From the winner of the 2004 PEN Center USA Literary Award for Creative Nonfiction
In his award-winning memoir In the Shadow of Memory, Floyd Skloot told the hard story of coming to terms with a brain-ravaging virus. A World of Light, written with the same insight, passion, and humor that distinguished the earlier volume, moves Skloot’s story from the reassembly of a self after neurological calamity to the reconstruction of a shattered life. More than fifteen years after a viral attack compromised his memory and cognitive powers, Skloot now must do the vital work of recreating a cohesive life for himself even as he confronts the late stages of his mother’s advancing dementia. With tenderness and candor, he finds surprising connection with her where it had long been missing, transforming the end of her life into a time of unexpected renewal.
At the same time, Skloot and his wife are building a rich new life at the center of a small isolated forest on a hillside in rural Oregon, where a dwindling water supply and the bitter assaults of the weather bring an elemental perspective to his attempts to make himself once more at home in the world. By turns poignant, funny, and frightening, A World of Light balances the urgency to capture fragmented, fleeting memories with the necessity of living fully in the present.
The current memoir vogue would have Skloot belaboring the tortures he endured at the hands of his mother, all piled upon more hand-wringing, blame, and navel-gazing through dilated pupils. Though his understated approach has probably consigned him to a university press (a place where he’s comfortable; he’s an accomplished poet after all), the critics that bother to take notice of this small book find it, like his first essay collection In the Shadow of Memory (**** Sept/Oct 2003), a masterful effort. Words like "nourishing" and "grace" paint a fair picture of reviewers’ tones; they respect his accomplishment as much as they respect the effort that must have gone into creating it. It makes one believe that, if we only remembered what was important, life might be much more rewarding.
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: Blauner@aol.com.
I really enjoyed Skloot's previous two collections of writings, and I enjoyed this one too.
This one is very different to the other two though as Skloot barely mentions his illness at all in this one.
I came to know (and love) Skloot's writing because I could relate to his experiences with having a severe neurological illness. He writes so eloquently about all the symptoms and describes many of them so well, better than I've ever read anywhere else; it was like reading my own diary written by someone else at times! Wonderful writing.
But I also came to just like reading what Skloot had to say when it wasn't about his illness too. So I'd highly recommend this book to anyone who enjoyed either of his previous books - just don't buy it if you're only after more insights and discussions of his illness because they just aren't there!
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Clarence is a wanderer. Read the first pageKey Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
Normal Page, Turning Up the Gravity, New York, Short Page, Billy Gardner, Long Island, Memory Impairment Unit, First Page, Long Beach, Ebbets Field, Giovanni Bruno, Last Page, The Song of the Exhausted Well, Southern Illinois University, Taking Stock, Achill Island, Jessica Tandy, Kate Skloot, Floyd Skloot, The Original Amateur Hour, The Waste Land, Thomas Kinsella, Amity Hills, Bar Mitzvah, College Boy
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