The Dream of a Broken Field Dream of a Broken Field (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780803234819)

The dream of a broken field is to bear crops. The dream of a broken history is to create meaning, to find among the fragments a way to tell the story of a life. It is this dream that Diane Glancy pursues here, through essays on writing, faith, family, teaching, and retirement. Blending a poet's vision and a storyteller's voice, the result is at once a virtuoso work of creative nonfiction and an exploration of that genre's outer limits by one of the foremost voices in Native American literature today. Uneasily and yet firmly balanced between European and Native cultures--English and German on her mother's side, Cherokee on her father's--Glancy continues to search for a language that articulates the Native experience with both the fullness of tradition and the lapses inherent in a broken heritage. Accordingly, The Dream of a Broken Field offers a narrative that pauses and circles, connects and changes direction and travels great distances with grace only to stop sharply for a startling insight. Writing of weekend trips and long journeys, of natural landscapes and burial mounds, of Native American cosmology and a Christian upbringing, of Native American boarding schools and indigenous writers in American universities, Glancy captures the opposing demands of a hurried life and the timeless reflections of a history forever unfolding.

Author: Diane Glancy
ISBN-10: 0803234813
ISBN-13: 9780803234819
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
Language: English
Published: 07/01/2011
Pages: 220
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.65lbs
Size: 8.40h x 5.50w x 0.70d

Review Citation(s):
Christianity Today 03/01/2012 pg. 50