House of Steps: Finding the Path Home

The author of Going to Ground describes her journey from Georgia back to northeast Kansas, where she and her dogs set up housekeeping, in entertaining essays that detail her encounters with the woods, wasps, roaches, and the wonders of the natural world. Tour.

In a breezy manner, Blackmarr describes her move from a remote cabin in southern Georgia (the setting of her first memoir, Going to Ground) to a ramshackle home near Lawrence, Kans. From the vantage point of this house with stacked rooms connected by an endless series of steps, Blackmarr observes the ebb and flow of rural Kansas life in a series of essays. Throughout her descriptions of her conflicts with wasps in the attic, her explorations in surrounding fields and her encounters with an assortment of Kansans, Blackmarr's sentences often sparkle. Describing "The Girl Who Could Talk to Trees," she writes: "When she was a girl, an Oklahoma woman I know was best friends with an old sycamore in her back pasture. She ran to it when she was hurt or sad and sat under it and cried and told it her troubles, she said, and it sang to her and told her its secrets." While Blackmarr's associative leaps are often intriguing, and her well-crafted sentences hold the promise of deeper meaning, she rarely mines her observations for true revelation. Rather, the writing tends to float from moment to moment, like dust on the Kansas wind. Occasionally, this airy style settles on its mark. An essay titled "Magic" neatly describes how the sacred world reveals itself in simple, material things. "Origami Ducks" captures in four concise pages the rituals of Thanksgiving and of giving thanks. More insight and less flutter would have been welcome, however. (July)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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.

Blackmarr, author of Going to Ground: Simple Life on a Georgia Pond (Viking, 1997) and essayist for the weekly public radio shows Georgia Gazette and Up-To-Date, continues her journey of self-discovery in a series of essays centered around a "house of steps"Aa hippie house that is all angles, glass, and drafts. Blackmarr's essays are imbued with a deep sense of nature and a quirky acceptance of human shortcomings. Community and family are important. She has an appealing, stream-of-consciousness writing style that invites the reader to join her extended family and share adventures with her super-organized mother and three crazy dogs. A pleasurable read, just right for a hot summer day. Recommended for public libraries.AShana C. Fair, Ohio Univ., Zanesville
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Blackmarr returns with another collection of essays that, in effect, amount to a journal of solitude. In her previous Going to Ground (1997), she wrote of her return from Kansas to her native Georgia, where, for five years, she lived in her grandfather's old fishing cabin. In her latest book, she has gone back to Kansas to do graduate work, and she chose, again, to live rurally. During her many hours being alone, Blackmarr had time to ponder life and its metaphysical aspects, but she also had time to react to and think about the more concrete factors of her life 15 miles down a country road. Wasps were now a big part of her life, as was "baseball mailbox," whereby teenagers use a baseball bat to try to knock down mailboxes as they drive by. When aloneness is appreciated, you can afford to sit in bed for two days and fold origami Christmas presents or go all day without uttering a sound. Think about it. Brad Hooper