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Search - The Middle Distance

The Middle Distance
Author: John Edwards

The Middle Distance is an anthology of creative nonfiction produced by the members of The Villa Writers' Workshop. 22 authors contibute humor, essays, family history, and personal narrative to this collection. Varying from two pages to ten, the 66 pieces embrace the entire genre of creative nonfiction in all its forms. In the Foreword, Puli... more »tzer Prize nominee Diana Hume George writes:"The Villa Writers ... embody what Walt Harrington means by the extraordinary-ordinary of the genre called intimate journalism ... the immersion journalists whose subjects are often ordinary people. The Villa Writers create such intimate portraits through personal essays, because they are often both the subjects and the chroniclers of their own lives and eras, and those of the people they witness for, are maddened by, and dearly love. Their worlds are peopled by beings who have learned a great deal. The result is writing that glistens with newly remembered life. "Although this group’s home base is Erie, Pennsylvania, they represent what’s best about writing groups all over the country. Community writers write. They don’t have time for nonsense. They fight for the time to make writing a priority. The Villa Writers talk about writing, read to each other, discuss survival issues (from Alzheimer’s to existentialism), listen closely, free-write, edit, repair each other’s language with respect. Often members of what’s now called the "sandwich generation," they write about their mothers and fathers, their gardens, their children and grandchildren, small and grown, the towns they grew up in; they speak of nursing dying people, sighting pronghorns, visiting old department stores, tracing the mosaics of the Baptistery floor in Florence. They are teachers and nurses and social workers, organists and biologists and waitresses, convicts and speech pathologists, cooks and administrators, journalists and public relations people, printmakers and homemakers.The essays here are often drenched in memory so sweet (or so awful) that it almost aches. Life goes fast. These people record what they know, where they’ve been, what they’ve witnessed, whom they’ve loved – ephemera unknown to others, central to them, that otherwise die unobserved. Sometimes the essays here are less elegiac than that. The generally tragic tenor of life notwithstanding – and that tenor is acknowledged here aplenty – some of these writers retain a lighter view of human endurance so deep that even cancer can’t repress it.The writers here ... have looked closely at people and process nearby them, and seem aware of Andrew Marvell’s words, written in the seventeenth century but as good for the twenty-first, in 'To His Coy Mistress': But at my back I always hear

Time’s winged chariot hurrying near

And yonder all before me lie

Deserts of vast eternity. "Gazing across an even horizon, the writers represented here are concerned with eternity in time, or else with writing ’zines about retail hell — it can come to the same thing.The Villa Writers have produced a fine anthology that speaks, in its many voices, from the need to tell our ordinary human stories. After you’re around long enough, you realize that there’s the stuff of Greek tragedy in every other house on your block. The translucence we associate with Shakespearean comic vision infuses some of the same lives. The Villa Writers’ Workshop could be meeting in any town or city in America. These are my people. And yours, whoever you are."

ISBN-13: 9780971720503
ISBN-10: 0971720509
Publication Date: 1/1/2002
Pages: 281
Rating:

0 stars, based on 0 rating

Publisher: Cambridge Springs Press
Book Type: Paperback
Members Wishing: 0
Reviews: Amazon | Write a Review

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