Where Rivers Change Direction by Mark Spragg
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Book Reviews of Where Rivers Change Direction
Book Review: Fine writing by an excellent Wyoming essayist
Summary: 5 Stars
Many fine things have been said here already about this collection of essays by a gifted and thoughtful writer. Spragg's memories of his boyhood are vivid and precise, and the narratives around which many of his essays are constructed are compelling and suspenseful, their resolutions often breathtaking. As just one example, the dangerous hunt for a wounded bear evolves into an evocation of a search-and-destroy mission in Vietnam.There are many ways to read these essays -- as nature writing, coming of age memoir, record of a vanishing way of life. For me, the essays are most absorbing when Spragg tells of his teenage years, working in the all-male world of his father and the cowboys who work for him. They capture the awkwardness of learning to take on a man's responsibilities when they require a fearlessness and stoic toughness more common to pioneers and the Wild West than the urban environment of most of his contemporaries.
There's a poignance that comes a bit clearer in the final essays, which skip forward in time to the author's middle years. Here you pick up a sense of something gone awry, a disillusionment and a good deal of personal anguish. There is a winter spent alone in a snowbound house as he recovers from a personal malaise identified by no more than the reference to severe leg pains. In the final chapters, he walks the back roads and irrigation ditches of Powell, Wyoming, in search of some measure of equanimity while his mother slowly dies of emphysema.
The title, "Where Rivers Change Direction," seems to be a reference to the Continental Divide, and maybe also to the watersheds that emerge in all our lives and pull us with a gravitational force we don't recognize at the time and come to know only long afterward. I recommend this book to anyone interested in western literature, personal memoirs, gender studies, and finely crafted writing.
Book Review: As Good as They Say
Summary: 5 Stars
I read Spragg's novel, "Fruit of Stone," first, and was left rather cold. I'm glad I ventured forth with "Where Rivers Change Direction" because it is truly brilliant.This is a writer who can burnish a sentence the way a saddlemaker polishes leather--the love of craft is obvious, and the end result is a quiet elegance that is breathtaking. He loves the passive verbs...so do I. The stately passivity take the wildness of ranch life from the hands of "action packed" Hemingway types and snares it in amber. Posterity over posturing? Sure, I'll take that!
He's capable of being thoughtful, brash, graphic, elegiac, and, at times, pretty funny. I adored "Wapiti School," wherein he nails Candy Dohse, his first true love, right on the forehead with a snowball during recess. He even put a pebble in the snowball first. Ah, young love!
There's no riders in purple sage, crazy saloon whores, shootouts, chuckwagons, or wacky Western shenanigans, and the "New West, worse than the Old West" place dysphoria/post-mod malaise is absent, as well. What you have instead is Spragg's life--from youth to maturity--carved away from the bone as if by a hunter's skilled hand. Okay, that was a (poor) attempt at a Spraggy sentence. So, don't read me...read him!
Book Review: So Well Drawn
Summary: 5 Stars
What an unrelentingly gripping series of stories -- life, death, animals, boys, girls, men, women, horses, snakes, water, wind, earth, blood, fire and sky. Mark Spragg's style is a bit like David Hockney doing his photograph collages. He doesn't show you everything, just bits and pieces to make the whole. He lets you put some of the pieces in place. What a style. It's shot through with his own strong character and some compelling scenes of raw Wyoming life. The stories follow an amazing arc that you don't see coming until the last chapter and then you just kind of want to start all over again, and meet the boy that became the man. Beautiful stuff. Look, I'm not really out here trying to sell my book at every corner but the people who told me about Mark Spragg are readers of my book, "Antler Dust." I had three recommendations from "Antler Dust" readers to check out Mark Spragg, mostly because, I believe, of the detailed outdoors action and the fact that my book takes place in a neighboring state, Colorado. I am going to read more Mark Spragg but for others who like him, please also consider Antler Dust.Book Review: A very beautiful book.
Summary: 5 Stars
This memoir by Mark Spragg is one of the best books I've read in years. And I read a lot of books. His imagery and descriptive lines aren't just written. The words are sculpted into exquisite granite sentences like the mountains that surrounded him as he grew up on a dude ranch in Wyoming in the 1960s. I read the book two weeks ago and can still remember one or two, paraphrased here. He's shoeing a horse with John, one of the hands, and he gets put down a bit by a man he respects, perhaps, more than his father. He writes that he didn't mind being a boy, but didn't like being treated like one. Later, in describing his school, which had about 12 children, he says it was painted the color of an elk's eye. I mean, this is terrific stuff and there are lines like that on every page. The only other writers I've read who do this well are Barbara Kingsolver and Owen Parry. Sure, there may be others, but I've not read them yet. You have to read this book. It will make you laugh, perhaps cry, it will give you goose bumps and it will make you think. It is a gem.Book Review: Men & Horses: A fun and engaging romp growing up in Wyoming
Summary: 5 Stars
Where Rivers Change Direction is the engaging story of Mark's journey to manhood on a working Wyoming dude ranch in the 1960's. This is a place outside the world of televisions and flashy cars. Life is his regular classroom, and a boy has to grow up quickly in order to endure and survive in the harsh realities of the wilderness. The responsibility that Mark both endures and earns for himself, gives him his character. It is easy to trust his voice and experiences, including the silent moments as he imagines himself as a horse alongside the other horses, testing his breath in the cold air. Mark's words match his imagination, giving us a taste of what it is like to be a horse in Wyoming. Rivers can change direction when dammed up by man, or they can follow the contour of the earth they cut through every day, changing themselves. The river of the title is about Mark's life, and this memoir leads just through the point where he changes direction. I wouldn't have missed a turn.