Folly Beach: An Essay on Family, Fear, Physics, Philosophy & Fun

by Steven Harvey

Folly Beach is a book-length personal essay about overcoming fears of mortality and loss through creativity. It begins when writer Steven Harvey, strumming his ukulele, watches his granddaughter dance on the boardwalk of his beach rental and has the uncanny sense that he is waving goodbye to all that matters. This valedictory feeling clings throughout the week to happy activities with his family. Having just retired from a lifetime of college teaching, he remembers his last classes and the last books he taught. All seems to be slipping away, a common feeling no doubt for many who retire. Folly Beach never loses sight of the inevitable losses that the passage of time brings, and the wistful feeling never entirely goes away, but loss doesn't have the last word. Instead the book breathes new life into the old truth that the end is not as important as the many creative ways we get there: children, poetry, cross-rhythms, kitesurfing, wave-hopping, and late night conversation as moonlit breakers lap the shore to name a few. In the face of the grim, Folly Beach holds up the human capacity to create as our sufficient joy. It is the thought of architectural follies inspired by the name of the beach that keeps the feelings of loss at bay. Harvey finds himself looking up those useless and at times poignant buildings that do little more than celebrate their own creation and devises ways for the family to build their own. An elaborate fort made of sand, flattened and swept away by the tides, is a kind of doomed folly on a small scale, but in the making of it Harvey and his family become part of a boundlessly creative universe, and the realization of that simple truth serves as a balm.

200 pages, Paperback

Published March 16, 2020

About the author

Steven Harvey's newest book is Folly Beach: An Essay on Family, Fear, Physics, Philosophy & Fun. It celebrates creativity as a sufficient joy in the face of loss and mortality. He is also the author of The Book of Knowledge and Wonder, a memoir about coming to terms with the suicide of his mother published by Ovenbird Books as part of the “Judith Kitchen Select” series. In addition he has written three collections of personal essays--A Geometry of Lilies, Lost in Translation, and Bound for Shady Grove--and edited an anthology of essays written by men on middle age called In a Dark Wood. Two of his essays have been selected for The Best American Essays Series: “The Book of Knowledge” in 2013 and “The Other Steve Harvey” in 2018. Over the years, fourteen of his essays have been recognized as notable by that series as well, and he was twice honored as a finalist in the Associated Writing Program’s nonfiction contest. He is a professor emeritus of English and creative writing at Young Harris College, a founding faculty member in the Ashland University MFA program in creative writing, a senior editor for River Teeth magazine, and the creator of The Humble Essayist, a website designed to promote personal prose. He lives in the north Georgia mountains.

Reviews

[Jan Shoemaker · Rating 5 out of 5]

Folly Beach is a gracefully braided meditation that is erudite, funny, humble, and wise. Its concerns are the joys and hurdles of family life, the conjectures of philosophy, the discoveries of science--and the mysteries that remain. Author Steven Harvey, vacationing with his family on the Atlantic coast, is aware, as we do become when the years pile up, that his days are not so many as they once were. He sees where it's all going, all right--but there is nothing gloomy to his ruminations. Rather, he dwells on the richness of the moment, on the cumulative moments that comprise his own life and, seamlessly enlarging his focus, human culture. Folly Beach is rich and deep and thought-provoking. And fun--so very much fun.

[Sarah M. Wells · Rating 5 out of 5]

A masterful weaving together of all of the small and big goings-on that happen while on a beach vacation: the way the tides of time collide with all that matters. This brought to mind the beautiful essay length works of Judith Kitchen and Roger Rosenblatt. Folly Beach deserves a spot sandwiched with these and other celebrated writers of the essay.