A Step from Death

This is the second Woiwode memoir I've read. Neither are "easy" reads. You have to pay pretty close attention to follow the circuitous paths of Woiwode's logic and writing style, which often seems unnecessarily elaborate and labyrinthian. But the effort pays off in the anecdotes he offers about his realtionships with his father (his mother died when he was nine) and his son. Woiwode is speaking throughtout the narrative to his son, Joseph, who was an army helicopter pilot in Iraq as he was writing this. There are also more stories here about Woiwode's long friendship with William Maxwell, who was the fiction editor at The New Yorker magazine. And anecdotes about other writers abound too, as was true in his first memoir, What I Think I Did. I was particularly taken with a story about Jim Harrison and pal Tom McGuane who came to do some bird hunting on some property Woiwode was renting in Michigan. You get the definite impression that Woiwode is a perfectionist in his writing to the point of obsessive compulsive disorder, as he documents a couple of near breakdowns trying to complete his magnum opus, Beyond the Bedroom Wall. Marital complications and separations are also given space here and Woiwode holds little back. Tempted as I was at times to simply toss the book aside, I'm glad I finished it. It's worth the slog. I may try to find Beyond the Bedroom Wall, if only because the book seems to have come close to killing its author. In any case, this Larry Woiwode sounds like a very interesting guy. - Tim Bazzett, author of SOLDIER BOY: AT PLAY IN THE ASA

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.

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.

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 re