novels written since 1960.

A highly acclaimed first novel can often prove to be a mixed blessing, as it can overshadow a writer’s subsequent efforts. Poppa John, Woiwode’s third novel, was greeted with some disappointment; that reaction, coupled with a long period in which Woiwode published nothing, led some critics to wonder about his commitment to his vision. After the period of relative inactivity following the success of his first two novels nearly twenty-five years earlier, Woiwode returned to the family chronicle in Born Brothers, The Neumiller Stories, and Indian Affairs. Their appearance seems to have answered the concerns of his critics.

Woiwode’s recent foray into autobiography with the introspective Acts and the publication of What I Think I Did, with plans for two additional autobiographical volumes, suggests that in his sixties Woiwode began to move into a new phase of his life’s work, one involving looking back on his writer’s journey; certainly, with his continued literary productivity, it does not imply that his journey is anywhere near its end.

What I’m Going to Do, I Think

First published: 1969

Type of work: Novel

A newlywed couple search together for meaning and purpose against the bleak, faithless landscape of the late 1960’s.

Woiwode’s first novel, What I’m Going to Do, I Think, is an absorbing character study of two newlyweds, each of whom is originally drawn to the other as opposites proverbially attract. Chris Van Eenanam, the protagonist, is a listless mathematics graduate student, an unhappy agnostic preoccupied with his unsure footing in the world. Put simply, he lacks vocation or a consuming vision of what he should do with his life. The novel’s title thus accentuates his self-doubt and indecision, echoing something Chris’s father once said in observing his accident-prone son: “What I’m going to do, I think, is get a new kid.” Ellen Strohe, his pregnant bride, is a tortured young woman, dominated by overbearing grandparents who raised her after her parents’ accidental death. Neither she nor Chris can abide her grandparents’ interference and meddling.

Little action takes place “live” before the reader, as Woiwode’s psychological realism deploys compacted action and flashbacks and the patterned repetition of certain incidents to carry the reader along as effortlessly as might a conventionally chronological narrative. The reader learns “what happens,” primarily as events filter through the conversations and consciousness of Chris and Ellen during their extended honeymoon at her grandparents’ cabin near Lake Michigan. This tantalizing use of personal perception and vaguely unreliable memory has become a trademark of Woiwode’s characterization. It permits him wide latitude in choosing when and how to reveal his characters’ motivations and responses to the events that shape their lives.

In their retreat from the decisions that Chris chooses not to face, the couple, now intimate, now isolated, confront a grim modern world that has lost its faith in a supreme being fully in control of the created universe. This loss is exemplified most dramatically in the lives of Chris and Ellen as they try to sort out the meaning of affection and fidelity in their new relationship as husband and wife and as potential parents. Ellen’s pregnancy is, at first, a sign of a beneficent nature’s approval of their union, but later, as each has a premonition of their unborn child’s stillborn delivery, it becomes a symbol of an ambivalent world’s indifference to their marriage and its apparent fruitlessness.

In the absence of a compensatory faith even in humankind (a secondary faith arguably derived from faith in God), Chris and Ellen come to realize that they have lost their ability to navigate a hostile world with a lasting, meaningful relationship. The “student revolutions” of the 1960’s had promised social enlightenment and unadorned love, a secure replacement for the tottering scaffold of religious faith and civic duty that undergirded their parents’ generation. They discover, however, that neither science, as represented in Chris’s mathematics pursuits, nor nature, as a metaphor for the modern world’s hostility to metaphysical certainty, can fill the vacuum left by a waning faith in God or humankind. Such a committed faith, whose incessant call is to fidelity and perseverance, cannot survive without passion or understanding in the perplexity of the young married couple’s inexperience in living.

In a suspenseful epilogue that closes the novel with an explanation of what has happened to them in the seven years following their marriage, Chris and Ellen return to their honeymoon cabin. Chris retrieves the rifle that he has not touched in many years, and, as the action builds toward what will apparently be his suicide, he repeats to himself the beginning of a letter (perhaps a suicide note) that he could not complete. “Dear El, my wife. You’re the only person I’ve ever been able to talk to and this is something I can’t say. . . . ”

As he makes his way to the lake, he fires a round of ammunition into a plastic bleach container half-buried in the sand. In the novel’s enigmatic final lines, Chris fires “the last round from his waist, sending the bullet out over the open lake.” This curious ending seems intended by Woiwode to announce Chris’s end of indecision, a recognition that his life can have transcendent meaning only in embracing fully his marriage commitment to Ellen.

