Each day as we count down to the April 18 announcement of the Minnesota Book Awards, we highlight one of the thirty-two finalists. Today we feature 2015 Memoir and Creative Nonfiction finalist James Silas Rogers.
Reflections on Sacred Spaces
Northern Orchards: Places Near the Dead by James Silas Rogers
Published by: North Star Press of Saint Cloud
Category Sponsor: Northwestern Mutual
Rogers reflects on his visits to graveyards and burial grounds around Minnesota in this thought-provoking collection of essays that explore memory and sacred space. Not believing cemeteries to be macabre places, he instead focuses on their quality of “restored innocence,” transcendence, and spirituality. In writing that is both reverent and wry, he delves into the living history to be found in these sacred spaces and finds a sense of connection to the past. In the essay “Looking for Patrick,” he writes of his research on Patrick Cudmore, a writer who had a “heroic misjudgment about his own significance,” who emigrated from Ireland and settled in Minnesota in the nineteenth century. In “The Old Order,” Rogers documents his experience visiting an old Amish cemetery near Wilmont, Minnesota and what he learned about Amish culture in the process. Northern Orchards: Places Near the Dead pensivelylaments the frivolities of modern life and explores the histories of some of Minnesota’s sacred spaces.
About the author:
Rogers’ poems have appeared in many journals and he is the author of the poetry chapbook Sundogs. His creative nonfiction has been included in New Letters, Notre Dame Magazine and Best American Essays, among other collections. He edits New Hibernia Review, an Irish Studies quarterly published by the University of St. Thomas.
Links:
Minnesota Author Challenges Cemeteries’ Macabre Stereotype
The reviews are in:
“With his acute eye and meditative voice, Rogers gives us a tour not of death but of living history in his visits to graveyards. These closely considered cities of the dead contain deep reservoirs of lyricism in their ignored beauty, and Rogers is a winning, graceful guide to their secrets and meaning.” – Patricia Hampl, author of I Could Tell You Stories: Sojourns in the Land of Memory
“What Rogers calls ‘a sensation of connectedness and transcendence’ is a sensation harder and harder to come by in an America devoted to sprawl and growing rapidly and perilously away from any sacramental sense of place, any sacral awareness of human experience. Equally reverent and wry, these moving pieces remind us of the soul-enlarging powers of remembrance.” – Daniel Tobin, poet and author of Belated Heavens
“James Silas Rogers writes with a feeling for deep time, calling to mind the spirit of Joseph Mitchell’s essays. ‘Marble orchards’ —cemeteries— have a claim on his heart. After reading these evocative essays, they’ll have a claim on you, too. I’m ready to travel with Rogers anywhere his curiosity leads him.” – Howard Mansfield, author of In the Memory House
Join us at the Awards Gala!
Award winners will be announced at the 27th Annual Minnesota Book Awards Gala on Saturday, April 18 at the historic St. Paul Union Depot. The opening reception begins at 7 p.m., followed by the awards ceremony at 8 p.m. Tickets are $50 and are available by visiting www.thefriends.org/gala.
Have you read Northern Orchards? What are your thoughts? We welcome your comments!