A Garland of Rosemary's Memory Roses (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9798240930577)

This book speaks in three voices, but tells one story.

The first voice is memory-the lived narrative of Rosemary Hartmann and Garland "Johnnie" Johnson, two people born into the hardscrabble world of early twentieth-century rural America.

Hers is a story of rootedness and responsibility, of a girl who learned early to tend the furnace, stack the wood, and hold the family together when her father fell ill. His is a story of restlessness and seeking, of a boy so frail he was warmed in a stove's oven, who later rode the rails through the Depression, danced in borrowed moments, and walked through the darkness of war as a scout behind enemy lines.

The second voice is myth-an allegorical poem titled "The Crown of Original Remembering," which tells of a primordial Man who once wore a Crown of silence and walked with a Woman who pulsed within him like rhythm itself. Together they tended a Field of Soul until curiosity turned the Man outward, and he walked into exile, building a Marketplace where memory became commodity, and the Crown became rumor.

The poem traces his wandering through a desert of half-remembering until the Woman returns-not to rescue him, but to help him unearth what he had buried beneath his own motion.

The third voice is meaning-this analytical essay, which seeks to illuminate the pattern that runs beneath both narrative and poem, to name the archetypes at work, and to show how two ordinary lives in Minnesota and North Dakota embody an eternal journey of human consciousness.