At the Corner of Past and Future

“The Nebraska voice of Pamela Carter Joern shines like the stars in the vast dome of her natal sky, at once lyrical and straightforward. With sharp observation, tenderness, and wry humor, her collected stories and essays carry us irresistibly from a three-year-old’s memory of a red couch by a window to wise and surprising meditations on mortality in a wider world. It’s a wonder and a gift.”—Gayla Marty, author of Memory of Trees: A Daughter’s Story of a Family Farm

“Pamela Carter Joern delivers what I want from a well-crafted memoir in essays: emotional honesty, unstinting candor, lyrical writing, artful storytelling, attention to context, and a deep and fearless questioning of what she knows, or thinks she knows, about herself and her place in the world.”—Lisa Knopp, author of What the River Carries and The Nature of Home

“Pamela Carter Joern shows us the big sky in this affective and eloquently written collection. The big sky of a Great Plains childhood. The big sky of flying leaps, finding meaning, and facing mortality. The big sky of Nebraska itself, a necessary landscape that pulls her home, holds her steady, and keeps letting her leave and return again. These heartrending essays about place, personhood, and the passage of time invite us to bask in all our big skies of troubled and ecstatic living.”—Barrie Jean Borich, author of Body Geographic and Apocalypse, Darling