News from The Blueroad
Nancy Paddock’s Fall 2011 readings
Wednesday, Sept. 7, 7 p.m.: True Colors Bookstore
4755 Chicago Ave. S., Minneapolis.
Reading and signing.
Tuesday, Sept. 20, 7 p.m.: The Loft Literary Center Target Performance Hall
Open Book, 1011 Washington Ave. S., Minneapolis.
Reading and signing.
Tuesday, Sept. 27, 10 a.m.: Summit Center
518 S. 5th St., Mankato.
Reading and discussion.
Wednesday, Oct. 5, 7:30 p.m.: Common Good Books
165 Western Ave. N., St. Paul.
Reading and signing.
Monday, Oct. 10, 7 p.m.: The Bookcase of Wayzata
607 E. Lake St., Wayzata.
Reading and signing.
Saturday, Oct. 15, 11 a.m.-1 p.m.: Rain Taxi/Twin Cities Book Festival
Minneapolis Community & Technical College, 1501 Hennepin Ave., Minneapolis.
Book signing.
Acclaimed Minnesota poet Nancy Paddock’s new memoir, A Song at Twilight, now available
Blueroad Press is pleased to announce the publication of its latest title, A Song at Twilight: Of Alzheimer’s and Love, a memoir by acclaimed Minnesota poet Nancy Paddock—about her parents’ descent into the netherworld of Alzheimer’s, and the challenges and choices for care that she and her sisters faced while confronting this most baffling and tragic of diseases. You can buy it here. Read more here.
Shelf Awareness calls Stompin’ a “captivating collaboration”,
“Philip S. Bryant’s jazz memoir in verse is set in post-war Chicago’s South Side, centered on his father, James, and Preston—two working-class men, friends, easing into middle age. ‘Music was their haven and oasis…It affirmed a spirit flowing within and between them and throughout the world.’ They spent their Saturday afternoons listening to jazz; it was their joy and their solace. They often disagreed on what constituted good music: ‘Is this music? It’s all turned ’round backwards.’ This is Preston’s reaction to Ornette Coleman, when all he really wants is to hear after a tough day is Ellington and Gonzalves and Mood Indigo. Music was their starting point for larger discussions about the blues, how history is written, Greeks and Romans, the Bible, King’s assassination. But dissecting and loving jazz is the core of their talks, like Preston’s take on Lee Konitz: ‘Hell, he sounds like a nuclear physicist scratchin’ one of them theorems on a blackboard. Might be brilliant watchin’ it unfold, but damn if it’s ever gonna move anybody.’ Bryant mixes prose with poetry as the story unfolds of friendship, family, food and church. Accompanying his writings are original compositions by jazz pianist and vocalist Carolyn Wilkins, and the book includes a CD that weaves Bryant’s readings with Wilkins’ evocative music. It’s a captivating collaboration.
Bryant’s poetry is smooth and lyrical…For readers who like jazz, combining some tunes with these poems will create an engaging multi-layered experience. Listen to Miles and read this [poem of Bryant's]:
Birth of the Cool: Minnesota
I know, Miles,
you didn’t have rural southern Minnesota
in mind when you
blew your classic mute
on your Birth of the Cool
sessions in New York, circa 1949.
But it’s in the way the paper-thin
ice forms on the edge of the lake
today in late October:
meeting at the cold, dark water’s edge
—still open and free
though not for long—
with the ripples of these short, choppy
muted notes of yours
blown just out of reach
this cool windy autumn morning.”
–Philip Bryant
—Review by Marilyn Dahl, Shelf Awareness
For a limited time only, purchase A Song at Twilight and Stardust & Fate: The Blueroad Reader for just $25 US ($28 CAN), shipping included! Order here.
Mary Ann Grossman reviews A Song at Twilight for the St. Paul Pioneer Press.
As the World War II generation enters old age, children and grandchildren are in new territory as they grapple with changes in their loved ones.
Minnesota poet Nancy Paddock captures every emotion of this journey in her touching new memoir, A Song at Twilight.
Paddock doesn’t give advice. She doesn’t cite statistics about dementia or explore medical advances. She tells a personal story that doesn’t need embellishment.
Lois and Ralph Pearson, Paddock’s parents, met when they skated at the Hippodrome at the State Fairgrounds. Nancy was conceived just before her dad left for military service, and when he returned, the couple created a safe and happy home on St. Paul’s East Side.
As Lois began to experience memory loss and health problems, Nancy and her two sisters decided their parents needed to move from their White Bear Lake condo to a safer environment. After much soul-searching, they settled on an apartment in a high-rise. The move disoriented the older Pearsons, who felt like prisoners in their new home, even though many services and activities were available.
When the couple needed assisted living, their daughters arranged for a room at a care facility where, eventually, Lois became so ill she had to be moved to a room away from her husband of 60 years.
