Joe Henrys' writing life
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As 2011 comes to an end, I feel a somberness lying heavy on the world. Christmas and the lights of all religions, seem to have finally dimmed for me under those timeless shadows of greed, separateness and man's inhumanity to man.
| L. A. Times Blogs (July 10, 2011) | PDF of review |
Discoveries: "Lime Creek"
A Novel by Joe Henry
Susan Salter Reynolds
Los Angeles Times
Joe Henry, a songwriter whose work has been performed by Frank Sinatra, John Denver and many others, has written his first novel in a style so spare and deep that it could almost be sung aloud by the reader. It is not so much a story, a narrative, as it is a ballad, an insight into the relationship between a father, his three sons, their mother, the horses they break and tend, and the place at the foot of the Wind River Mountains where they live, Lime Creek. Here is the father, a young man of 20, sent from his home in Wyoming to the unfamiliar East for college, walking three miles from a train station to ask the love of his life if she will marry him. Here are the three boys they raise making a fire to heat the water for their bath. Here they are learning to live with horses, learning about the cold, getting to know the land around their home. Here they are navigating the loss of their beautiful mother, remembering her hair and the way she talked to dogs. Here is their father, eating alone. With such lyrical writing, it is astonishing how little information we need to embrace the feeling of a family we will never forget.
| L. A. Times (July 10, 2011) | PDF of review |
Henry's debut novel is like his songwriting --
lyrical and fine story telling
Jesse Coffey
Lexington Literature Examiner
Joe Henry may be a songwriter by trade but he's definitely a master storyteller and he's got a definite hit on his hands with his debut novel, Lime Creek.
Henry has written lyrics for some of the industry greats, most notably--well, to me anyway because I'm such a big fan--the late singers Frank Sinatra and John Denver. The two crafted some of Denver's greatest songs. And at long last, Joe Henry has taken that gentle, casual style of lyric writing and put it into his prose.
Lime Creek is a series of verbal tableaus that paint the stories of a family as they go through their lives. Henry explores those lives carefully and poetically and the pictures are rich and moving.
We meet Spencer who falls in love at first sight with the vacationing, lovely Elizabeth, telling his mother that he's met the woman that he wants to marry. He follows her back East where she lives and he's attending college. He marries her in true romantic, poor college student form. They come back to Wyoming to create a horse farm and raise three boys--Lonnie, Luke, and Whitney.
We watch the boys grow up and become men, having their own lives and learning about each other and the man they call Father, Papa, Dad.
The relationships are complicated and yet so beautiful and touching. Henry's prose puts you in the time and place. His own experiences of raising horses in Wyoming adds texture to the story. His songwriting ability is what makes this so poetic, from the way Spencer talks to the way he describes the land and the horses.
The pacing is perfect. You never linger in one "place" long enough to get bored. Each "chapter" shows another aspect of the characters. The dialogue is perfect; reading along, you can almost hear each character's speaking voice as they talk to each other. These people are so real, you feel as if you know them personally.
This is a marvelous character piece, with amazing characters and a riveting story line. For a debut novel, Joe Henry's Lime Creek is a masterpiece.
| Lexington Literature Examiner (June 29, 2011) | PDF of review |
Aspen meets Joe Henry,
neighbor and novelist
Andrew Travers
Aspen Daily News
Joe Henry spent an hour on stage Monday, most of it with his eyes closed and his hands folded motionlessly in his lap.
It was Henry's first foray into public speaking in Aspen. He has lived in the Valley for nearly four decades, solitarily writing in a cabin beside the Roaring Fork River. His first novel, "Lime Creek," was published last week by Random House.
At Monday's event at the Aspen Institute, which kicked off the Aspen Writers' Foundation's 35th annual Summer Words Literary Festival, Henry had his friend, the actor Anthony Zerbe, read aloud from the book to 100-some festival attendees.
Henry opened his eyes and answered questions from the audience for about 10 minutes.
"I'd actually like to hear four sentences strung together," Zerbe prodded the soft-spoken and reclusive writer.
