The Church of One Life: A Memoir in Story, Lyric Essay, Letters, & Poems is a fragmented memoir comprised of many sections in different literary forms: narratives, lyric essays, letters (some acting as hermit crab essays), and poems. These work together to create a whole picture of one person's life and times seen as part of our shared oneness in our one-shot lives filled with choices and their consequences.
Family, friends, strangers, travel, tears, trees, racism, sex, faith, death, meteors, absence, presence, slime mold, and other hymns to being all find their place in this book. These stories and meditations present a mosaic of one life in the second half of the 20th century and into the 21st. They offers an invitation for readers to recognize their own ways of wonder, gratitude, and reckoning with challenges facing both our individual lives and our society.
Sections of the book tell stories of family of origin, relationships, and parenting, reflections on griefs and loss, wonder at the natural world, growing understandings about sexuality and race, church life, travel, and witness to social justice issues.
Readers of memoir, lyric essay, epistolary writing, and poetry will enjoy how these element work together to create an authentic, vulnerable, often humorous telling of one life's relationships, wonder, and witness to challenges and always possibilities.
