gettysburg Review, Boulevard, Virginia Quarterly Review, Prairie Schooner, and Creative Nonfiction. His seventeen books include the memoirs In the Shadow of Memory (University of Nebraska Press, 2003), A World of Light (University of Nebraska Press, 2005), and The Wink of the Zenith: The Shaping of a Writer's Life (University of Nebraska Press, 2008); the poetry collections Approximately Paradise (Tupelo Press, 2005), The End of Dreams (Louisiana State University Press, 2006), Selected Poems: 1970-2005 (Tupelo Press, 2008), and The Snow's Music (Louisiana State University Press, 2008); and the novels Summer Blue (Story Line Press, 1994) and Patient 002 (Rager Media, 2007).

His newest books include his first collection of short stories, Cream of Kohlrabi (Tupelo Press, 2011), and a forthcoming collection of poems, Close Reading (Tupelo Press, 2013).

He co-edited The Best American Science Writing 2011 (HarperCollins/Ecco Press) with his daughter, Rebecca Skloot.

He contributes book reviews to the New York Times Book Review, Boston Globe, Philadelphia Inquirer, Los Angeles Times, Harvard Review, Sewanee Review, Notre Dame Review and other publications, and is a member of the National Book Critics Circle.

Floyd has taught at the Mid-Atlantic Creative Nonfiction Summer Writers Conference at Goucher College, the Paris Writers Workshop, and elsewhere.

He lives in Portland, Oregon, with his wife, Beverly Hallberg, a weaver and landscape painter, whose light-filled works cross between impressionistic and abstracted styles. Her paintings grace the covers of Floyd's books, Approximately Paradise, The End of Dreams, Selected Poems: 1970-2005, and The Snow's Music. See her work at www.beverlyhallberg.com.

Floyd's daughter, Rebecca Skloot, is the bestselling author of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (Crown Books, 2010), winner of the Heartland Prize and Wellcome Trust Book Prize, and named Best Book of 2010 by Amazon.com. Visit her website at www.rebeccaskloot.com.

Skloot is represented by Andrew Blauner at Blauner Books Literary Agency. Contact him at: [e-mail].

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A FINE RIGHTNESS!, November 27, 2008

By 

Robert McDowell "Robert McDowell" (Ashland, OR USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Wink of the Zenith: The Shaping of a Writer's Life (Hardcover)

Floyd Skloot's THE WINK OF THE ZENITH: THE SHAPING OF A WRITER'S LIFE, includes the most engaging critical writing about William Faulkner I've ever read.

When Skloot was an undergraduate at Franklin and Marshall College in the mid-Sixties, he got a job taping literature for Professor Robert Russell, who was blind. His account of preparing the tape for The Sound and the Fury is an inspiring account of how one learns to read every word of a book.

I thought of two things while going along for the ride. One: in the ideal academy, wouldn't it be a pretty thing to assign each student, at the beginning of a term, a book to record for a blind person; not an excerpt, but all of it. And two, Faulkner and Virginia Woolf were working the same side of the street.

As if this weren't reward enough in a book about the shaping of a writer's life, Skloot also delivers some of the best insights I've seen regarding the novels and method of Thomas Hardy.

Much of the rest of the book is equally revealing about Skloot's east coast childhood, dysfunctional family, early illness, and first literary influences.

Sports, summer camps, a brief career as a childhood spy, a galloping father, an outrageous 1960s interview ensemble, a caged chicken that yelled Help! every time someone walked by, and the Brooklyn Dodgers make poignant appearances.

We also hear one small detail that tells so much about Skloot's make-up as a writer and human being. I'm thinking of him briefly mentioning how, as a halfback he relentlessly hurled his 120 pound body against 180 pound opponents until he was knocked unconscious.

We learn how early bouts with illness guided the bedridden future writer towards a deeper, richer inner life, how distance running created a much needed connection to his father, and how his own long illness forced him to struggle to master the tiniest steps and simplest memory processes he (and all of us) had taken for granted. Finally, the pieces about he and his wife visiting his aged mother in a memory impairment ward are heartbreaking, hilarious, and disturbing. I won't give away great lines and anecdotes here, but I will share that these pieces contain some of the very best writing on the nature of memory I've seen. It's also pretty terrific in illustrating the Hello/Goodbyes that relentlessly envelope our time here.

Before I stop, it occurs to me that the rich seed of a next book is here, too. Many writers bless us, as Skloot has done here, with a memorable book about a writer's life, but he also has tremendous material at hand for a book on a writer's wife! Skloot's wife Bev (painter, house builder, musician, singer, itinerary magician, mapmaker, chef), is so integral to the author's living and writing that I can't imagine this book or any other being born without her. Theirs is a marvelous creative partnership, and Skloot's contemplative, John Muir-like attention to detail might very well give us the greatest book of this kind we've ever had. Just a thought, but I hope he considers it!


Robert McDowell, The Poetry Mentor, Bestselling author of POETRY AS SPIRITUAL PRACTICE: Reading, Writing, and Using Poetry in Your Daily Rituals, Aspirations, and Intentions (Free Press, 2008), [...]

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Compelling Examination of "The Shaping of a Writer's Life", January 20, 2010

By 

Cara Holman "Booksprout" (Portland, OR) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Wink of the Zenith: The Shaping of a Writer's Life (Hardcover)

In The Wink of the Zenith, his fourth memoir, Floyd Skloot turns his focus on how his past shaped his life as a writer. Through a series of overlapping essays, arranged in roughly sequential order, Skloot reconstructs memories vividly in order to examine how the influences of his past turned him towards a writing life. In the chapters covering his childhood in Brooklyn, and later on Long Island, what emerges is a stark portrait of a lonely boy with a vivid imagination, who struggles to make sense of his father's untimely death and his mother's cruelty.

Through a baseball essay originally assigned by a teacher as punishment, and through his fascination with the world presented to him by the television set his family owned (the Zenith of the title), Skloot details how he came to discover the creative world of writing and how it functioned to provide him an escape from his troubled life.

Subsequent essays follow Skloot during his undergraduate years at Franklin and Marshall College, where under the mentorship of his advisor, he discovers Faulkner and embarks on a comprehensive study of the works of Hardy, and continue into his early years as a writer. The essays in the third part cover his adult years, as he copes simultaneously with his mother's Alzheimer's, and with cognitive changes in himself brought on after contracting a virus in his early forties that left him with neurological damage. It is a testament to Skloot's writing skills that what emerges is an always compelling, sometimes humorous, sometimes poignant account of how he got where he is today as a writer.

The Wink of the Zenith was a 2009 Oregon Book Award Finalist in the category of creative nonfiction.