Into Woods: Essays by Bill Roorbach

by Bill Roorbach

Into Woods is an exuberant, profound, and often wonderfully funny account of ten years in the life of its award-winning author, Bill Roorbach. A paean to nature, to love, to family, and to place, Into Woods provides a sequel to Roorbach's first book, the critically acclaimed and popular Summers with Juliet, which traced Roorbach's courtship of Juliet Karelsen, ending with their wedding on the water. Into Woods begins with their honeymoon on a wine farm in the Loire Valley of France and closes with the birth of their new daughter and return to their beloved Maine. Thoroughly original, the essays of Into Woods blend journalism, memoir, personal narrative, nature writing, cultural criticism, and rare insight into a narrative of place, a meditation on being and belonging, love and death, wonder and foreboding. The title essay, Into Woods, is a portrait of the writer as a young man; it is also a hymn to work and men. This evocative essay sets the theme for the rest of the collection. Spirits, Shitdiggers, Mudflats, and the Worm Men of Maine, Duck Day Afternoon, Birthday, and Sky Pond all pay homage to Bill's life in Maine. You Have Given This Boy Life, perhaps the most hau

Genres: Nonfiction, Essays, Memoir

180 pages, Hardcover

First published March 1, 2002

About the author

Bill Roorbach's newest novel is The Remedy For Love, coming October 2014 from Algonquin Books. Life Among Giants, also from Algonquin, is in development for a multi-year series at HBO, and won the 2014 Maine Literary Award in Fiction. Big Bend: Stories has just be re-released by Georgia in its Flannery O'Connor Award series. Temple Stream is soon to be re-released by Down East Books. Bill is also the author of the romantic memoir SUMMERS WITH JULIET, the novel THE SMALLEST COLOR, the essay collection INTO WOODS. The tenth anniversary edition of his craft book, WRITING LIFE STORIES, is used in writing programs around the world. His short fiction has been published in Harper's, The Atlantic Monthly, Playboy, and dozens of other magazines, journals, and websites, and has been featured on NPR's Selected Shorts, and won an O. Henry Prize. He lives in western Maine where he writes full time.

For more information about Bill Roorbach, see www.billroorbach.com, www.lifeamonggiantsthebook.com, and be sure to enjoy his blog and videos at www.billanddavescocktailhour.com. Follow him on Twitter: @​billroorbach.

Reviews

[Sull · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good vignettes of a life lived around the ease of the natural world and the difficulty of writing. Walking the dogs, fixing up an old country house, cooking food--the easy things. Writing about the people he meets, his artist wife, his New England neighbors--that's harder, even though he's used to being misunderstood, or found inadequate or wanting in surprising ways; he's used to being the patsy, the butt of an obscure joke he's not in on.

In the natural world, he's fine, splashing along a creek with the dogs, canoeing, renovating his old house so well that the former owner grows tearful when he revisits. But amongst people he falls victim to old prejudices about men like him, older, watchful, quiet, intellectual, writers.... Some of these 'chapters' skirt the line between memoir and fiction, but in an interesting & perhaps helpful way. Probably all of us with imagination do skirt that line when remembering ourselves as slightly different people than we really, truly were, the reality full of shadows of something else that was there for a moment as a possibility then gone.

[E Berry · Rating 5 out of 5]

All I can add is that for me, the essays served as catalysts for my own self-examinations, of life and nature. The author's self-deprecating humor and insightful observations will lead me to obtain other works by Mr. Roorbach.

[Laura Jess · Rating 2 out of 5]

Has a fantastic ending,though I did feel that it dragged on at times. Interesting and one I would more than likely read again.