At the Corner of Past and Future

Pamela Carter Joern is the author of four works of fiction: Toby’s Last Resort, In Reach, The Plain Sense of Things, and The Floor of the Sky, all published by the University of Nebraska Press. She has written six plays that have been produced in the Twin Cities of Minnesota and taught writing at the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis for ten years.

“The Nebraska voice of Pamela Carter Joern shines like the stars in the vast dome of her natal sky, at once lyrical and straightforward. With sharp observation, tenderness, and wry humor, her collected stories and essays carry us irresistibly from a three-year-old’s memory of a red couch by a window to wise and surprising meditations on mortality in a wider world. It’s a wonder and a gift.”-Gayla Marty, author of Memory of Trees: A Daughter’s Story of a Family Farm “Pamela Carter Joern delivers what I want from a well-crafted memoir in essays: emotional honesty, unstinting candor, lyrical writing, artful storytelling, attention to context, and a deep and fearless questioning of what she knows, or thinks she knows, about herself and her place in the world.”-Lisa Knopp, author of What the River Carries and The Nature of Home “Pamela Carter Joern shows us the big sky in this affective and eloquently written collection. The big sky of a Great Plains childhood. The big sky of flying leaps, finding meaning, and facing mortality. The big sky of Nebraska itself, a necessary landscape that pulls her home, holds her steady, and keeps letting her leave and return again. These heartrending essays about place, personhood, and the passage of time invite us to bask in all our big skies of troubled and ecstatic living.”-Barrie Jean Borich, author of Body Geographic and Apocalypse, Darling

• Introduction Part 1. INTERSECTIONS of TIME and PLACE 1. Looking for Direction 2. Forest and Prairie 3. At the Corner of Past and Future 4. Standing in Lines 5. Comforter 6. Salvador DalÍ and Me Part 2: INTERSECTIONS of MEMORY and TRUTH 7. My Earliest Memory 8. Memory Thefts and Transplants 9. In Pursuit of Magic 10. Dr. Silverman and the Kansas City A’s 11. My Mother, the Liar 12. Vaccines 13. Shards 14. Sky Part 3: INTERSECTIONS of LIFE and ART 15. Carnal Appetites 16. Cathedrals and Cottonwoods 17. Egg Carton Art 18. God Is Not a tv Repairman 19. Because the Poet Died 20. Privilege 21. I Say Unicorns Are Real 22. Souls at White Heat 23. Fatigue 24. A Flying Leap 25. What Is the Meaning of This? Acknowledgments Notes