Beyond the Bedroom Wall

First published: 1975

Type of work: Novel

A sprawling chronicle of an immigrant family’s vitality and enduring faith despite the obstacles to its survival in the modern world.

The expansiveness and comic twists of Woiwode’s second novel, Beyond the Bedroom Wall: A Family Album, offer a marked contrast to What I’m Going to Do, I Think. In Beyond the Bedroom Wall, Woiwode parades sixty-three characters before the reader by the beginning of chapter 3. True to its subtitle, “A Family Album,” Beyond the Bedroom Wall is a rather impish and gangly work of loosely connected snapshots of three generations of the German Catholic immigrant Neumiller family. Woiwode straightforwardly invites the reader to leaf through this “album” not as a rigorously chronological narrative but as a curiosity piece, pausing at particular episodes and events.

From sentimental scenes of a father telling his children stories and the poignancy of a child fighting a nearly fatal illness to the agonizing grief of losing one’s spouse, Beyond the Bedroom Wall is an engaging homage to the seemingly evaporating family unit at the end of the twentieth century. Nevertheless, the novel’s “plot” is nearly impossible to paraphrase, consisting as it does of some narrative, some diary entries, and even its protagonist Martin Neumiller’s job application for a teaching position. Woiwode had published nearly a third of the forty-four chapters of Beyond the Bedroom Wall as self-contained short stories in The New Yorker; thus it is no surprise that the book reads as a discontinuous montage of events, images, and personalities. Woiwode reworked many of these episodes, foregrounding other characters and character traits, for his collection The Neumiller Stories.

Part 1 of the novel opens with the funeral of Otto Neumiller, a German immigrant farmer who had brought his family to the United States, and it continues, to part 5, with stories of the third generation of Neumillers, concluding in 1970, thus bringing members of the Neumiller family full circle from birth to life to death. Otto Neumiller had emigrated to America in 1881, relocating in the plains of North Dakota. As the reader meets him at the end of his life, he stands poised between two worlds, knowing neither the love nor the admiration of his neighbors, but seeking to bequeath something of value to his son, Charles. The farm he tended and leaves behind becomes emblematic, not of his success as a man of the soil but of his life as a devoted father who has sown and reaped a loyal and steadfast family, one whose strength is not in great friendships or possessions but in mutual love.

After setting this context, Woiwode moves the narrative forward quickly, introducing the family of Charles’s son, Martin, who is the “family album’s” true focal point. Martin Neumiller, like his father and grandfather, is a God-fearing, devoutly Catholic man and proud son of North Dakota whose ordinary adventures and gentle misadventures give the novel any formal unity it possesses. “My life is like a book,” he says at one point, “There is one chapter, there is one story after another.”

To see his life as a story, written by God in the gives and takes of everyday life, Martin must accustom himself to finding profundity and sustenance in the painfully ordinary patterns and repetitions of life and not in the frantic and guilt-ridden excesses of sophisticated city life or Hollywood romanticism. To accentuate this resolution, Woiwode peoples the novel with odd folks who serve as Martin’s extended family, a naturally burlesque troupe of characters who boisterously sample both the joys and the sorrows of life on Earth within the confines of small-town America.

The Neumiller family over which Martin presides is hardworking, intelligent, and generally steady; they are manifestly not extraordinary when measured against the typical families of traditional, rural, midwestern life. Martin, like Woiwode, revels in their normality. Driven to resign as an underpaid and underappreciated small-town teacher and principal, Martin takes on odd jobs as a plumber and insurance salesman to provide an income while waiting for another opening. Hearing of a principalship in the small Illinois town where his parents live encourages him to move there from North Dakota. Completely loyal to his wife, Alpha, Martin clearly treasures her and the six children they have. They have committed themselves to each other “till death parts them.”

The move to Illinois is disastrous, however, as anti-Catholic bigotry denies Martin the job he sought, and Alpha subsequently dies abruptly. The reader discerns, with Martin, that it was his break from “ordinariness,” from typical family patterns of mutual decision-making—found in his uncharacteristically sudden decision to move his family east—that has animated most of the tension and diversion within the novel and which ultimately delivers its theme. Left to serve as “father, mother, nurse, teacher, arbiter, guardian, judge,” Martin appears to shrivel up inside. Outwardly stoic about his life’s ups and downs, he continues to be resolute about how to face disappointments and discouragements: “A man should be grateful for what he gets and not expect to get one thing more.”

