DeWitt Henry - Sweet Marjoram: Notes and Essays

Selected Works

Essays

Compulsive reading. I would finish one dazzling piece, then instantly turn the page to another, then to another and another. Each piece surprised and delighted me in new ways, sometimes with unexpected laughter, sometimes with sighs of recognition or sadness or loss, but always with admiration for the beautiful and graceful connections -- maybe "reflections" is the better word -- [Henry finds] among the offerings of our world. The book is poetry and prose, both at once. -- Tim O'Brien, author of DAD'S MAYBE BOOK.......

True wisdom and beauty, in a time when we dearly need both.—Eileen Pollack, author of THE BIBLE OF DIRTY JOKES......One could place this book, so different from its contemporaries, in the dive-in-get-wet tradition begun by Montaigne: choose a subject as your starting point and then follow where your musings take you. But I am reminded of another French thinker as well, the philosopher of the imagination Gaston Bachelard, who reminded us that "Words dream." In Sweet Marjoram, DeWitt Henry leans in close, divines those dreams, follows their lyrical and associative reasoning, and in his precise and luminous prose, maps our contemporary consciousness, noting our psychic landmarks, our moral architecture, the roads we take to the things that matter.—Richard Hoffman, author of HALF THE HOUSE and LOVE & FURY.

Short Fiction

Falling: Six Stories

These are stories with traction. Henry's writing immediately brought to mind the work of Richard Yates in terms of style, time periods, and deep characterization. And, like Yates, he takes no prisoners. --Susan Tepper, author of THE MERRILL DIARIES.......

What a marvelous, fierce collection! --Margot Livesey, author of THE FLIGHT OF GEMMA HARDY.......

Who’d have thought we could enjoy such engagement, even entertainment, in some of the worst nightmares of life as a man in America? In the good cop breaking bad, the solid breadwinner who begins to lose, and lose, or the middle-aged middling success who, with one step outside the norms, might break his neck? Dewitt Henry skillfully computes the angle of fall for all those. In one freaky, brainy outlier of a tale, he even details the long drop of the great King Kong. Yet in Kong's case as in the dirt-beneath-the-nails realism of the two novella-length closers — each the rise and fall of an entire Rust Belt cityscape — Falling proves most moving in its grasp of the essential tragedy: the perversion of the dream once pure. --John Domini, author of MOVIEOLA

Memoir

Visions of a Wayne Childhood

21 brief sketches about growing up on the Philadelphia Main Line during the 1940s and 50s

Sweet Dreams: A Family History

Hidden River Press. 2011. 252 pages. This is a moving, sepia-toned, and powerful look at the bonds of a family, but it also tracks the development of a deeply gifted writer and his dedication to American letters. This resonant memoir is by turns poignant and harrowing, and with each new page, I felt the exhilarating rush of recognition. In writing about his family, DeWitt Henry ushers his readers to better understandings of their own histories. --Bret Anthony Johnston, author of CORPUS CHRISTI: STORIES

Safe Suicide: Narratives, Essays, and Meditations

Red Hen Press, 2008. 190 pp."As with any flat-out wonderful book, a few words of praise cannot begin to do it justice. But here goes: SAFE SUICIDE is elegantly written, edgy, touching, inventive, surprising in its shifts of style and form, and completely spellbinding from start to finish. Partly memoir, partly a sequence of interlocked essays, this is a book that works its way under your skin and down into your vital organs. It is really, really good."--Tim O’Brien, author of THE THINGS THEY CARRIED.

Novel

The Marriage of Anna Maye Potts

Winner of the 2000 Peter Taylor Prize for the Novel

Anthology

Sorrow's Company: Writers on Loss and Grief

Essays that reflect the tenacity, the strength to go forward and to love. Beacon Press, 2001. 219 pp.

Fathering Daughters: Reflections by Men

Co-edited with James Alan McPherson. Beacon Press, 1999. 252 pp.

Breaking Into Print: Early Stories and Insights into Getting Published (A Ploughshares Anthology)

A collection of first or very early fiction by now prominent authors as it appeared in the prizewinning journal Ploughshares over the past three decades.

Sweet Marjoram: Notes and Essays

Available October 15, 2018

In this new collection of essays, Henry draws on his 40-year career as an award-winning novelist, memoirist, editor, and teacher, as well as on the works of classical and contemporary literature that have served him as “equipment for living.” He develops a lexicon of 22 abstract terms, including Weather, Time, Handshakes, Privilege, and Empathy. He sifts the layered meanings of each term through research, wit, personal stories, literary quotations, and free association. His inspirations are Stephen Dedalus’s stream of consciousness and Hamlet’s soliloquies, as both in turn are inspired by Montaigne’s essays. Some terms suggest collective wisdom. Some invoke discoveries. Some reveal outmoded agendas and biases, or promise new ones. The adventure is in how, rather than in what, to think; and Henry’s terms of choice are salient to our culture and times, where too often they serve to prevent rather than to challenge original thinking.

"DeWitt Henry's SWEET MARJORAM is an astonishing hybrid, a bracking intellectual call-to-arms that subverts all categorizations. Poetic, impassioned, insightful and original, these far-reaching medications are vital and beautiful and, at this moment, the perfect antidote to the base soundbites that define our culture."--Bret Anthony Johnston, author of REMEMBER ME LIKE THIS.

"In case anyone is still wondering about the accrued benefits of a lifetime's reading, teaching, viewing, and thinking, DeWitt Henry's SWEET MARJORAM offers the spirited and enjoyable answer. A Shakespeareian breadth of interest subjected to a steady inquiring pressure--the reader finds aphorisms for living on every page."--Sven Birkerts, author of CHANGING THE SUBJECT: ART AND ATTENTION IN THE INTERNET AGE

"Be warned! The far-ranging notes and essays of SWEET MARJORAM are addictive. Once I began reading, I couldn't stop. I wanted more of Henry 's wit and wisdom, his dazzling, surprising juxtapositions. I wanted to see him keep making the familiar new, and the strange familiar. Whether he's writing about folly or time or food or meat or envy or appetite, Henry has a gift for making his reader see the world afresh. A delightful and highly original collection.--Margot Livesey, author of MERCURY and THE HIDDEN MACHINERY

"DeWitt Henry's SWEET MARJORAM is as delicious as the title suggests, a rich, evocative, brilliant collection chronicling all that is pungent and fresh in the wide world, keenly observed by a modern-day Montaigne. Read this one, but slowly, savoring every word." --Dinty W. Moore, author of THE MINDFUL WRITER.

"SWEET MARJORAM is terrific. Tons of sharp, intelligent insights, and all sorts of oddly unexpected, intriguing connections. The pacing is rapid-fire. It has a wonderfully defined shape and heartfelt vision. A powerful, passionate collection."—James Brown, author of THE LOS ANGELES DIARIES and THIS RIVER.

Selected Works

Sweet Marjoram: Notes and Essays

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