Zerbe, whose acting credits include playing the villain in the James Bond film "License to Kill," gave an animated reading of Henry's evocative prose, going through two full chapters from the novel-in-stories. It brought some chuckles and ahhs from the audience of locals, world authors and festival workshop students — but mostly it elicited an attentive silence.
The reading left at least one attendee, Annie Denver, wife of the late John Denver, in tears. Henry co-wrote songs with Denver through the height of his career, and moved to Aspen at the legendary folk singer's urging, in 1974.
In his brief remarks, Henry spoke bluntly about his devotion to his art, about writing through the night, every night, alone in a writing room he calls "the box," throughout the winters beside the river.
"My nature is much closer to an animal than a human," he explained, "in that I've never felt I had choices. It's not like it [writing] came from ambition, or even motivation. It was something I needed to do. It's breathing."
And after decades writing alone, Henry dispelled any notions of magic or glamour in the process of creating fiction.
"Writing is about one thing," he said, paraphrasing screenwriter William Goldman. "Going into a room and doing it."
Henry also may have ruffled some feathers among the tuition-paying festival students when he told them he believed writers cannot be taught the craft.
"I think you can't really learn to be an artist," he said, telling of his disaffection with workshops he attended at the University of Iowa's prestigious creative writing program. "It's a facility that's given to us or not. You can learn to improve what you have if you have it, but you can't go to school to learn it."
Yet Henry appeared to be a hit. The festival's on-site bookstore sold out every copy of "Lime Creek" on hand, and a line to have Henry sign it snaked through the lobby of the Aspen Institute's Doerr-Hosier building long after his presentation.
In an interview last week, Henry spoke about the abrupt shift of moving out of his very private world to share his work and himself with readers.
"It's a new reality," he said.
The pages that became "Lime Creek" were taken to a literary agent by a local friend of Henry's, despite his reluctance to share them.
The writing unexpectedly set off a bidding war among 10 publishing houses, with Random House winning out.
Henry said the act of writing itself has driven him, not any expectations of literary fame or even publication.
"I have faith in my work but I never presumed something was going to happen," he said. "I just felt it was good enough to speak to people ... The writing owns me. It really is my master and I have no choice in the matter."
Over the last few decades, his largely unseen work and his solitary existence have grown to mythic proportions around Aspen. Henry is rumored to have penned thousands of hand-written pages. "Lime Creek," culled from that expansive output, is an elegant work, coming in at 160 pages.
The book contains eight linked stories about a ranching family. The writing is mostly terse and pathos-rich, building to moments where Henry lets his poet's pen loose in gorgeous, lyrical and sparsely-punctuated paragraphs that will quicken the pace of any lover of the English language.
In those moments, and there are many of them in this slim book, Henry transcends any staid notions of "western writing." Yes, there are stories about the messy birth of a foal, the heart-wrenching death of a beloved mare, the crossing over into manhood of a young ranch-hand stranded horseless in a sub-zero snowstorm.
But the subtle ambition of "Lime Creek" is to chart the maddeningly rough-cut pathways of the human heart, their poignant intersections where fear meets courage, and where longing turns either to loss or love. In its best moments, this book does for the world of tack and horseshoes what Tim O'Brien did for war stories — elevating them beyond time or place or genre.
"Everything is universal," Henry said last week. "Nobody can create new human emotions that have never been felt before. So every one of us, in the end, is the same."
Asked about his local reputation as a Salinger-esque hermitted genius, Henry said he was genuinely surprised that anyone knew he was a writer, or even living here.
Often for months at a time while he's writing, he said, the only person he interacts with is the clerk at the post office or the fellow weight-lifters at his gym.
He writes by pencil, purging the stories in his head in a flood of unpunctuated prose. He revises, he said, by going back and typing his work on an old Selectric typewriter, then reading it aloud to himself until it sounds right. A quiet Luddite, he doesn't use a computer or a cell phone.
In recent years, Henry has spent his summers in Los Angeles, New York and Nashville, working with musicians as a songwriter. Since John Denver's untimely death, he's partnered with the likes of Garth Brooks and Rascal Flats writing songs.
