Description
The Gate in the Garden Wall
essays by Sam Pickering
ISBN: 978-1-956440-10-2 paperback $19.95
ISBN: 978-1-956440-11-9 ebook $9.99
June 21, 2022
Last year Sam Pickering announced that he’d written his final word. “I intend to sit in a chair at the edge of the driveway and on sunny days doze through hours waking up occasionally to identify birds on the feeder. My hands and lap will be empty, and I won’t worry about a wind scattering papers across the yard.” Three days later Mike a college classmate wrote him. “Given all the books you have written, it makes me sad to hear that you have written your last book. Please remember what mighty things 80-year-olds can do. For instance, Goethe taught himself Greek when he was 80. Too bad he died at 81.”
“I’m trapped,” Pickering said and picked up his pencil. “Words are me.” Sam Pickering has written more than thirty books and barrows of articles. When not at his desk, he was in the classroom, the last thirty-five teaching English at the University of Connecticut. Originally from Nashville, he did not plan to teach, or write. “But,” he says, “the good life knocks a person about and takes him here and there”—in Pickering’s case to years meandering the Mid-East, Eastern and Western Europe, to Australia, and Nova Scotia, to places great and small. He says he loved teaching, the secret to which was “liking people.” His pages reflect his enjoyment of and love of life, particularly the ordinary things that form the fabric “of all our lives.”
Vicki Pickering holding Little Sammy Pickering, Big Sammy looking on beside the Reedy River in Greenville, South Carolina. (Photo by Edward Pickering)
About The World Is My Garden, too:
An inherently fascinating compilation of deftly scripted and reader engaging essays showcasing a perceptive mind and a born storyteller’s narrative style, The World Was My Garden, Too will prove to be a welcome addition to both community and academic library collections.
—Paul T. Vogel for The Midwest Book Review
from “Radioactive”
in The Gate in the Garden Wall
by Sam Pickering
“After all, these delightful gifts, discovered in nature and framed in words, are what we leave behind at the gate in the wall where the garden ends.”—THE
Sam Pickering is back with his twenty-fourth essay collection full of flowers, characters from children’s books, and quotations from the works of obscure writers such as the homily “To the Bramble Flower” by Ebenezer Elliott. The same cast of characters is here too, his children and his wife, Vicki, though the children are grown with children of their own, and Vicki as a character has grown, too, over the volumes from the one who refuses to read his books, thus missing out on what a great guy he is, into a constant source of common sense and comfort that he cannot imagine living without. His walks now are rarely solitary because she is with him, the “I” turning into “we.” He digresses on ordinary folks and oddballs whom he meets, hears from his confidant, Josh, and often includes letters, many probably written by him, to which he offers goofy replies. He still has crazy ambitions, though he has replaced the one about becoming the president of the University of Connecticut where he taught for years. He has heard instead from a fan in Iran who writes in broken English that he would like to do the impossible: translate Pickering into Persian. Pickering can’t quite shake the thought of becoming “the American essayist and college professor who, improbably, became the presiding spirit of Iranian pedagogy.” Remarkably, the books get better and better without changing much. In essay after essay, the voice remains the same: oddball, funny, outrageous, endearing, and steeped in a lifetime of reading. In all this fun, it is easy to lose sight of the simple truth that in every essay he is also as serious as death that metastasizes just under a surface of sparkling prose. Read more…
Here is a 2018 interview with Sam Pickering.
“A Little Fling and Other Essays,” a Sam Pickering reading (from the Southern Festival of Books in 1999)
kpdavis –
Sam Pickerings familiar essays are always delightful–even the melancholy ones.