This is the bare bones of Paddock’s story. What makes A Song at Twilight so worth reading is the way she weaves her childhood memories of her laughing, strong parents into the heartbreaking decisions she and her sisters had to make at every step of their parents’ walk into the twilight.
Throughout these moves, the senior Pearsons displayed the confused emotions so many of us deal with when it comes to our aging parents. Ralph and Lois didn’t understand what was happening to them physically—Lois lamented that she didn’t know “how I got this way”—and Ralph would ask where he lived. Both parents kept returning to World War II and the strength they found to get through their separation when Ralph was in the military. Paddock helps readers make her parents’ acquaintance by excerpting letters they sent one another during the war.
Through her narrative, Paddock explores the anguish of children who struggle with the role reversal of becoming their parents’ parents.
How do you make decisions while allowing the aging to kept their dignity? How can you know how parents will react to new living conditions? How do you ease your guilt when they ask, “Why can’t we live with you?” How do you cope when you realize you made the wrong decision for them that seemed right at the time? Why do we blame nursing home staffs, who are doing the best they can, for a system that has made frail old age a disease instead of a condition? What’s the best response when a parent says life isn’t worth living and wants to be dead? How do you keep from crying as you watch parents lose connection to cherished holiday rituals, old friends and their past?
Nancy and her sisters tried to navigate these difficult decisions while holding stressful jobs. Coping meant, for Nancy, trying to understand her Zen master’s advice that sometimes all you can do is stand in place and be still, allowing life to happen.
Lois died first, followed just four days later by her husband. Nancy had a lovely fantasy at their funeral: “…on the morning Dad died, Mama glided by on long blades, looking just as she did the first night he saw her. And as she passed, she pulled him free of his old body….”
Nancy gives credit to her husband, writer Joe Paddock, for being her strength through this hard time. The Paddocks are longtime advocates of sustainable agriculture. Almost 25 years ago, before most people were thinking about land issues, they wrote Soil and Survival: Land Stewardship and the Future of American Agriculture with the late Carol Bly.
—Review by Mary Ann Grossmann, St. Paul Pioneer Press, July 17, 2011
The Minnesota Star Tribune calls Twilight “intensely personal and heart-shattering”
In her new book, A Song at Twilight (Blueroad Press, 304 pages, $18), Minnesota poet Nancy Paddock has written an intensely personal and heart-shattering memoir about being a caretaker for her parents as they descend into the murky landscapes of Alzheimer’s and depression. It’s also a fascinating, illuminating meditation on the indeterminacy of memory and memoir, a struggle to remember despite the diminishment of the mind.
Her mother’s Alzheimer’s creates a recurring inversion of roles. Paddock remembers having “imaginary friends” as a child; her mother never once punctured the illusion. Now it is Paddock’s mother whose mind is filled with fantasies, visions and imaginary events. Faced with one glaring fabrication, Paddock hesitates to correct her mother: “Even if her story has no meaning, why do I, who once played with angels, need to correct her?”
Lyrically powerful, Paddock’s narrative moves from the darkening present, as her parents, Lois and Ralph, struggle with their mental capacity, to the past—their love affair and family life, as recorded in family letters, old photographs and stories. Like any loving daughter, Paddock struggles to balance her role as wife and career woman with the requirements of taking care of parents who need more help every day. There are good days and bad. Paddock seeks to give them the illusion that they remain independent, but she knows it’s a mirage. Her parents are angry both at the loss of their capacities and the need to have their three daughters acting as caregivers.
Paddock’s compassion fuels every page. Watching her mother’s memory slowly disappear, she asks, “What must it be to feel your hands shake…to botch recipes you knew by heart, to grope for the spelling of simple words…to be taken everywhere like a child?” Paddock must ultimately accept her own inability to “fix” things, but she battles like a tiger to defend her parents’ dignity.
There’s plenty of dark humor here. As Paddock discusses with the nursing staff the possibility of using antidepressants, Ralph sardonically asks Lois, “Do you feel like a bug on a screen?” Later, one of Ralph’s daughters asks him how he’ll dress up for Halloween, and “[h]e grimaces, gestures toward his ravaged face. ‘Isn’t this scary enough?’”
Just as her parents descend into darkness, Paddock becomes depressed, too. She’s brutally honest about her own ambivalent feelings. “[D]rugging them—and myself—also dulls my own anguish.” Both parents die by memoir’s end, within days of each other, and Paddock’s memoir transforms into a determined attempt to remember, to commemorate what’s been lost. A Song at Twilight is Paddock’s beautiful, fragile and unforgettably open-hearted effort “[t]o write my way out of a labyrinth of sorrow,” a sorrow that connects each of us in loss.
Chuck Leddy is a member of the National Book Critics Circle and also reviews books for the Boston Globe.
—Minnesota Star Tribune, Aug. 16, 2011