He was living in Los Angeles in the early '70s, and working with Denver when he made the move to Colorado. As Henry tells it, he was planning a retreat back to Wyoming where "Lime Creek" is set.
"I had never heard of Aspen," he recalled. "But I said to John, 'I really have to get back to the mountains. Are there any mountains there?' He laughed and he said, 'Come look.' I've been here ever since."
His first brush with fame came in the mid-'70s, when a Newsweek magazine reporter, in a cover story about John Denver, described Henry as Denver's writing partner and a "sensitive cowboy poet."
Henry recalled going into the Aspen Ice Garden afterward, to play in a club hockey game, as he used to, and meeting his surprised local teammates.
"When I came into the locker room, 20 guys started screaming, 'Here comes the sensitive cowboy poet!,'" he laughed. "None of them had ever known I was a songwriter."
Such exposure has been rare for Henry. A former boxer and minor league hockey player who spent his young life breaking horses and bones, he retreated to write poetry and fiction in the Roaring Fork Valley in his early 30s, as his beaten body took him off of the ice rink and out of the boxing ring.
"As closed off as I try to stay in the physical world, I lay the whole thing out on paper," he said. "I'm sure that's probably a function for a lot of artists, that catharsis."
Though Aspen still may not get to know Joe Henry himself, many who've picked up "Lime Creek" are hoping he'll share more of his work in the future.
Zerbe, to whom the book is co-dedicated, promised Monday's audience that many more books of prose and poetry Henry has crafted in his local sanctuary will make it onto their bookshelves.
"This is the very first we've heard from him," Zerbe teased, "but we are going to hear a lot from him down the line."
| Aspen Daily News (June 21, 2011) | PDF of review |
'Lime Creek' is warmly mischievous, lyrical and enticing
John Colson
Aspen Times
Woody Creek writer Joe Henry's newly released novel, Lime Creek (Random House, $24 suggested retail), was at once a welcome arrival in my mailbox and a bit of a surprise in its brevity and slim profile.
That is because I'd been hearing about the book for years as Henry labored on it, and had enjoyed periodic stage productions of "A Lime Creek Christmas," adapted from the book by Henry and his friend, actor Anthony Zerbe.
I was expecting a tome, a much thicker work that would consume weeks of intensive reading.
What i got was a slender volume, eight chapters of glowingly deep prose, sometimes volcanic as it surges from the page and leads the reader through episodes of the lives of a modern Wyoming ranching family in the early 20th century.
The physical aspects of the book are deceptive, though. Easily devoured in a few days of occasional reading, Henry's depiction of the lives and times of rancher Spencer Davis, his wife and two sons is riveting in its spareness, its emotional gravity, and its blending of pathos and humor.
And it draws the reader back for successive visits, evoking a need to plumb the depths of this family's trials, tribulations and triumphs in the high basins backing up to the Wind River Mountains.
The opening chapter rolls out at the reader like those very basins, starting with a glimpse of Davis at his favorite pastime, breaking "rough stock" horses in a corral at a neighbor's ranch.
As he gentles and befriends a young colt, the 20-year old cowboy also encounters the daughter of the family that owns the ranch, a year younger than he is. Right there, that day, he decides to marry her, and he wins her agreement later that year while they are both attending colleges in the East.
Before the chapter ends, they have eloped, and wedded in a New York town named Valhalla (it is a real town, by the way) because Davis can't quite absorb what he is about to do and has heard that Valhalla is "where they take the dead heroes."
The wedding is performed by a justice of the peace, who holds up a trial of a trucker who has fatally run over a local woman to accommodate Davis and his bride.
The ceremony takes place with what seems like the entire town sitting as witnesses, and provides an odd but touching counterpoint to the proceedings that have been interrupted, something that the reader grasps along with the justice of the peace and the townsfolk themselves.
From this warmly mischievous beginning, this lyrical and enticing novel moves with Davis and his family through the years, a kind of narrative river that is glimpsed only every now and then by the reader, as if we are traveling on a road running parallel through rolling countryside next to that river.
