boneyard

by Stephen Beachy

In this unusual “collaborative novel,” Jake Yoder, a precocious boy caught between Amish culture and the modern world, sits in his middle-school classroom writing stories at the behest of a stern but charismatic teacher. Jake's stories feature children who are crushed, imprisoned, and distorted, and yet somehow flailing around with a kind of bedazzled awe, trying to find a way out. His characters wander through Amish farms, one-room schoolhouses, South American plains, mental institutions, exotic cities, and prisons; his sentences seem constructed to the beat of an obsessive internal rhythm, and his prose is often haunting and beautiful. The strange logic and disturbing shifts in Jake’s tales reveal a young boy processing intense emotional experiences in the wake of his mother's suicide and his own proximity to the schoolroom shootings at Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania, in 2006. Jake imagines fantastic journeys, magical transformations, and rock stardom as alternatives, it seems, to his own grim reality and the limitations of his life among the Amish. Novelist Stephen Beachy frames Jake's work with commentary from both himself and editor Judith Owsley Brown, in which they offer their very different views on Amish culture, literary context, the use of psychoactive medications for children, Stephen's own mental health, and the reality of Jake Yoder's unverified existence.

Genres: Fiction

300 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2011

About the author

Stephen Beachy is a writer. He was born in Des Moines, Iowa, in 1965. His first novel, The Whistling Song, was published by W. W. Norton with cover illustrations by Curt Kirkwood in 1991 and his second, Distortion, by Harrington Park Press, in 2000. Two novellas, Some Phantom and No Time Flat were published in 2006, from Suspect Thoughts Press. His fiction has been published in BOMB, Chicago Review, Blithe House Quarterly, SHADE, and various anthologies. He has written literary criticism for the San Francisco Bay Guardian.

In October, 2005, he published an article in New York Magazine, exposing the writer JT LeRoy as the concoction of a woman named Laura Albert, with the help of her family members.

Beachy teaches in the MFA Program at the University of San Francisco.

Beachy is also a second cousin of biologist Philip Beachy and historian Robert Beachy.

Reviews

[Isabel Padilla]

I’ve learned on this that the US used to put pictures of missing kids on milk cartons? What

[Lewis Buzbee]

i've long been a huge fan of beachy's work, and this is certainly his most stunning novel yet. i can't even begin to tell you about all the twists and turns and layers of reality in this book, it's so complex. but it also reads like a dream, clear and vivid and haunting. it's a brilliant, hypnotic, kaleidoscope look at america and its children, and you'll never see the world the same again. i think it may be a work of genius. prepare yourself. oh, and it's hilarious, too.

[Craig Laurance]

The novel boneyard by Stephen Beachy is a dense postmodern prose poem/meditation on murder, missing children, being Amish, being, personhood, rock and roll stardom, the role of the Author, creativity and dreams. It’s funny and bleak, surreal and erudite, crude and drenched in dream logic. It’s a labyrinth.

Lovers of surrealist fiction should check it out.

[Charles]

Brilliant. Shimmering. The collapse of untenable frames.

[James Pinakis]

abandoned

[Colette]

Beachy has a brilliant dark perspective of the world. I loved its trance-like qualities and would read anything he wrote.

[Daniel]

An amazing, crazy Mennonite novel about bondage and rock music.