Description

Published by Wayne State University Press

Author(s)

Anne-Marie Oomen is chair of the creative writing department at Interlochen Art Academy.

Other Books by Anne-Marie Oomen: Pulling Down the Barn: Essays on Growing Up in Rural Michigan, An American Map,

Reviews

“With these absorbing reflections, Oomen blurs the distinction between the inside and the outside of people and buildings. Coming of age, in her hands, means making the connection between self, others, and surroundings.”

— Bloomsbury Review

“Drawing from ordinary moments from childhood, with settings such as her family’s farmhouse and the local schoolyard, the author employs a gentle touch and poetic details to tell a compelling coming-of-age story in rural Oceana County.”

— Westland Observer

“In House of Fields, every moment is considered, consistent, built in the way that the old Dutch masters built their paintings: layer by layer, achieving, at last, a luminous warmth found only in glimpses during the course of our daily lives. And yet, in retrospect, this is exactly the light cast by what we remember—more complex than nostalgia, more shadowed, a bittersweet scar.”

— A. Manette Ansay, author of Vinegar Hill and Limbo

“Anne-Marie Oomen brings not only the past, its people and domestic mythologies, to life in this brilliant book, but she brings life to the landscape, the seasons, and the very walls that contained them. Measured, musical, and wise, these pieces give us a poet's sense of the mystical, with a storyteller's attention to character and place. A kind of travelogue of the spirit and an ode to the miracle of memory, this is memoir to the highest power.”

— Laura Kasischke, author of The Life Before Her Eyes and Suspicious River

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