Using this “family album” approach, Woiwode lends concreteness to his notion that reality is a fragile construction, one that sometimes cannot bear scrutiny “beyond the bedroom wall”—that is, beyond the dreamy world of sleep, of its visions of what might be. Woiwode intimates that whatever hope there may be for fulfilling one’s dreams, it is anchored in “walking by faith, and not by sight,” by trusting in and actively nurturing family intimacy.

The rather sentimental, “old-fashioned” quality Woiwode achieves in this family chronicle, his evocation of once-embraced and now-lamented values, prompted critic and novelist John Gardner to place Woiwode in the company of literature’s greatest epic novelists: “When self-doubt, alienation, and fashionable pessimism become a bore and, what’s worse, a patent delusion, how does one get back to the big emotions, the large and fairly confident life affirmations of an Arnold Bennet, a [Charles] Dickens, a [Fyodor] Dostoevsky? Beyond the Bedroom Wall is a brilliant solution.”

Woiwode’s eye for the rich details of daily life enables him to move through vast stretches of time and space in executing the episodic structure in this novel. His appreciation for the cadences of Midwestern speech and his understanding of the distinctiveness of prairie life and landscape and its impact on the worldviews of its inhabitants recalls other regional writers such as Rudy Wiebe and Garrison Keillor at their best.

Poppa John

First published: 1981

Type of work: Novel

An aging actor fights to regain his self-respect and recover his own identity after his soap opera character dies.

When compared with the massive Beyond the Bedroom Wall, Poppa John is shockingly short and is more a finely wrought character study than a novel. Consequently, Woiwode relies on subtle symbolism and poignant imagery to convey the story’s essentially religious themes. The book takes its title from the character that aging actor Ned Daley has played for many years on a popular television soap opera. With his character’s immense personal popularity beginning to overshadow the show itself, he is eventually written out of the show in a dramatic “death.” Now close to seventy, outspoken, and Falstaffian in appearance and behavior, he seeks to recover his identity as “Ned,” which has been sublimated during his twelve years as the imperious Poppa John.

Poppa John’s compressed action takes place on two days in the Christmas season, a Friday and a Sunday—nakedly separated by a vacant and voiceless Saturday—and the novella is thus divided into two parts, decisively marked by the calendar: Friday, December 23, and Sunday, December 25. As in his other fiction, Woiwode is concerned that the reader discover the nature of his characters’ predicaments by “listening” to their own thoughts and memories as they recall them, rather than by intrusive exposition by an omniscient narrator. Progressively but achronologically, one learns the relevant facts of Ned’s past; recollection, in fact, dominates present action in the evolving narrative.

Therefore, in responding to the novella, it is important to recognize the character traits that Ned has sought to embody in Poppa John for twelve television seasons. Part King Lear, part Santa Claus, Poppa John evinces a kind a tragic benevolence, resolving contrived soap opera dilemmas with well-chosen biblical verses. Though easily spouting Scripture while in character, Ned rarely discerned its significance for himself, nor has the sage presence of Poppa John transferred any benefits to his own relationships. In this portrayal, Ned found inspiration in his own grandfather, a fiery evangelical preacher scandalized when his daughter, Ned’s mother, married a Catholic and converted to this alien faith. His father, a vaguely corrupt policeman, had died a violent death that Ned himself overheard taking place while hiding in a warehouse—a signal event that drove him into an adult acting career that has prevented him from becoming the unique individual he was born to be.

Consequently, Ned has a complex and paradoxical relationship to religious faith. It at once circumscribes his life and distances it from its reality. The “Scriptures,” Woiwode’s narrator opines, “had given him slivered glimpses into the realm of time, from the vantage of his years, where a central pureness . . . held the continual revolving of days into weeks—into months, into ages—in balance with the compiled weight of the ages revolving beneath the particular minute of each day.” When Poppa John dies, Ned’s own life begins to unravel, and he is increasingly forced to face his own inconsistencies, his doubts, and even his sins.

The novel opens as Ned and his devout and devoted wife, Celia, dress for a day of Christmas Eve shopping. Ned has been out of work for more than a year, and the couple must withdraw money from savings to fund any gift buying for each other. “Ned” only to his wife (he is “Poppa John” to everyone else), he is lost in the malevolent nostalgia of growing old without a true self or true self-respect. Ned is tentative about this trip uptown; he has been in analysis, seeking to exorcise the ghost of Poppa John from his psyche. He no longer knows how to “be himself.”

