Best-selling novelist and poet Jeanette Lynes lights up these lyric essays with her inimitable wit and verve, making inspired and surprising sense of her past, her obsessions, and her restless wanderings in search of home.
In these deeply entertaining essays, Jeanette Lynes throws out sentences like glittering lifelines to her past self. She brings her rural childhood to life again, drawing insights painful and uplifting from the mire of poverty and seclusion. She charts the challenging internal weather of her post-divorce campus life as a creative writing prof. And in a pivotal essay on aprons, Lynes brilliantly stitches together the loneliness and depression of rural farmwives with the hopeful mothers—like hers—fighting heroically to raise their kids on next to nothing on a hard-scrabble farm.
Lynes’ essays track her path from a comfortable married life to a new, more precarious identity with the solitude required to create art. She shows us her fierce struggle for a room of her own, even when that room is an apartment invaded each night by a species of bat that she dubs a “a little bag of night.” Whether ruminating upon Mary Pratt’s flaming dishcloths or the spinning carnival ride in a Sarah Polley film, Lynes’ lyrical gaze interrogates her assumptions, her desires, and her perpetual quest for home.
While regret and remorse sometimes infuse her words, the author is able to laugh at herself—the comic relief of short riffs like “My Life as a Pinterest Board” and “When I am Funniest (An Essay in Lists)” act as counterpoint to the longer and more meditative pieces.
About the Author
Jeanette Lynes is the author of four novels and seven poetry collections. Her latest novel, The Paper Birds, is a national bestseller and won the Fiction award at the Saskatchewan Book Awards. Jeanette’s third novel, The Apothecary’s Garden, was a finalist for a High Plains Book Award and was shortlisted for several Saskatchewan Book Awards. Her second novel, The Small Things that End the World, won the Saskatchewan Book Awards’ fiction prize. Jeanette’s first novel, The Factory Voice, was longlisted for The Giller Prize and a ReLit Award. Her poems recently appeared in Prairie Fire and Ninth Letter. Jeanette’s book on research in creative writing is forthcoming with University of Regina Press. She directs the MFA in Writing at the University of Saskatchewan.
Reviews
“How do we hold ourselves together in times of devastating loss and change? Jeanette Lynes ventures some unconventional answers: with rickrack, drum riffs, desert bike rides —and an inexhaustible love of words.
Wide-ranging as a prairie corn field, musical as a swarm of bees, the essays in Apron Apocalypse will make you think, make you laugh, pierce your heart—and stitch it back together, with extra pockets.” —Susan Olding,
author of Big Reader: Essays.
Winner of the 2023 John V. Hicks Long Manuscript contest, Apron Apocalypse, in the words of jury members Marsha Lederman and Jenny Heijun Wills, “accomplishes the near impossible. It draws together the brutality and ugliness of human experience with a pen insistent on beauty and hope. This collection of essays provokes, inspires, is both soft and hard. Like ‘an apron sewn from the remains of clothes we’d outgrown’, this collection is a new creation made from bits of a life left behind, a life transformed into something new, useful and beautiful.”
Read an Excerpt
Read an excerpt of Apron Apocalypse: Lyric Essays here:
Apron Apocalypse excerpt
