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The Winter Sun: Notes on a Vocation
Beautiful essays by Fanny Howe, a poet praised for her "private quest through the metaphysical universe . . . the results are startling and honest" ( The New York Times Book Review )
Fanny Howe's richly contemplative The Winter Sun is a collection of essays on childhood, language, and meaning by one of America's most original contemporary poets.
Through a collage of reflections on people, places, and times that have been part of her life, Howe shows the origins and requirements of "a vocation that has no name." She finds proof of this in the lives of others―Jacques Lusseyran, who, though blind, wrote about his inner vision, surviving inside a concentration camp during World War II; the Scottish nun Sara Grant and Abbé Dubois, both of whom lived extensively in India where their vocation led them; the English novelists Antonia White and Emily Brontë; and the fifth-century philosopher and poet Bharthari. With interludes referring to her own place and situation, Howe makes this book into a Progress rather than a memoir.
The Winter Sun displays the same power as found in her highly praised collection of essays, The Wedding Dress , a book described by James Carroll as an "unflinching but exhilarating look at real religion, the American desolation, a woman's life, and, always, the redemption of literature."
Fanny Howe's richly contemplative The Winter Sun is a collection of essays on childhood, language, and meaning by one of America's most original contemporary poets.
Through a collage of reflections on people, places, and times that have been part of her life, Howe shows the origins and requirements of "a vocation that has no name." She finds proof of this in the lives of others―Jacques Lusseyran, who, though blind, wrote about his inner vision, surviving inside a concentration camp during World War II; the Scottish nun Sara Grant and Abbé Dubois, both of whom lived extensively in India where their vocation led them; the English novelists Antonia White and Emily Brontë; and the fifth-century philosopher and poet Bharthari. With interludes referring to her own place and situation, Howe makes this book into a Progress rather than a memoir.
The Winter Sun displays the same power as found in her highly praised collection of essays, The Wedding Dress , a book described by James Carroll as an "unflinching but exhilarating look at real religion, the American desolation, a woman's life, and, always, the redemption of literature."
200 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2009
12 people are currently reading
345 people want to read
About the author
Fanny Howe
91 books161 followersFanny Quincy Howe was an American poet, novelist and short story writer. She was raised in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Howe wrote more than 20 books of poetry and prose. Her major works include poetry such as One Crossed Out, Gone, and Second Childhood; the novels Nod, The Deep North, and Indivisible; and collected essays such as The Wedding Dress: Meditations on Word and Life and The Winter Sun: Notes on a Vocation.
Howe received praise and official recognition: she was awarded the 2009 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize by the Poetry Foundation. She also received the Gold Medal for Poetry from the Commonwealth Club of California. In addition, her Selected Poems received the 2001 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets for the most outstanding book of poetry published in 2000. She was a finalist for the 2015 International Booker Prize. She also received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Poetry Foundation, the California Arts Council, and the Village Voice. She was professor of writing and literature at the University of California, San Diego and lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Howe received praise and official recognition: she was awarded the 2009 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize by the Poetry Foundation. She also received the Gold Medal for Poetry from the Commonwealth Club of California. In addition, her Selected Poems received the 2001 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets for the most outstanding book of poetry published in 2000. She was a finalist for the 2015 International Booker Prize. She also received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Poetry Foundation, the California Arts Council, and the Village Voice. She was professor of writing and literature at the University of California, San Diego and lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
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Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews
August 16, 2009
Today a woman in New Orleans thanked Jesus when she was handed a drink of water. We saw her on television.
Why did the woman thank Jesus instead of the man who brought it to her?
I mean, if she thinks Jesus brought the glass of water, who brought the flood that made her thirsty?
Tell me, why did the woman thank Jesus?
What if you were to tell her that not only did Jesus die two thousand years ago, but he did not come back and does not exist in any possible sense today.
What if you were to tell her that she should thank the man in front of her instead and ask him his name.
What if you were to tell her that we stand alone on a planet and when she is given a glass of water, it follows from a series of causes that have made it an inevitable gesture.
And so she should thank the man, not Jesus, for the water since he was the faithful member of a chain of neighborly acts.
Or maybe this is what she meant.
Why did the woman thank Jesus instead of the man who brought it to her?
I mean, if she thinks Jesus brought the glass of water, who brought the flood that made her thirsty?
Tell me, why did the woman thank Jesus?
What if you were to tell her that not only did Jesus die two thousand years ago, but he did not come back and does not exist in any possible sense today.
What if you were to tell her that she should thank the man in front of her instead and ask him his name.
What if you were to tell her that we stand alone on a planet and when she is given a glass of water, it follows from a series of causes that have made it an inevitable gesture.
And so she should thank the man, not Jesus, for the water since he was the faithful member of a chain of neighborly acts.
Or maybe this is what she meant.
November 18, 2023
This confusion was at her source like the smear of chaos.
*
November 4, 2018
2,5/5. Not so sure what I just read. Not much of an essays book like I though it would be. Very personal, closer to a biographies with small reflexion on writing. Well written, not doubt about the writing style, very beautiful, but too personal and not enough philosophical for my taste. Not what I was expecting!
July 16, 2025
RIP Fanny!
April 13, 2009
i've long waited for this new book by fanny howe, ever since i came across a portion of one of her lyric essays published several years ago in some hoity-toity journal of scholarship, i think it was. many reviewers are right: the linkages between this book, 'the wedding dress,' and the earlier 'lives of the spirit/glasstown: where something got broken' are readily apparent. if you, as a reader, are willing to proceed by the poetics of bewilderment that howe herself uses in all her works. 'the winter sun' bears relation to 'the lyrics,' her most recent book of poetry, too. then again, in her work, genre categories are more useful for how she breaks them down and blurs them than for how she fortifies them.