As he strolls the streets of New York, he moves intermittently in and out of his Poppa John identity, conversing amiably with strangers who recognize him, all the while employing the gestures and intonations his adoring fans have come to expect. He is simultaneously a captive of the public who gave him his livelihood and the victim of a medium that rewards popularity by “killing” its source.

The more his casual acquaintances offer their condolences for his fictional death, the more self-pitying he becomes. After he and his wife agree to split up so each can shop for the other, Ned succumbs to an old temptation, alcohol. In a neighborhood bar, he allows himself to be “picked up” by an admiring fan and would-be dancer who takes him to her apartment. When her roommate returns to find the drunken and blubbering old man, she persuades the dancer to return him to the bar whence they came, and eventually they send him on his way in a cab. Exiting at the next block, Ned wanders the streets and eventually collapses in a street mission, which he mistakes for the homely Catholic cathedral of his youth. The next face he sees, now on Christmas morning, is that of his wife. Confined to a hospital psychiatric ward, Ned is “coming to himself,” realizing that he, after all these years, does believe in God and therefore can come to believe in himself.

In minimizing the action of the novella and compressing it into only two days, Woiwode places special weight on two different and compelling Christian images he seeks to juxtapose: the joyful incarnation of the baby Jesus, foregrounded in the Christmastime setting; and Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection, a dark Friday and a buoyant Easter Sunday separated by a bleak, lost Saturday. As Christ is in the grave, his fate unknown, Ned/Poppa John is also buried and left for “dead” in his drunken stupor. When he awakens to receive his wife’s Christmas gift of a briefcase bearing his initials N. E. D., his life as Ned Daley is restored, and he is thereby enabled to embrace a future he despaired of finding again. What Woiwode offers in Poppa John is a modern parable of life, death, and rebirth.

Born Brothers

First published: 1988

Type of work: Novel

The continuing saga of the Neumiller family, whose characters were introduced first in Beyond the Bedroom Wall.

Woiwode calls this novel a “companion volume” to Beyond the Bedroom Wall, and it returns to the characters and setting of that work. Beginning in the middle of the twentieth century, Born Brothers is filtered through the perceptions of Charles Neumiller; through his memories, he is seeking a meaning and purpose for his life. As elsewhere, Woiwode eschews chronological narrative, and the present is submerged deeply into the past. The novel progresses through various memories of Charles. To speak of a plot or setting is unhelpful; to force Woiwode’s uniquely fashioned version of family chronicle into such misleading categories is to misconstrue Woiwode’s vision—that lives do not neatly fit into prescribed, sequential patterns. Family members appear in a seemingly random way that shows Charles’s quest for an answer to the plaintive cry of his heart: Is there life after childhood?

A gifted raconteur and orator, Charles has followed his voice into a New York career as a “voiceover” in commercials and as a “radio personality” focused on small-town life. He is thus accustomed to creating illusions and re-creating forgotten, homely images in the minds of his listeners. In fact, he is incapable of conceiving of a meaningful world outside the psychic landscape of his own family structure. Having endured assaults on his marriage and having struggled with alcohol, Charles leaves New York behind for his beloved North Dakota. A suitable anthem for Charles Neumiller’s life can be drawn from his own musings: “Imagination is, indeed, memory—that is more profound than any fantasy.” The events and relationships of the past are as concrete as any the present can offer him.

His childhood and his own fatherhood have profoundly shaped his life in ways that preclude other influences and forces from engaging his life. The minutest detail of a past experience is recalled and rehearsed in Charles’s mind as the reader is invited to share vicariously in its warmth and vitality. Errant smoke from a father’s cigar, a mother’s bedtime stories, a life-threatening fall—each of these recollected events breathes life into Woiwode’s protagonist as he searches for an anchor to hold onto in the storms of modern life.

The thematic key to the novel may be found in a recognition that Charles longs for a restored bond of brotherhood he once shared with his elder brother, Jerome—drawn from a childhood which the adult Charles visits frequently, once again inhabiting what now seems an idyllic Garden of Eden in North Dakota, free from the cares and motivations of prurient, polluted, industrial life. That Charles’s radio job comprised the roles of both the interviewer and the interviewee encapsulates his need for conversion, of freedom from self. He needs an outside, a reference point, which, implicitly, he seeks in Jerome—an affirmation he anticipates but does not truly realize in a New York reunion in a dingy hotel room. If their memories are not “mutual,” he fears, “I might have invented our love.” Ultimately, Woiwode hints, Charles will find “a place to stand” only through a renewed faith in the transcendent, and eventually Charles concedes that the only proof of God’s existence “is God’s existence in you for eternity.”