We catch the two boys, Luke and Whitney, as they mature and change, undergo harrowing moments that occur to all those who live the ranching life, and deal with their inner struggles against the constrictions of their father's love, combined with the fear of losing the feeling of safety that comes with that love.
We observe, with a mixture of sorrow, awe and understanding, as a beloved mare is put down after a full and useful life.
And even as we move with the family as they experience losses and triumphs, we also move with Henry himself as he explores his own feelings about the scenes he is describing and about the lifestyle, the strengths, the pride and humility of the people we encounter.
This is not, strictly speaking, a slice-of-life book. Rather, it amounts to a series of helpings from a strong gumbo of life, endlessly bubbling in a pot warmed by the flames of existence.
It is a very satisfying stew.
| Aspen Times (June 20, 2011) | PDF of review |
Mountain Time
Internationally-renowned, award-winning songwriter Joe Henry
publishes his first novel – 20 years in the making
Erik Philbrook
Playback Magazine
Having thrived as a songwriter for much of his life, providing lyrics for well over a hundred recordings by a wide range of artists, from Frank Sinatra and John Denver (with whom he wrote 18 songs) to Olivia Newton-John, Roberta Flack, Garth Brooks, Rascal Flatts and many others, Joe Henry is about to become a first time novelist. It's a moment many years in the making. Although as a younger man he received his MFA from the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop, where his classmate was John Irving and his teacher Kurt Vonnegut, his fiction- writing career was kept at bay while Henry, well, lived -- working around the country as a laborer, rancher, a professional athlete and as a lyricist.
Inspired by his personal experiences living and working in Wyoming and Colorado, Lime Creek (Random House) tells the story of the Davises, a twentieth-century ranch family living a sometimes harsh, sometimes heartbreakingly beautiful life in the West. True to his often naturalistic, inspirational and always deeply emotional songwriting style, Henry has created a novel akin to beholding the Rocky Mountains themselves – an awe-inspiring experience that quiets the mind and stirs the soul. That he does so with prose that evokes such masterful writers as William Faulkner and Raymond Carver is a testament to his remarkable literary gifts. Lime Creek has already garnered praise from one of the great western authors of our time, Larry McMurtry (Lonesome Dove), who said, "Lime Creek is a wonderful book, subtle in texture, rich in sorrow. I hope it gets the readers it deserves."
From his home in western Colorado, Henry spoke to Playback about publishing his long-in-the-works novel.
What was your ambition in writing this novel?
It never had anything to do with ambition. In my head was a voice that said, "Start writing your novel." But then the animal part of me says, "Yeah, but you're not going to be here long enough to finish it, so why waste your time." One of my failings, I guess, as a human anyway, is that I've never been able to look much further than the day I'm in.
So it just never happened. But it was always hanging over me. Then one year, on one of my "decade birthdays," I made my annual trek to my favorite mountain, which is about 60 miles from where I've lived all these years. It's a little less than 14,000 feet high, and on those big birthdays I've always climbed that mountain. My birthday is in the spring so it's in the middle of a really heavy snow time.
I've never had a tent, so I would dig a hole in the snow and spend the night in that hole, and then finish climbing the mountain the next day. On this one particular birthday up on that mountain, the weather turned real bad and I knew I was probably not going to live to see the dawn. It was very bad. But when the first light finally came and I knew I was going to make it, I told myself, "If I get down, I only have two choices when I get home: I either jump in the river (by my house) and drown, or I start writing this novel."
And so I did get home and I didn't jump in the river. I went to sleep. When I woke up, I started writing.
How did you divide your time between songwriting and writing your novel?
I've always split my creative life between writing the manuscript in winter and then in the summer being strictly a songwriter, a lyricist, trying to get with people whose music inspires me, in New York and LA and Nashville. Sometime during the third winter of writing on my manuscript, I realized that where I had started was probably going to be the end of the whole story. And so it took me another 20 years to get back to the beginning of that ending.
What kept you motivated to work on something for so many years?
I never really had a choice. I've had two masters all these years. One's my body -- I've never stopped working-out. And the other is my soul -- I've never stopped writing. And no matter what the state of my health is, I have no choice but to be in the gym when I'm supposed to be. And no choice but to show up for work with my pencil every night.
