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That wound also creates artists, of course, and Charles, who is very much the Woiwode figure, both being second sons in families with similar histories, sketches a vision of a novel which, though he despairs of ever writing it, has much in common with the book we are reading. Charles imagines a novel split by an abyss. One half of it would be a journal written by his mother, describing her early years and leading up to her life in Hyatt, its path moving in an "earth-colored, unbroken line." The other half would be a series of "multicolored pieces about North Dakota and Illinois, … each piece complete in itself, whole and unshakeable, bearing no outward relationship to any other piece, … each moment, each year sealed off because it's escaped destruction and has to buttress the chaos battering at it." What would happen, Charles asks, if the pieces could somehow shift and rearrange themselves, no longer sealed off from each other or from the lost world across the abyss? It would be as if his mother were signaling him from across that great divide, the edges of things permeable and no longer fixed, his mother urging him to move forward and live. Impossible, Charles admits, eyes on his own "tongue-tied paragraphs." Perhaps not, the novel suggests, offering, splintered sentence by splintered sentence, the first steps of just such a work.
Woiwode has published two memoirs that document his attempt to bring the lost, "unbroken" line associated with his mother into productive tension with the sealed-off, walled-in pieces of his adult life. The two books share a distinctive form. What I Think I Did (2000) tells the story of the winter of 1996 on Woiwode's southwestern North Dakota farm, two hundred miles from where he had grown up. The family moved there in 1978, and found themselves, eighteen years later, caught in "the worst winter in collective memory." The major drama is the desperate struggle to keep an outdoor wood-burning furnace going despite bitter cold, terrible storms, and a woeful lack of preparation. The book-length narration of these events is interleaved with Woiwode's memories of first coming into language, discovering his core material, and writing his early stories. We might call this the story of his becoming a writer, culminating with the publication of his first novel, What I'm Going to Do, I Think, in 1969.
The second memoir, A Step From Death, just published, recounts a terrible accident suffered by the author while baling hay in 2005. His clothing became entangled in the tractor's PTO, its power takeoff, and he broke three ribs and almost lost the arm around which his caught jacket knotted itself. That tale—the accident and his recovery—is broken into by a series of flashes and glints that eventually combine to tell the story of the next phase of his writing life, coming to a head with the publication of Beyond the Bedroom Wall in 1975. The form is really the point of the two memoirs. In both present-tense stories, the author is plunged into a blank, whited-out state. He is almost erased, and to make himself visible again, he must sort through the various memories and insights that rise up into consciousness. Wallace Stevens describes poetry as "the mind in the act of finding / What will suffice," and Woiwode would agree, making a kind of prose poetry out of the act of remembering and testing and sorting out, the two memoirs rising up out of Charles' heart-stopping plunge into an inexplicable blank space yawning open just where stability should have been.
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