Restoring the Burnt Child is the second volume in William Kloefkorn’s four-part memoir, which will cover the four elements: water, fire, earth, and air. Negotiating the no man’s land between ages nine and thirteen, this memoir of a small-town boy’s life in 1940s Kansas continues the story Kloefkorn began in his much-loved volume This Death by Drowning. With characteristic humor and in prose as lyrical as his poetry, he describes the unsentimental education he received at the hands of the denizens of Urie’s Barber Shop and the Rexall Drugstore and at the knees of the true characters who made up his family. From the “firefly” stunt that nearly burns down his home to the distant firestorms of World War II, fire presents an endless range of subtle and surprising lessons for the boy, whose impressions Kloefkorn conveys with the immediacy, naiveté, and poignancy of youth—and reconsiders with the wisdom and distance of age.

 

Restoring the Burnt Child powerfully brings to life the lost, unforgettable world of a boy, and of a poet, coming of age in midcentury middle America. Chosen as a 2008 One Book, One Nebraska selection, this Bison Books edition is updated with a set of discussion questions.

William Kloefkorn is Nebraska’s state poet and emeritus professor of English at Nebraska Wesleyan University. He is the author of many volumes of poetry and two other memoirs, This Death by Drowning and At Home on This Moveable Earth, both published by the University of Nebraska Press.

“A marvelous book, full of the intensity and grittiness of language drawn from rocky Kansas fields and from great literature. Kloefkorn’s voice provides a perspective unlike any other I’ve read, one that has had me reading out loud, saying, ‘Listen to this.’”—Peggy Shumaker, author of Underground Rivers

“A fun, interesting, and compelling read, combining the best of fiction writing with the intimacy and material of memoir.”—Dianne Nelson Oberhansly, author of A Brief History of Male Nudes in America

"As history both personal and communal, and as performance both written and oral, this book gives us [Kloefkorn] at his best."—David Pichaske, Great Plains Quarterly

“Imagine the renegade, 14-year old spirit of Huck Finn in the massive body of Merlin Olsen, gentlest of the giants who were the L.A. Rams’ legendary ‘Fearsome Foursome,’ and you’ve got Bill Kloefkorn. Or as close as you can get.”—Harold Hill, Lincoln Journal Star

2008 One Book, One Nebraska selection

 

2004 Nebraska Book Award, non-fiction category winner, sponsored by the Nebraska Center for the Book