A Step from Death

by Larry Woiwode

Larry Woiwode's literary fame began with his first novel, the 1969 classic What I’m Going to Do, I Think, and continued unabated through his brilliant 2000 memoir What I Think I Did. In this deeply affecting follow-up to the latter, Woiwode addresses his son as heir to his emotional interior. With vibrant wordcraft and a poetic sensibility, Woiwode begins his story by relating a near-death experience with a malfunctioning hay baler — the kind of mistake that can kill a novice farmer. This episode is the first skein in a rich tapestry of memories, from colorful snippets of Woiwode’s time in New York as a young writer working with the late, great William Maxwell, to his days as a young father, husband, and teacher trying to scrape enough together to buy a ranch in western North Dakota, and finally to the prospect of an empty nest and the step from death that he finds rapidly approaching.

Genres: Memoir, Nonfiction

288 pages, Hardcover

First published February 28, 2007

About the author

Larry Woiwode was designated Poet Laureate of North Dakota by the Legislative Assembly in 1995. He served as Writer in Residence at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1973-74; and from 1983-88 was a tenured professor at the State University of New York, Binghamton, and director of its Creative Writing Program.

Larry Woiwode’s fiction has appeared in Antaeus, Antioch Review, Atlantic Monthly, GQ, Harpers, The New Yorker, Paris Review, Partisan Review, and many other publications; his poetry has appeared in Atlantic Monthly, Harpers, The New Yorker, Mademoiselle, Poetry North, Tar River Poetry, Transatlantic Review, Works in Progress, and other publications and venues, including broadsides and anthologies.

His novels and his memoirs are widely acclaimed and his writings have been translated into a dozen languages and earned him international recognition: he is the recipient of the William Faulkner Foundation Award, 1969; has been a Guggenheim Fellow, 1971-72; a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the National Book Award, 1975; chosen by the American Association of Publishers for a novel to present to the White House Library, 1976; is recipient of an Award in Literature from the National Institute and American Academy of Arts & Letters, 1980; of the John Dos Passos Prize (for a diverse body of work), 1991; and of a Lannan Literary Fellowship, 2001. He has also received North Dakota’s highest honor, the Theodore Roosevelt Roughrider Award, conferred by Governor Sinner, in 1992; and in 2011 received the Emeritus Award from the High Plains Awards Committee, for “A Body of Work as Vast as the West.” His recent publications include Words Made Fresh, and The Invention of Lefse, published in 2011 by Crossway Books. His new novel Blackburn Bay is nearly ready to be viewed by agents and publishers, and in 2010 he completed a new book of short stories

Reviews

[James Murphy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Larry Woiwode has been quiet lately. There's been no novel since Indian Affairs in 1992. But his 2 volumes of memoirs published since then are wonderful and demonstrate--in case we'd forgotten--how well he can write. Reading something this fine can leave a feeling of elation in you that stays a long time. A Step from Death, the 2d volume of Woiwode's memoirs, is dedicated to and written as an address to his son, Joseph, who was stationed in Iraq at the time of writing. Woiwode's a North Dakota Farmer as well as novelist. He describes a life bounded by farm, weather, and writing. Part of the beauty of the book is his affection for and understanding of the land. He obviously loves it and the life it's given him. The book's about relationships, especially that between fathers and sons. It's also about the deep sense that they are merely one wave of successive generations of fathers and sons. He has family in mind as he tills memory to bring up the history of the land they own and cultivate. It also remembers Woiwode's years in New York as a young writer and kind of son to his editor and mentor, William Maxwell. Chapter 6, entitled "Sonship," has much to say on the role of the father in fiction. Woiwode himself has written about the patriarch in his novels and about mistrust of the responsibility they assume. The title refers in part to the accidents Joseph and Woiwode have experienced. Those accidents, all nearly fatal, punctuate the course of the memoir and suggest that survival is a matter of chance. And the title refers to the steps toward death we all take, that the aging author feels each step is part of his mortal progression. But rather than let the thought settle into melancholy he says he can trace his life back to the brilliant image with which he ended his first novel, What I'm Going to Do, I Think, the image of the trajectory of a bullet fired over open water. While he understands gravity will slow the "existential declination of extended flight" he expects to be able to pick the bullet from the air as a grain of wheat ready to burst into life again as another story. A Step from Death is a beautiful book that doesn't give in to gravity but soars.

