House of Steps: Finding the Path Home - Softcover

Blackmarr, Amy

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0865549125 ISBN 13: 9780865549128

Publisher: Mercer Univ Pr, 2003

Synopsis

For vicarious seekers of the simple life who loved Going to Ground, here are more graceful and pithy essays--from its author's move to a quirky habitat in rural Kansas.

"Lovely," said the Chicago Tribune of Going to Ground, which the Washington Post Book World called "by turns pert and engaging, musing and meditative . . . gives us the warmth of Amy Blackmarr's friendship, and the remarkable gift of watching her come to know herself. " Now Blackmarr returns from her granddaddy's old Georgia pond-side cabin to a northeast Kansas bluff and a tree-high house crazily cobbled into four floors of rocky walls, mazelike stairs, and drafts. Alone with her three dogs, she again weaves scenes from her past into reflections on the present, plucking from everyday life the bright gems of wonder and meaning in an extraordinary world.

In the vibrant midwestern silence, where far-off voices play alarming tricks at night, Blackmarr gets lost in the woods, battles wasps but refuses to step on roaches, takes in her third stray dog, frets over the "corruption" of her mother, confronts a blushing mailman with her Victoria's Secret catalog, collects bugs in a bowl, and confronts her own perfectionism. All teach her the deepest lessons about herself, her community, and her God. Like Kathleen Norris's The Cloister Walk and Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, House of Steps is an ode to "the remarkable and incorruptible process of living from day to ordinary day." Warm, lyrical, and gently ironic, it is Blackmarr's "clear space you can go back to and rest in on days when you can't put your feet on that ground."

About this title

Review

There are dozens of "finding home" memoirs on the shelves these days, accounts by men and women who, tired of fast-lane life and following Henry Thoreau's footsteps, make for the countryside to raise barns, sheep, and families. Only a few of these well-intentioned autobiographies (notably Linda Hasselstrom's Feels Like Far) are set on the Great Plains, that huge, ego-deflating ocean of grass that runs from northern Canada to the Mexican border.

With House of Steps, Georgia-bred writer and radio commentator Amy Blackmarr stakes her literary claim to a little slice of the Plains, an old farm on the outskirts of Lawrence, Kansas. Her house, she writes, was "built by a flower child as the 1960s faded," and it's a ramshackle creation indeed, full of odd angles, staircases that lead to paralyzing heights (whence her title), and unmapped nooks and crannies--just the sort of place where a curious person could find plenty of ways to pass the time. In vignettes that betray their origins as radio sketches, Blackmarr recounts her days of getting to know the ways of the landscape, the passing seasons, the flora, and especially the fauna, among which prominently figure ill-tempered wasps, spiders, and field mice. Her memoir has many charms, including her meditation on the silence that accompanies a life alone in the far countryside, a life sometimes fraught with danger but more often laced with wonder. --Gregory McNamee

From Kirkus Reviews

Flashes of brilliance illuminate stretches of humdrum nature writing and earnest introspection from essayist Blackmarr. In Going to Ground (1997) Blackmarr sold her Kansas City paralegal business and retreated to her family's Georgia farm. ``Returning to Georgia was my withdrawal from the world,'' she writes, but Kansas (where she now holds a graduate fellowship at the University of Kansas) ``brought me back.'' Well, part way back. Ever headstrong and aloof, she keeps her distance in rural McLouth, living in a funky house that's a monument to 1960s flower power, ``an M.C. Escher graphic that actually exists in all three dimensions.'' Despite its charms, the drafty rustic abode, known locally as the Tree House, ``was not, after all, something the Keebler elves would live in,'' Blackmarr soon learns. But it does provide isolation and abundant access to nature. Trading her Georgia pond for Kansas prairie grass, she still hews the Thoreauvian line, viewing isolation as a way to draw closer to humanity rather than escape it. No ascetic, Blackmarr abandons attempts to fast in the Kansas heat and instead watches TV and eats Girl Scout cookies. She reveres the natural world around her rural home even as she fights it, battling spiders, wasps, and an unruly lawn with the grim determination of a suburbanite. Her stubbornnessdisplayed in Kansas and in flashbacks to her life in Georgiais a recurring theme. Blackmarr is no Annie Dillard, though, and her digressive, loose-jointed reflections on life in a small place often spawn breathless writing about fairly unremarkable things. At other times, she drills an image perfectly, as when she compares her own sense of dispossession as a Southerner in Kansas to ``a Faulkner character in a cowboy song.'' Subtitle aside, differences between southern and midwestern life are addressed only superficially. This slender book is ultimately a lot like the house it was written in: whimsical, apparently arbitrary, and frequently out of plumb, it somehow stands up. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Edition details

• Publisher: Mercer Univ Pr
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0865549125
• ISBN 13: 9780865549128
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 160