Flesh and Stones: Field Notes From a Finite World

by Jan Shoemaker

Fine writing by Midwest author..."Travelogue and family album, tour of heart and tour de force--with Flesh and Stones, we are alerted to an astonishing work in words. Jan Shoemaker crafts essays that tell the rare and contrarian facts of life with apparent ease, uncanny authenticity." --Thomas Lynch, author of The Undertaking

Genres: Memoir

176 pages, Paperback

First published October 25, 2016

About the author

Jan Shoemaker grew up in Saginaw, Michigan. Shortly after finishing her B.A. in English at Michigan State University, she moved to Seattle where she waited tables at the Pike Place Market and wrote poems while she rode ferries around Puget Sound. In the years that followed, she wrote poems while waitressing on the Maine coast and in Rhode Island. Eventually, she returned to Lansing Michigan to be closer to her family and make a career in education.

She has been teaching high school in mid-Michigan for twenty-eight years, first for the Diocese of Lansing and currently at a public high school outside the city. She sees her real imprint on her school’s curriculum in the World’s Religions class affording her students field trips to synagogues and churches and mosques, as well as a Hindu Temple, and a Buddhist monastery. She is a recipient of the Greater Lansing United Nation Association’s Loy LaSalle Award for outstanding contributions to Global Education and International Understanding. In addition to teaching, she is a part-time bookseller at independently owned and run Schuler Books in Okemos, Michigan.

Her work has been featured on public radio, anthologized, and published in many magazines and journals including River Teeth, The Sun, Fourth Genre, Colorado Review, Upstreet, and Sufi Journal. She earned an MFA at Ashland University. In 2016 her first book Flesh and Stones, Fieldnotes on a Finite World was published by the Ohio based Bottom Dog Press.

Reviews

[Maddie · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very touching and thought provoking examination about the finite nature of life, the inability to always act in accordance with our desires - even when inspired by love, and the questioning of what come next.

Disclaimer: I am related to the author =)

[Donna R · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved these essays by an author I went to school with. I wept, I laughed, I relayed. A wonderful collection of stories by a gifted author.

[Sarah M. Wells · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved reading Jan’s lyrical meditations on the finite world. She swings from heartbreaking grief to humor in a minute, essaying through raising teen to grown young women, the losing of a mother, and more. A lovely read.