Books by Steven Harvey
On writing essays:
Every morning I follow Montaigne’s footsteps down to the lapping edge
of the empty page and loosen the line on the tiny skiff of the mind. I
leave the Lord’s Prayer behind as I float free on the waters of one man’s
prayer, a prayer without petition, a meditation without mindlessness.
“What do I know?” I ask, my eyes scanning the long horizon. If I am
at the computer, the harborlight of a blinking cursor marks my way. If
not, I wait, pencil in the air, testing the winds of my next thought. An
idea takes shape at the point of utterance, and I lean forward. The
scripture of humanity begins anew the moment my uncertainty stains
the empty page.--Steven Harvey "The Empty Page"
The books:
Steven Harvey has published three books of personal essays and edited an
anthology of essays as well. For him, the personal essay is a vivid way
to explore the meaning of ordinary experience.
All of his books, described below, are still in
print and can be easily ordered at your bookstore or online at
www.amazon.com or other internet sites.
Bound for Shady Grove
University of Georgia Press (ISBN 0-8203-2197-4)
Bound for Shady Grove, the newest collection of personal
essays, describes Harvey's attempt to understand the traditional music
of the Appalachian mountains. His primary research tool was the banjo
which he learned to play as he met musicians in his adopted
home in the North Georgia mountains. The book is organized
around the ancient modes common to mountain music, the changing
modes becoming a metaphor for the shifting seasons of a life.
"This wonderful volume is a first, a sensitively written personal
reflection on the poetics and passions of mountain music. There have
been studies, collections, and histories of Appalachian music,
but now Steven Harvey, in essays attuned to the seasons of life and
musical modes, has turned our attention to the complex ways in which
fiddle tunes, ballads, and especially banjo picking can move heart
and spirit." --Art Rosenbaum
"I liked this book a lot, or as we say in the mountains, 'a
bushel and a peck and some in a gourd.'" --Zell Miller
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A Geometry of Lilies
University of South Carolina Press (ISBN 0-87249-895-6)
A Geometry of Lilies is Harvey's first book. In it he uses the
experiences of his own family to discuss what it means to live in a typical
American family cut adrift from history and tradition and transplanted far from
relatives or roots. He writes about how the American family learns to 'make do',
fashioning its own rituals and myths to celebrate life's joys and register
its losses and uses the personal essay to reveal patterns of ordinary life, the
hidden geometry of our days.
"These ten refined, luminous pieces are in the tradition of the
familiar essay, informal and urbane, with an engaging narrator who
speaks, as Montaigne did, out of everyday experiences. They are familiar
in a deeper sense as well, for they dwell on life within a family."
--Scott Russell Sanders
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Lost in Translation
University of Georgia Press (ISBN 0-8203-1890-6)
Lost in Translation, an extension and culmination of Harvey's
first book, explores the ways that we handle life's
inevitable losses. Children leave home, work evolves, we age. Such losses,
these essays say, are the leavings of our changes and the price we pay for
becoming. Some part of our true self finds voice only in such changes.
"Harvey breathes lyricism and beauty into ordinary hours. He rumages
time and place and arranges knick-knacks so that the pages exhilarate."
--Sam Pickering
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In a Dark Wood: Personal Essays by Men on Middle Age
University of Georgia Press (ISBN 0-8203-1878-7)
In addition to the books that he has written, Steven Harvey has also edited
an anthology of essays called In a Dark Wood: Personal Essays by Men on Middle Age.
Notoriously unable to show their vulnerability and express their feelings, most men
pass through the dark wood of middle age alone, needlessly trying themselve and those
near them. In this gathering of personal essays some of the genre's best writers share their
own experiences of middle age, opening up to us about such male preoccupations as love and sex,
waning powers and wasted opportunities, and wealth and happiness. Writers include Geoffrey Wolff,
Scott Russell Sanders, Franklin Burroughs, Bernard Cooper, and others.