At the End of Ridge Road

by Joseph Bruchac

At the End of Ridge Road traces Joseph Bruchac’s path from “nature nut” to jock to writer, to his home at the end of Ridge Road near where he was raised by his grandparents. This colorful memoir explores the links between Bruchac’s native Abenaki culture and his long-held views on human dignity and social justice. Asking readers to remove their watches to they might “live time” rather than be ruled by it, Bruchac tells his own story—one that sits at the crossroads of his Abenaki and European heritage. From the foot of Glass Factory Mountain to the halls of Cornell University, from a classroom in West Africa to a start-up literary magazine in a room of his grandfather’s home, Bruchac superimposes Native American ways of seeing upon the structure of today’s world. Bruchac believes the essential wisdom of native cultures, the balance of nature, and the power of a well-told story each holds ways to avoid humanity’s most destructive impulses.

152 pages, Paperback

First published March 4, 2005

About the author

Joseph Bruchac lives with his wife, Carol, in the Adirondack mountain foothills town of Greenfield Center, New York, in the same house where his maternal grandparents raised him. Much of his writing draws on that land and his Abenaki ancestry. Although his American Indian heritage is only one part of an ethnic background that includes Slovak and English blood, those Native roots are the ones by which he has been most nourished. He, his younger sister Margaret, and his two grown sons, James and Jesse, continue to work extensively in projects involving the preservation of Abenaki culture, language and traditional Native skills, including performing traditional and contemporary Abenaki music with the Dawnland Singers.

He holds a B.A. from Cornell University, an M.A. in Literature and Creative Writing from Syracuse and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the Union Institute of Ohio. His work as a educator includes eight years of directing a college program for Skidmore College inside a maximum security prison. With his wife, Carol, he is the founder and Co-Director of the Greenfield Review Literary Center and The Greenfield Review Press. He has edited a number of highly praised anthologies of contemporary poetry and fiction, including Songs from this Earth on Turtle's Back, Breaking Silence (winner of an American Book Award) and Returning the Gift. His poems, articles and stories have appeared in over 500 publications, from American Poetry Review, Cricket and Aboriginal Voices to National Geographic, Parabola and Smithsonian Magazine. He has authored more than 70 books for adults and children, including The First Strawberries, Keepers of the Earth (co-authored with Michael Caduto), Tell Me a Tale, When the Chenoo Howls (co-authored with his son, James), his autobiography Bowman's Store and such novels as Dawn Land, The Waters Between, Arrow Over the Door and The Heart of a Chief. Forthcoming titles include Squanto's Journey (Harcourt), a picture book, Sacajawea (Harcourt), an historical novel, Crazy Horse's Vision (Lee & Low), a picture book, and Pushing Up The Sky (Dial), a collection of plays for children. His honors include a Rockefeller Humanities fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Writing Fellowship for Poetry, the Cherokee Nation Prose Award, the Knickerbocker Award, the Hope S. Dean Award for Notable Achievement in Children's Literature and both the 1998 Writer of the Year Award and the 1998 Storyteller of the Year Award from the Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers and Storytellers. In 1999, he received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writers Circle of the Americas.

As a professional teller of the traditional tales of the Adirondacks and the Native peoples of the Northeastern Woodlands, Joe Bruchac has performed widely in Europe and throughout the United States from Florida to Hawaii and has been featured at such events as the British Storytelling Festival and the National Storytelling Festival in Jonesboro, Tennessee. He has been a storyteller-in-residence for Native American organizations and schools throughout the continent, including the Institute of Alaska Native Arts and the Onondaga Nation School. He discusses Native culture and his books and does storytelling programs at dozens of elementary and secondary schools each year as a visiting author.

Reviews

[Ruby Hollyberry · Rating 3 out of 5]

This wasn't quite what I thought it would be. Bowman's Store: A Journey to Myself is really what I meant to get. Next time! That one is the real memoir. This one is a short general biographical piece, not much more than an essay, meant to basically explicate the author's life/writing philosophy. There's a whole series of these, each with a different person's philosophy, apparently. It is followed within the same covers by a very long editorial by someone who considers himself a critic of the nature writing school of criticism, explaining why Bruchac is and isn't a nature writer. It was not very interesting. So I rather feel like I read a couple of articles on the topic of this author, and not a book by him.