In these fifteen personal essays, Gary Gildner comes of age at a Catholic school learning Latin, how the girls crossed their legs in algebra, and football in the school’s bomb shelter by exchanging punches with his best friend. He goes to Communist Poland to teach American literature and, in medias res, teaches the Warsaw Sparks baseball team how to win. Living in Czechoslovakia when that country is splitting in half, he learns the meaning of “Where the Dog is Buried” and fathers a daughter. Gildner writes about his Polish-German family’s immigrant story and his friendships with poet Richard Hugo and Raymond Andrews, his college roommate and the author of Baby Sweet’s and other African American novels. He writes about 9/11, stealing, meeting a cougar up close, meeting Michele, felling his barn in Idaho’s Clearwater Mountains with a crowbar, and boxing with Chuck Davey, a fellow Michigan State Spartan and one-time challenger for the World Welterweight title.
 
Essays from this collection have appeared in such venues as the New York Times Magazine, The Southern Review, and New Letters.

Gary Gildner has given readings at the 92 St. Y, Manhattan Theatre Club, Library of Congress, Shakespeare & Co. in Paris, and on the ferry crossing Lake Michigan. He’s been writer-in-residence at Reed, Davidson, and Randolph colleges, Seattle University, and Michigan State. Among his many books are two memoirs, a novel, four collections of stories and eight of poems. He is the winner of a National Magazine Award, Pushcart prizes, NEA and other fellowships, the William Carlos Williams, Theodore Roethke, and Iowa Poetry awards. He and Michele have traded the Clearwater Mountains of Idaho for the foothills of the Catalina Mountains in Arizona.