[Old Man JP · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a nicely written memoir that Woiwode wrote to his son. In it he detailed significant events in his and his families lives and most of those events were disastrous accidents that occurred to them on their farm in North Dakota. The book began with a near-death accident in which Woiwode's jacket got caught in a spinning piece of machinery on his tractor and he told how he was able to eventually escape from it and his torturous walk back to his farmhouse. Other disasters he detailed were his barn burning down, his son being run over by a horse and having life threatening head trauma, a severe car accident that he and his wife were injured in while driving in a blizzard, his son being injured when sticking his hand into a spinning mower blade and another accident his son was in when he dropped a gun and shot himself in the leg. This was all very interesting but the thing that stood out for me, as an atheist, was his continual praising of God for his grace in protecting them. Woiwode, as with most religious people, is very selective in his thinking. For example, if a near accident occurs but leaves them untouched, they thank God for intervening and sparing them, but, on the other hand, if they are involved in the accident but are not injured they thank him for his protection. If they are injured but not seriously they thank him for that. If the injury is life threatening but they manage to survive, they thank him for that and, finally, if the accident is fatal, they thank God for his grace in helping the surviving family members to overcome their grief, as Woiwode does when he tells of his mothers death when Woiwode was very young and how God helped his father to overcome it. I don't understand why God doesn't just go with the first option of protecting people from harm and spare them the suffering. Staying with the overly religious nature of the book, another thing that stood out is Woiwode talking about nonbelievers when he says "Many of the noisiest critics of the Bible haven't read it". Actually, I think that the exact opposite is true. Most religious people have never read it and those that have, only selective parts. The noisiest critics (outspoken atheists who have written books) are mostly people who grew up very devout and became biblical scholars only to discover what the Bible actually says. This is a well written book that Woiwode meant to be about his family's ordeals with some religious undertones but the religious part was too much of a distraction for me to make it enjoyable.

[Brian Western · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautifully written account of life and death...ahem...a step from death. And loss...sad and hopeful.

[Keith · Rating 4 out of 5]

Larry Woiwode, based on body of work, is among the best of current American writers. This book, a memoir similar to his earlier, "What I Think I Did", does little to harm that reputation. He continues to reveal himself to be a 1960's idealist attempting to incorporate environmentally friendly practices into his activity. What appealed most to me in the book, however, was not the farming, but his account of composing what I think is his finest work, BEYOND THE BEDROOM WALL. It is a torturous journey, one which stretches the cord of his marriage almost to the breaking point. The ten or so years it takes to write it consumes him so he has little left for his spouse, or for his two infant children. Those ten years between his first novel, WHAT I'M GOING TO DO, I THINK, to which he sold the movie rights to a man who never got around to making a movie. His honoring of that transaction, encouraged by his father's sense of integrity and sanctity of a man's word, keeps him from withdrawing those rights from the original buyer and transferring them to Paul Newman, who also desired to make the movie. The years are filled with encounters with most of the major writers of the day, and one encounter includes to comic memory of a party given in his honor by his editor. The description of the suit he wore, which stood out even more than Tom Wolfe's signature white one, is worth the price of the book.
This book is a letter of love written to his only son, Joseph, who was, at the time, serving in Iraq. Joseph tends toward being a writer himself, and Larry, his father, writes this fearless account of what it sometimes takes to write a book so beautiful and so moving as BEYOND THE BEDROOM WALL. He writes neither to encourage nor to discourage, but out of a father's love for his son, who, according to Larry's memory, is probably a better farmer than he. Whether or not he will be a better writer, or whether he will ever write, remains to be seen.

[Beth · Rating 4 out of 5]

Perhaps the hardest books to write are those that hold themselves accountable to no conventional boundaries or forms. Those that permit time to spill across their pages -- backward, forward, a rush of movement, a sudden stilling, returns and retreats. Those in which one thought juts deeply into the core of another, in which elisions are story, in which one is at a loss to define a true end or beginning. Books like these cannot hold their readers, let alone survive themselves, unless they are perfectly calibrated -- orchestrated as if by some higher power, so that all the fragments do at last become a gleaming, self-sustaining whole.

Larry Woiwode's new memoir, "A Step From Death," is a book of interweavings, to use his terminology, a book that rides on the understanding, in Woiwode's words, that:

"All experience is simultaneous, stilled and sealed in itself, and we manage daily by imagining we move from minute to minute, somehow always ahead. Our multiple selves collide at every second of intersection, one or the other vying for supremacy, the scars of the past flooding through the present texture of our personality, and maturity is knowing how to govern the best combination of them."

(excerpted from my Chicago Tribune review, 3/15/08)

[Kyla · Rating 2 out of 5]

Some spare beautiful moments, befitting a North Dakota landscape. Less clear is intent and scope and then at the end it hits a odd patch railing against the liberalism of universities and how we all would be better off in small, Christian universities. which made me distrust every page up until that point.

[Holly Woodward · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow, no one writes like Larry Woiwode, with such refined style but from a POV pushed to the edge. He writes so intensely of pain and so thoughtfully of the struggle to find one's way through difficult circumstances.

[Scott Snider · Rating 2 out of 5]

I couldn't finish this book. Lost interest about halfway through. Normally I like everything Larry writes and this is more of the same. Maybe I've changed and gotten older so this didn't speak to me.

[Jan · Rating 2 out of 5]

I just could not get into this book, despite my interest in the North Dakota area in which it takes place.