256 pages
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.” 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.
Preface
Acknowledgments
Part One: Home Economics for Halfbacks
1. Going, Going, Gone
2. The Wink of the Zenith
3. The Summer of the Vampire
4. Cover Stories
5. Home Economics for Halfbacks
Part Two: When the Clock Stops
6. When the Clock Stops
7. Into a Maelstrom of Fire: On Having a Feeling for Thomas Hardy
8. Echo Lark
9. Numbers
10. Running After My Father
Part Three: Travels in Lavender and Light
11. Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered
12. The Voice of the Past
13. Shine On
14. Travels in Lavender and Light
15. Jambon Dreams
16. Flesh and Fortune: Coming Back to Measure for Measure
Epilogue: Silence the Pianos
The Wink of the Zenith includes Skloot’s Pushcart Prize–winning essay “The Voice of the Past” 2009 Oregon Book Awards: Finalist in the Creative Nonfiction category.