At times, the tedious details of Charles’s recollections are dizzying, even unedifying. Yet it is the totalizing effect, the sheer volume of Charles’s “unedited” introspections, that gives the novel its weight and its merit. In part, it is Woiwode’s intent to lay the blame for American society’s apparent moral disintegration—rampant promiscuity, unwanted pregnancy, and divorce—to the absence of strong family ties, but he leaves open the question of whether Charles’s captivity to the past is the solution or part of the problem. In the end, Born Brothers can perhaps be received as fiction’s most ambitious, if not most successful, attempt since the work of French novelist François Mauriac to capture the vagaries of the active conscious mind and tortured spirit within the linearity of print.

Indian Affairs

First published: 1992

Type of work: Novel

This is the second installment in the chronicles of Chris and Ellen Van Eenanam, the young married couple first introduced in What I’m Going to Do, I Think.

Chris and Ellen Van Eenanam are still adjusting to life together as a couple, to the death of their stillborn child, and to the changes inevitable in young adulthood. Chris needs to complete the writing of his dissertation, the final step in attaining his Ph.D. in mathematics. In an isolated cabin in upper Michigan, Chris intends to concentrate on his writing and his marriage.

Chris Van Eenanam is of mixed blood (Lakota on his grandfather’s side) but has always considered himself more white than red, having been raised and educated in New York. His relocation will prove to be cultural as well as geographic, personal as well as regional, as he grapples with issues of self-identity. His move inland toward the center of the nation positions him closer to his heritage in a type of reverse migration. Through encounters with other American Indians, Chippewa whom he initially disdains, Chris gradually sees a reflection of himself and acknowledges his Indian heritage, but it comes at a cost—increasing estrangement from his wife, Ellen.

In this novel of personal reversals, Chris makes a final identity shift. His decision to return to New York at novel’s end suggests an abandonment of his newly acquired American Indian persona and a return to the assimilated mainstream Chris Van Eenanam, the selfsame character that he was at the novel’s beginning. In the final analysis, Chris appears to don identities as he dons clothing, wearing that which is most conducive to the social and geographic climate at hand. Woiwode seems to propose that in an age of uncomplicated travel and increasingly merged ancestries, a clear sense of self becomes difficult to sustain. That a unified Chris could emerge with a hybrid identity, one both white and Indian simultaneously, unfortunately is not an option.

“Silent Passengers”

First published: 1993 (collected in Silent Passengers: Stories, 1993)

Type of work: Short story

Together the Steiner family recovers from a tragic accident that renders their son comatose.

Set on a high-plains ranch, the summer retreat of a Silicon Valley family, “Silent Passengers” explores personal tragedy from a perspective that is intimate and introspective. Ostensibly the Steiners have purchased their summer home to enable Mr. Steiner to spend quality time with his children, nine-year-old James and twin daughters, but on the afternoon in question he lies isolated in the twins’ bedroom, napping off the aftereffects of excessive beer consumption while his family visits a neighboring ranch to ride horses.

After Steiner’s wife, Jen, and their children dismount from their ride, one of the horses, an Apache, hooves James in the chest, and the boy is knocked unconscious when his head strikes the ground. Apprised of the accident by a neighbor’s phone call, Steiner recalls the final words that he spoke to James, a dismissive “I don’t care” in response to his son’s query about whether to go with the girls or remain with his father to help repair a broken tractor. As he races to the emergency room, this memory torments Steiner, as does his regret about drinking, a habit he had promised to avoid while on vacation.

Ultimately, this is a story about caring, hope, love, and resurrection. The father who said he did not care cares deeply. Following a doctor’s pronouncement that James will likely remain comatose, Steiner and his wife fall to their knees in an anguished embrace suggestive of physical if not verbal prayer. When they rise in unison, Steiner’s next action is to lift James out of his labyrinth of tubes and deliver him to his mother’s lap, where Jen cradles her son. Instinctively, the boy raises his arms to clasp his mother’s neck. On the day following their reenactment of his conception and birth, James attempts speech. Steiner, awakened as well, realizes that he and his wife have been silent passengers on their son’s quick descent into and slow deliverance from darkness. Though he may never return to mental and physical wholeness, James’s awakening to consciousness is sufficient cause for Steiner’s joy: “That’s enough, he thought. . . . it was enough to have the child with them, alive.”

