Still Water Bending - Softcover

Clarke, Wendy Mitman

4.4

20 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1939632048 ISBN 13: 9781939632043

Publisher: Head to Wind, 2017

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In the river-born community of Ophelia, Virginia, on the Chesapeake Bay, there are three religions: The Water, The Family, and The Land. For generations, this trinity has sustained a community of proud, independent people. But their way of life is dying. Third-generation waterman Jines Arley Evans clings to what little is left. The fisheries are depleted. His wife and son are long dead, his estranged daughter, Lily Rae, bitter at her father’s emotional abandonment, far away. The family land and silent house, the workboat Jenny Rae, and the water, its rhythms, mysteries, and seasons are all that remain for him. A stroke while fishing threatens to take even that. But when a stroke Jines suffers threatens to take even those fragments of what’s left of his world, Lily Rae must leave her life as a journalist in Portland, Maine and return home to care for him. Thrown uncomfortably together, they must come to terms with each other and with their isolation from others. Maybe they can find common ground in an unlikely place, Jines’s boat shed, where they once again try to build a traditional deadrise skiff together. As Jines’s powerful life contracts, Lily’s expands. She begins to see the place and people she had left behind through new eyes, including Jamie Cockrell, her once best friend. Now divorced with a beautiful young daughter, Jamie yearns for what few other young men of Ophelia still want—a chance, like Jines, to run his own boat and work on the water. Lily is falling in love, not only with Jamie and his daughter but with her home. Yet in the end, she has to make the hardest decision she has ever faced.

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About the Author:

Bio for book jacket: Wendy Mitman Clarke is a writer and reporter who worked for The Associated Press in northern New England before returning to her home waters in the Chesapeake Bay, where she had spent much of her youth exploring the Sassafras River with her parents on their sailboat. She became mid-Atlantic bureau chief for Soundings in Annapolis, then went on to Chesapeake Bay Magazine where she reveled in writing about the Bay, its history, environmental issues, and raising two kids as water rats on the family's 34-foot sailboat Luna. She eventually became the magazine's executive editor. In 2001, The Mariners' Museum and the National Parks Gateways project hired her to write a book of essays, which became Window on the Chesapeake, The Bay, Its People and Places (2002, Howell Press and The Mariners' Museum). In 2008 she and her husband, son, and daughter left Annapolis on their 45-foot sailboat Osprey to travel fulltime through the U.S. East Coast, Bahamas, Central America, and western Caribbean. During their journeys, she wrote an award-winning monthly column for Cruising World magazine called "Osprey's Flight," and she remains a contributing editor. When they returned in 2012, she took a position as a staff writer at Washington College in Chestertown, Maryland, where she is now director of media relations. Earning her master's degree at Washington College, she began writing poetry and since has been published in Blackbird, Rattle, and the Delmarva Review. Two of her poems have won the Pat Nielsen Poetry Award (2015 and 2017) and one was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She has attended the Bread Loaf Writer's Conference twice, studying fiction. She is a regular contributor to Smithsonian.com, and her nonfiction journalism has appeared in Smithsonian, Preservation, and National Parks magazines, in addition to numerous marine and boating publications. In 2002, BOAT/U.S. honored her with the Monk Farnum Award for Excellence in Editorial Commentary, and she has won multiple awards from the Society of Professional Journalists, Maryland, and Boating Writers International. The Chesapeake Bay Magazine story that seeded the idea for this novel, "The Water and Walter Coles," won an Emmart Memorial Award honorable mention, and was published in River Teeth, a journal of creative nonfiction.

Review:

Still Water Bending is a deeply moving story about a woman's journey from a childhood, which resulted in a hardened heart, to experiencing that heart finally broken open. She finds that Thomas Wolfe's "You Can't Go Home Again" is not necessarily accurate - though the pain of such a journey is real and powerful. To take it requires true courage, and that courage is explored in this novel. It is a novel filled with tenderness, truth-telling and wisdom. It is a powerful, life affirming, "must read." Michael Glaser, Maryland Poet Laureate 2004-2009

Still Water Bending, Wendy Mitman Clarke's evocative, moving novel, explores a Chesapeake and a waterman's family in the midst of great change. Jines Arley Evans and his adult daughter Lily Rae struggle to reconnect while navigating eddies of memory, tradition, and old hurts against a gorgeously detailed Chesapeake Bay. It's both an honest, nuanced family portrait and a ravishing love letter to the Chesapeake's working maritime communities--a worthy addition to the Chesapeake canon alongside writers like Horton, Tilghman, and Voight. Kate Livie, Author, Chesapeake Oysters: The Bay's Foundation and Future, former Director of Education, Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum

Both well-wrought and true... I loved every bit of it! Still Water Bending takes you deep into the heart of the Chesapeake, into the lives of the watermen and their families and their powerful attachments to the land, the sea, and each other. Beautifully written and emotionally rich, this is a novel to read and read again. Barbara Esstman The Other Anna, Night Ride Home, and A More Perfect Union

Aye, God, Wendy Mitman Clark knows boats and the Bay, its rhythms, its accents, its soul. She is a beautiful writer and this is a beautiful book, with compelling characters and a deep sense of place that is as enchanting and enduring as a Chesapeake sunrise. Eugene L. Meyer, journalist and author of Chesapeake Country is a member of the board of the Washington Independent Review of Books, and a former Washington Post reporter and editor.

Still Water Bending portrays a vanishing way of life as the watermen...struggle to maintain their independence and their dignity against an influx of moneyed 'come heres' who do not understand or respect the water or the land. It is also the story of two proud and
stubborn people, father and daughter, who...are struggling to come to terms with belonging and isolation, with loss and forgiveness, with dependence and choice, and with defiance and acceptance. They are trying to exert some control in a world where change comes whether we are ready for it or not. Written in the lyrical language of Bay fishing and boatbuilding, Still Water Bending explores with authenticity and sensitivity how people and communities adapt to the turbulence of life flowing around them. Beth Leonard VP at Boat US, author of Blue Horizons: Dispatches from Distant Seas, The Voyager's Handbook, and Following Seas: Sailing the Globe, Sounding a Life

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