E-Book Overview
Whether writing about a boyhood in the Great Depression, the bond between a young man and his family, digging storm cellars and ducking tornadoes, or the dropping of the atomic bomb as experienced by a paperboy in small-town Kansas, Kloefkorn brings a congenial mixture of seriousness and humor to his subjects. Here and there the commonplace lends itself to the not-so-common question: What is the odd relationship between power, terror, and beauty? Why are human beings torn between staying put and moving—in intellectual and spiritual as well as physical terms? And how much of who we are is composed of who we were? Rife with insight, At Home on This Moveable Earth is as wonderfully readable as the first two volumes of Kloefkorn’s memoirs, a thoughtful tour of a curious character’s life so far and a model of retrospective introspection.
(20060725)
E-Book Content
At Home on This Moveable Earth
At Home on
This Moveable Earth William Kloefkorn
University of Nebraska Press : Lincoln and London
Chapter 1 originally appeared in The Iowa Review (Summer 2005) under the title “At Home on This Movable Earth.” Chapter 3 first appeared in The Virginia Quarterly Review 81, no. 3 (Summer 2005), under the title “Walking the Dog to Dover.” A section of chapter 7, under the title “Down and Dirty: Re-visiting the Divine Fall,” originally appeared in Ascent 28, no. 3 (Spring 2004). Chapter 11 originally appeared as “Afoot on This Movable Earth” in New Letters 71, no. 3 (Spring 2005). © 2005 by William Kloefkorn. Reprinted by permission of New Letters and the Curators of the University of Missouri–Kansas City. My special thanks to the editors of these periodicals. Copyright © 2006 by the Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska. All rights reserved. Book set in Robert Slimbach’s Adobe Minion and designed by R. Eckersley. Printed by Th