March 12, 2009
'The Winter Sun' is essay fragments about Howe's childhood, family, her spirituality, her vocation as a writer. There are parts of this book that I found more immediately compelling than others, but what made me really love this book was how in reading it, I felt like I needed to pay more attention to the things I wouldn't naturally be drawn to, in particular the fragments on Howe's religious/metaphysical explorations. I, as the reader, felt like I should listen to Howe because I trusted her as the writer to show me things about religious philosophy that she understood intuitively/experientially that I would have been closed off to myself.
January 11, 2011
A moving, carefully-written document of pilgrim spirituality, activism, monastic devotion to art, and resistance. Howe is a mystic, activist, feminist, and an artist; she's also resolutely sober-minded. The book accretes rather than charging forward, and turns often back on itself, re-interpolating or reflecting on prior insights: the practices of religious devotion, poetry, parenting, activism, and philosophy all fold into one another in a given essay. Read the whole thing.
January 30, 2012
To my surprise, I felt in sync with Fannie Howe. She made mistakes in love or the chase. She loves her children. She is still trying to make sense of her own early family life. It seems she has lately become a Catholic. But the Buddhist kind. She didn't/doesn't like school, yet she is an intellectual in spite of herself. Part of this is me too, and some I would never be. She seems honest, and I like her meandering style, which she accomplishes without wasting a word.
October 23, 2016
Sometimes I didn't have the patience necessary for this book.
October 24, 2020
fanny forever <3
February 16, 2025
I really enjoyed certain passages of "Branches" and many sections of "Person, Place, and Time," including ones on: Henry Hampton, Jacques Lusseyran, Antonia White, Mary Manning (Fanny Howe's mother), and Emily Brontë. I also found "Waters Wide" to be very thought-provoking.
November 14, 2025
so clear now fanny howe's interest in childhood as the locus of a split self we carry onto our lives and need not even let go of... that very carrying will approximate the search for a meaning, or a self, or a god, that will make one out of two
May 25, 2017
not very interesting prose, biographic.. alot of intellectual allusions and name dropping
August 7, 2025
Partly memoir, partly meditation on what life is and parenting and childhood
September 3, 2025
I loved this
November 10, 2025
Best thing i’ve read in a while. A great read for poets.
March 18, 2016
First, I'm not a fan of books of fragments. The subtitle 'Notes on a vocation' is quite apt -- these are notes.
Here is a good one, about her writing students:
"...I do not expect them to tell except obliquely.
Because I don't tell. Dangerous memories are those that seem best left alone; contrary to what we are rged so often to do. If you speak of them they are deformed into words and become a potential conversation among strangers. They are not it. They are never it. They are not to be revisited. No matter how eloquent the description of the intimacy, violence, and fear, no matter how close the speaker is to what you are telling, the story is not it. Better to take up translation an turn someone else's memories into a cold poem, or better to make it fiction. True trauma has no language."
Pretty powerful stuff. I liked early essays, on her memory of being a child living in Harvard Square in the 40's.
Here is a good one, about her writing students:
"...I do not expect them to tell except obliquely.
Because I don't tell. Dangerous memories are those that seem best left alone; contrary to what we are rged so often to do. If you speak of them they are deformed into words and become a potential conversation among strangers. They are not it. They are never it. They are not to be revisited. No matter how eloquent the description of the intimacy, violence, and fear, no matter how close the speaker is to what you are telling, the story is not it. Better to take up translation an turn someone else's memories into a cold poem, or better to make it fiction. True trauma has no language."
Pretty powerful stuff. I liked early essays, on her memory of being a child living in Harvard Square in the 40's.
April 6, 2009
Since I was her student in the late 90's, it's fascinating (and clears up a few things) to read her perspectives on her students in the late 90's. Not that this book is all about me or anything. It's more like Sebald writing "To The Lighthouse" after a massive religious conversion or crisis. There's no other writer who can make religious questions seem so familiar to me (they aren't), and I think that's because for Fanny, conviction *is* its own crisis. It's unsurprising that there are few writers like her now -- most citizens of this century could not write while thinking like this. Maybe that's what the book's frequent evocations of past and future (and conflations of the two) are for: removing the influence of a present which requires conviction to be always brittle and positive.
July 30, 2014
I'm a fan of Fanny Howe, poet, seeker. This reads like a memoir, not of i facts but of her inner life. She has found in others wisdom to share. She conducts a conversation of sorts: "Without two people, there could not be one word." And,"There is only one nonreciprocal relationship: 'God' created the universe and entered into all beings for the sake of Self-realization"(Sankara). Through relationship we bring forth this Self-realization. Fear holds us back from evolving to full solidarity. Everyone has to be safe for everyone to be safe. This is the messianic message."
I know this sounds cryptic. Fanny Howe offers insights in as few, precise words possible. To condense her words further is probably to become cryptic. Anyway, I am enriched 'conversing' with her.
I know this sounds cryptic. Fanny Howe offers insights in as few, precise words possible. To condense her words further is probably to become cryptic. Anyway, I am enriched 'conversing' with her.
July 16, 2013
Just a small way in and I am in love with her use of language. She segues out of memories into spiritual musings seamlessly. I'll see where it takes me.
Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews