Dream That is Childhood

CIRQUE PRESS proudly announces The Dream That is Childhood: A Memoir in Verse by Sandra Wassilie.

The Dream That Is Childhood: A Memoir in Verse introduces a young girl growing into awareness of an uncertain world through an apprenticeship with the wilderness of territorial Alaska. Set during the years of the Cold War, it recalls a particular place, dominated by a lake, on the north side of the Alaska Range. It is a glimpse into the middle of the twentieth century from a child whose scant knowledge of the outside world comes mainly from overhearing the talk of adults and from books. Her daily life involves dog teams, boats, and planes. The outside world is different. Wassilie writes in a narrative style that leaps into the lyrical and into depths of mystery whether of waterweeds or parental behavior or her own changing body. Her childhood is a negotiation between loneness and a growing family in a hybrid community of woodsmen and government workers, between being lost in books and immersed in the forest, if not the changing moods of the sky and lake. She confronts the harsh beauty of her life equally with sorrow and humor. She comes to accept it as a series of arrivals and departures with hard choices to be made along the way. And in that acceptance, she finds she can forgive.

About Cirque Press:

Cirque Press grew out of Cirque, a literary journal established in 2009 by Michael Burwell. Sandra Kleven came onboard in 2011 to further the work. Cirque was established to provide publication opportunity to writers and artists of a region that falls north from Oregon to the Yukon Territory and south from there through Alaska to Hawaii. As of 2020, we celebrate twenty issues of our highly regarded journal. Cirque contributors are widely published in an array of journals. Their writing is significant. It is personal. It is strong. It draws on these regions in ways that add to the culture of place. The body of work of individual writers could be lost if it remained scattered across the landscape of literary journals. Cirque Press (2018) seeks to gather the work of our contributors into book-form where it can be experienced coherently as statement, observation, and artistry: where it can be preserved as literary history of the Pacific Northwest and Alaska. Sandra Kleven - Michael Burwell, publishers and editors