Following a week of physical therapy, their son is brought home to the ranch to continue his recovery. Wearing a harness to aid mobility, a wobbly James is attached to his mother’s steady hand by a leather strap, a symbolic umbilical cord. Undeterred, the boy runs downhill, mother in tow, in the direction of their own grazing horses. The image panics Steiner, who still fears his son’s mortality. A sudden gust of wind raises skyward the hair on the heads of his family members, and this natural phenomenon, suggestive of threads connecting earth to heaven, and emblematic of life after death, transforms Steiner’s parental dread to one of benevolent acceptance.

What I Think I Did

First published: 2000

Type of work: Autobiography

This first volume of a projected three-part autobiography is set in two contrasting landscapes: the North Dakota prairie and the New York publishing world.

The title of Woiwode’s memoir, What I Think I Did, is a playful variation of the title of his 1969 novel, What I’m Going to Do, I Think. The autobiographical work is structured in two parts separated by an intermezzo that functions more like a pause than a transition. The first section contains the author’s memories of his childhood, including the death of his mother; his changing relationships with his own children at various ages; his connection to the prairie and, by extension, to nature; and the development and nurturing of his craft as a writer.

Central to act 1 is Woiwode’s account of surviving the North Dakota winter of 1996, the most severe on record. That dark season provides an emotional backdrop upon which he projects memories that, like snowdrifts, shape and reshape themselves. Storm temperatures, wind chills reaching negative triple digits, are potentially lethal, Woiwode recounts. His purchase, construction, and maintenance of a wood-burning furnace to heat the buildings on his ranch become a metaphor for both maintaining human life and relationships and fueling the writing process. Woiwode struggles to assimilate the childhood loss of his mother with the direction of his adult life: “Her death, the calamitous event I’ve tried in different ways to put into the hands of fictional characters, hoping to leave it with them, sometimes returns.” Exploring the events surrounding her death and seeking the information denied him as a child, it is his inquisitiveness that characterizes Woiwode as a writer and propels him toward his chosen career. His search for answers both practical (How did she die?) and spiritual (Why did she die?) continues in act 2 as he explores his apprenticeship as a young writer in New York City.

Aptly titled “Intermission,” the middle of Woiwode’s autobiography offers a break between parts 1 and 2 and acts as a spatial divide between prairie and city. The words attach themselves to no single place, and the section is startling in its physical disconnectedness, so dissimilar to what comes before and after. A description of walking through a crowded art gallery melds into a boyhood hike through solitary woods. Eventually, the section abandons terra firma altogether to become a powerful soliloquy whose intended audience is no longer solely the reader, but the ear of God. In this manner, “Intermission” becomes what it aims to be: a spiritual, not material, discourse.

The second section of his memoir locates Woiwode away from the prairie landscapes of his youth and middle age, landing him first on the campus of the University of Illinois in Urbana and later in the concrete cityscape of New York. Woiwode’s college days are complicated by his falling in love simultaneously with acting, writing, and a young woman, all three competing passions connected by their reliance on words to communicate emotions. Out of school and in New York, he befriends a young Robert De Niro, the actor, when they appear in an Off-Broadway play, but it is the page, not the stage, that holds the greatest appeal for Woiwode. In pursuit of this avocation, he is guided by William Maxwell, an editor at The New Yorker, who becomes Woiwode’s mentor. The culminating scene in act 2 depicts both men spilling tears at the news of the young author’s inaugural publication.

In this first installment of his life story, Woiwode avoids a strictly linear approach to narration; instead, he offers readers insight into significant scenes as they appear to cross his mind. Memories of events, places, and people are enhanced by Woiwode’s philosophical musings, commentary on both what he recalls thinking at the time and what he presently discerns of a recollected situation. His writing style, as it shifts forward and backward, mimics the powerful winds that wreaked havoc on the plains in the first section. What I Think I Did is part Bildungsroman, the story of a young writer’s emergence, and part elegy, a tribute to his mother and others who gave birth to his dream. It is a chronicle of life, death, survival, relationships, and writing. The author looks not so much within, but around himself, to acknowledge the sources of his craft.