That's admirable.
But it's not. It's like looking at a dog and saying, "it's really admirable that you're a dog." I have no choice and so I can't really take any credit. I just give thanks for what I've been given and I try to do the best I can with it.
You've worked on this book for so long. Is it hard for you to believe that it's truly completed?
I didn't realize how soon the physical book would be finished. I don't use a computer, so I asked a friend of mine to send an email to Random House to see if there was any possible way to still make three little last changes to the manuscript. I even said that if I have to pay a stiff penalty to make those changes, I'd gladly pay it. Meanwhile, I'm dealing with the river. I live eight feet from the one river that comes out of the mountains where I live, and we've had a big winter this year, with a great deal of snowfall that still hasn't begun to melt. When that snow begins to go, the river can become dangerous. And so on that same day that I had requested those final changes to my book, I'd had 60 sandbags trucked to my house. I'm outside unloading sandbags and piling them against the side that faces the river. When I finished and came back around front, I saw that I had missed the FedEx guy, who'd left a package on my doorstep from Random House, which I opened. And it was my first book.
Tell me how your writing career began.
I had an athletic scholarship to play ice hockey in college. I was a clean player, but with a very short fuse. If someone got me with a dirty play, usually my response was quick and to the point, so to speak. This one afternoon, before having to play that night, I could just feel that something was gonna happen. I was sitting at my desk with a pencil and an open notebook in front of me, and without thinking, I just started to write. I wrote without stopping for over two hours, and when I put the pencil down I felt as drained as if I'd just been in a fight. And so that was a big discovery for me. And I just kept writing.
When did you first start writing lyrics for songs?
After graduate school, with an MFA degree with honors and about $3.00 to my name, I ended up working underground in the mines in South Dakota. On my job application, I marked down an eighth-grade education. At the end of that summer, I drove East to caretake someone's estate and 6 dogs, and to play on a semi-pro hockey team. On the way, I had to go through the town where an old friend lived, and I told her I'd stop by to say hello. I thought if I got there about 9 o'clock, I could say hello and be on my way. After she had put her baby to bet, we were talking in the living room while her husband sat on the couch playing his guitar. I'd never met him before.
He kept playing the same melody over and over until I finally said, "What's that song you're playing? It's really beautiful." He said, "Oh, it's just something I made up." I grabbed a magazine off the table and a ballpoint pen and ran up into their attic. About 20 minutes later, I came back down with 8 or 9 verses to that melody, and he went nuts. I ended up staying there for 10 days. Every night his wife would go to bed with the baby, and he'd play something, and I'd go up in the attic and write words to it. So that was how my songwriting started.
When did songwriting become your bread and butter in earnest?
After a bunch of twists and turns, I ended up about a year after graduate school in New York and in a professional boxing stable. They had one guy for each weight division. I was the light-heavyweight (still am). And the only rookie too. And so for about a year, my whole life was either in the ring or preparing to get in the ring.
I think that every human life has specific moments that are pivotal, that will affect that life for its duration. I had broken my nose 9 or 10 times playing hockey and fighting. Before my third nose operation, hopefully to improve my breathing, the surgeon had told me that my fighting days were over. When I woke up in that room in Lenox Hill Hospital, my first music publisher was sitting there waiting for me to open my eyes. And when I did, he had an open Billboard magazine that he placed on my chest with a full-page ad for the first record that had my lyrics on it. So in that moment, my life of athletic violence ended at the same time that my songwriting career began.
How did you and John Denver begin writing together?
I'd been running a cattle ranch in Arizona, and I'd been writing with someone in the Kingston Trio who was a friend of John's. They would talk off and on and the friend would mention me. When John came to Arizona to give a concert, we met. A year later, I'm working on a construction gang in L.A. A publisher friend had told me he wanted me to work with some of his writers before possibly signing me. One evening after working on a jackhammer all day, I'm writing with this guy and when he goes to the men's room, I call my answering service. There's a message to call the Kingston Trio guy at this L.A. number. He tells me he's in the studio with John, who's recording his new album, and John would like me to stop by. My co-writer has returned and he asks me what that was all about and I tell him. He says, "You're going, aren't you?" And I say that I was in a recording-studio once and couldn't have been any more out of place. He begs me to go and take him, because he's a club singer and his whole repertoire is James Taylor and John Denver songs. And RCA just happens to be two blocks away.
