The World Before Mirrors

by Joan Connor

"What do you do for a living?" the podiatrist (or the photographer or the woman in the train station) asks, and Joan Connor answers, "I’m a writer," waiting with a cringe for the inevitable "Oh, boy, do I have a story for you!" How such offerings, not stories but small reports from the thick of life, become rich reflections on the nature of waiting and writing, language and love, memory and hope, is the mystery of this award-winning collection of essays. Traveling between the poles of Ohio and Vermont, childhood and motherhood, Connor writes of a peripatetic family whose oddities make the quirks of a Thurber household seem downright subdued; of a thirteen-year-old son as an unlikely companion through the torments of middle-aged dating; of old loves and new; and through it all, of writing as a means of finding the shortest distance between two hope. With language that distills insight from anecdote and transforms the stuff of middling life into telling metaphor, The World Before Mirrors , winner of the River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Prize, lifts the telling of a life’s stories into the realm of flight.

148 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 2006

About the author

Joan Connor is the author of Here on Old Route 7 and We Who Live Apart. She is associate professor of English at Ohio University and a member of the faculty at the University of Southern Maine's low residency MFA program.

Reviews

[Maureen Stanton · Rating 4 out of 5]

Joan Connor is an amazing writer. These essays show an engaging, poetic, restless mind at work.