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Video of Peggy Shumaker reading at the Geffen Theater (with Anne Carson) www.poetry.la

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Just Breathe Normally

http://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/product/Just-Breathe-Normally,673186.aspx

Cloth 2007    236 pp.  0-8032-1095-7 $24.95

Review in Kirkus:

In this entry in Tobias Wolff's American Lives series, Shumaker displays a rare gift to reinterpret what often seems like wanton aggression.

In June 2000, the author and her husband Joe were bicycling along a bike path near their home in Fairbanks, Alaska, when a teenager on a four-wheeler barreled around a corner and struck them both. Joe suffered minor injuries, but the author's were catastrophic, leaving her bedridden and weak for months. Most devastating was the skull fracture and resulting brain damage, which temporarily misplaced parts of her memory. Her memoir is an account of her attempts to reconstruct not just the events surrounding the accident, but also of her earlier years. Told in gem-like vignettes (few are more than two pages), her scattered memories come together to form a riveting and exceptionally touching story. This is not just an exercise in reconstruction, but also in forgiveness, as Shumaker struggles to come to terms with her feelings not just for the youth who almost ended her life, but also her reckless, abusive mother, who died when Shumaker was just 16, and her equally-reckless, but often-absent, father, both of whom were just teenagers when Shumaker was born. Alcoholism and depression ravaged the author's childhood, forcing her to become a parent to her three younger siblings, but her generous attempts to understand her parents elevates the narrative above the usual hard-luck story and transforms it into something much more delicate and lovely. The structure of the narrative—in which details of Shumaker's accident, recovery and childhood experiences are interwoven and only gradually disclosed—maintains such a high level of tension that, even at the end, secrets are revealed.

An entrancing meditation on absolution and memory.

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Blurbs:

“Here’s the truth of a single life presented in scenes so lyric, so honest, so encompassing, that in reading Just Breathe Normally I felt guided into wakefulness. Peggy Shumaker has rendered a masterpiece. This is the finest memoir I’ve read in years.”—Mark Spragg, author of An Unfinished Life

“Alternating the account of a tragic accident with fragments of memoir, Just Breathe Normally is a form of reconstruction. The resulting fusion is a remarkable tribute to the indomitable will to live and love. As memory bubbles up through a mind shaken loose from its linear clock, Peggy Shumaker shows us the route to compassion through the compressed power of language to open new worlds. If this book were poker, it would see your life and raise you one.”—Judith Kitchen, author of Distance and Direction and editor of Short Takes: Brief Encounters with Contemporary Nonfiction

Cover copy:

Just Breathe Normally by Peggy Shumaker

Just Breathe Normally opens with a traumatic accident. Shattered perceptions and shards of narrative tell the story, from wreck through recovery and beyond. In lyric prose, events spiral back through generations to touch on questions of mortality and family, immigration and migration, legacies intended or inflicted.

In the wake of her near-fatal cycling collision, Shumaker searches for meaning within extremity. Through a long convalescence, she reevaluates her family’s past, treating us to a meditation on the meaning of justice and the role of love in the grueling process of healing. Her book, a moving memoir of childhood and family, testifies to the power of collective empathy in the transformations that make and remake us throughout our lives.

We all live with injury and loss. This book transforms injury, transforms loss. Peggy Shumaker crafts language unlike anyone else’s, language at once poetic and profound. Her memoir enacts our human desire to understand the fragmented self. We see in practice the power of words to restore what medical science cannot: the fragile human psyche and its immense capacity for forgiveness.

            Peggy Shumaker is professor emerita at University of Alaska Fairbanks and the author of several books of poetry, including Blaze and Underground Rivers. She teaches in the Rainier Writing Workshop at PLU.

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