We go over and open the door into the console room just as John begins to sing on the other side of the glass. I've got my hardhat under my arm, I haven't shaven all week, and my t-shirt's torn. The head of RCA and John's manager and publisher and producer and his wife and it seems enough people to fill that little room all turn as two of them move to throw us out — just as John starts to sing. He sings the same verse twice and comes into the console room and waves at us as his producer says, "You need another verse if this song is gonna be on this album." And John says, "I've been trying but I don't know what to say." They leave for dinner, and I can't get John's melody out of my mind, until I write some words on the paper shopping-bag that's next to me as I drive. I type them up and go back and leave the paper on the console. I come back later that night and John says, "Hey Joe, we just recorded your song."
How would you define your relationship with John?
We had a real creative brotherhood. In all these years, I've had about 5 or 6 incredible collaborations where every time I'd get in a room with that person, something good would happen. But the most amazing collaboration was with John, because everything we did was nearly instantaneous. There was hardly any working on it. He loved to write to my lyrics. We'd usually talk about something and then split up, and that night a lyric would come out of me. I'd bring it back and he'd pick up the guitar, and an hour later we'd have a song.
Can you talk about the theatrical productions of Lime Creek that you've done over the years?
This book, Lime Creek, is dedicated to Roscoe Lee Browne and Anthony Zerbe. From the first time that they ever saw my (non-lyrical) work, they were taken with it. They did a wonderful theatrical presentation of world literature, called "Behind the Broken Words," for over 30 years, and eventually they started to include a selection from Lime Creek in their show, the only selection from an unknown writer. They would do writers like Dylan Thomas and Edna St. Vincent Millay and Yeats and E. E. Cummings and T. S. Eliot, people you studied in school, and then this one unknown author, Joe Henry.
Whenever Roscoe would give a reading someplace, he would always include material from this unknown poet, he'd call me, and Anthony would do the same. Anthony was the director of a new play festival in upstate New York, and as I was in the midst of one of those really fruitful musical collaborations, Anthony said that he wanted to try an evening of pieces from my manuscript along with some of the songs that I'd been writing. So that was the first stage presentation. And it evolved into what he called, "Prelude to Lime Creek." He named it that because in his mind he figured that some day he would be reading my work and a book publisher would leap up and say, "I will publish what you're reading." That actually happened the very first time, with Roscoe reading some of my early work that got George Plimpton all excited, but the Paris Review never closed the deal.
How did the songs figure into the theatrical work?
Originally, the songs that were used were always incidental, but they would be positioned so that they would still in some way add to the dramatic pieces. When the show was bound for the Denver Theatre Center, which is a big complex like Lincoln Center, Gary Burr and I wrote a series of new songs to support somehow each of these dramatic pieces. But we wrote them as if they'd be stand-alone songs, so you wouldn't have to know that they were directed toward something.
That "Prelude to Lime Creek" performance was really special and sold-out the theater for over a month. The theater people told us that it was one of the only times that people were coming up to the box office and saying that they were coming back for the third time. The other presentation that Anthony devised was around two stories that are both in this new book of mine. That performance is called, "Lime Creek Christmas." Anthony did it for a couple of years with John Denver, and then for a couple of years with Garth Brooks. Garth and Anthony did it a number of years ago with Beth Nielsen Chapman, at the Grand Ole Opry.
Have the songs that were written for these theatrical productions ever been released?
None of the Gary Burr songs have been cut, but the Denver Center told us that audiences kept asking for them. Eventually Gary went into the studio with his band and cut a CD. It was only sold at the theater that time, but I was told that somebody bought a copy online for about 200 bucks recently, and wrote a review saying how much he loved having it because the original that he'd had had gotten so scarred up from passing it around.
Were they all original songs written for the production?
The "Prelude" songs were, but "Lime Creek Christmas" includes one song I wrote with John Denver, A Baby Just Like You, which we wrote for Frank Sinatra, at his request, and he put it out as a single. There's also the song that I co-wrote that closed the Atlanta Olympics, called The Flame. And then when Garth did the show, we added Belleau Wood, which Garth and I wrote together about Christmas Eve on the battlefield, and it pretty much brought the house down.
Would you ever want to release these songs as a collection associated with the book?
Oh yeah. We thought that with all the Christmas packages that come out, it would be truly unique to release a recording that had Anthony reading these stories and a female and male artist do the songs. I'm not really aware of very many things that are both spoken-word and music together, but we've always thought that it could be a great Christmas recording. But I don't really seem to pursue the business side of things. I pursue the writing.
| Playback Magazine (June 15, 2011) | PDF of review |
Kindness, Faith and Humanity
Nancy Chuda
Huffington Post
I couldn’t put this book down. Not for a minute. In a world in which
tattered souls live amongst endless garbage and recycled news predicting
gloom for the planet, Joe Henry’s LIME CREEK comes as a breath of life
and light, casting long-remembered shadows of the “firsts” in our lives
while becoming a mantra for human kindness and time spent reconnecting
with what we have lost, including man’s oneness with nature and all
living things.
Set amidst the blinding snow storms and cold of Wyoming’s high country,
LIME CREEK is a Faulkneresque glimpse into the lives of a family of people
committed to solidarity, simplicity, and a respect for life. The story
centers around Spencer Davis and his sons. Henry captures the intimacy and
connectedness of their harsh outer lives that draw them even closer
together as they all bear witness to the eternal cycles of life and death;
where the reveries of innocence trumpet the hard edges of experience.
Spencer’s stoicism commands respect, while at the same time he is humbled
by the birth of a new foal or just the dawn of a new day. Family, for
Henry, emerges from out of the lightness of being human and from out of
the need of a lantern burning on a porch somewhere between heaven and
earth. Trust begins in the place Henry calls home.
As a knowing observer, Henry writes about witnessing the last breath of a
beloved animal’s life and the lessons learned from a childhood tomato
fight where a father’s love overrides his instincts as a disciplinarian.
How beautiful the sense of longing for what is maternal; not as human, but
as rock. LIME CREEK is about the river of life that both nourishes the
roots at the same time that it reveals the longing for something to hold
on to- Roots that hang on with grace and dignity and time well spent.
Like Thoreau’s, WALDEN, LIME CREEK pays tribute to the very nature of man.
Thoreau wrote: “Spring always convinced him he could live forever on the
lavish bounty of God. God was good: he knew because he listened to the
song of God in the woods. Joe Henry hears the godliness and the holiness
from which his words are fashioned. An act of kindness in faith and for
humanity.
| LuxEcoLiving.com (June 11, 2011) | PDF of review |
Library Journal—Starred Review
This first novel from noted lyricist Henry opens with a young man named Spencer gentling a two-year-old bay colt, watched closely by the woman he’ll eventually marry. It ends powerfully with Spencer’s son showing his stuff when he’s caught in a blizzard and must recapture a horse that has fled the barn, spooked by sliding snow. In between, told in heart-wrenchingly beautiful prose, we find the story of a Wyoming ranch family sometime in the 20th century. We see Spencer, out east at Harvard, diffidently wooing and eventually bringing home the sweetheart whose family summered in Wyoming. We see Spencer’s twin boys getting into serious mischief with a bunch of tomatoes. We see a lovingly described Christmas celebration in a barn and the struggle to save cattle as the terrible snows come, with Spencer uncharacteristically caustic as he tells his queasy children about a much darker, colder, and scarier time he spent in the army. And in the end, unfolding in discrete and carefully observed chapters, we have the whole picture of these touching, hard-earned lives. Brief but brilliant in the spirit of Paul Harding’s Tinkers, this remarkable work is highly recommended.
| LIbrary Journal (March 15, 2011) | PDF of review |