100 Tricks Every Boy Can Do: A Memoir

(Paperback)

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Bret and Kim Stafford, the oldest children of the poet and pacifist William Stafford, were pals. Bret was the good son, the obedient public servant, Kim the itinerant wanderer. In this family of two parent teachers, with its intermittent celebration of talking recklessly, there was a code of silence about hard things: Why tell what hurts As childhood pleasures ebbed, this reticence took its toll on Bret, unable to reveal his troubles. Against a backdrop of the 1960s puritan in the summer of love, pacifist in the Vietnam era Bret became a casualty of his interior war and took his life in 1988. 100 Tricks Every Boy Can Do casts spells in search of the lost brother: climbing the water tower to stand naked under the moon, cowboys and Indians with real bullets, breaking into church to play a serenade for God, struggling for love, and making bail. In this book, through a brothers devotions, the lost saint teaches us about depression, the tender ancestry of violence, the quest for harmonious relations, and finally the trick of joy.

Reviews

"The style is spare and poetic, story and reflection, moving ponderously, smoothly and touchingly back and forth across time." -- Portland Book Review "Kim Stafford's moving memoir of loss and guilt about the suicide of his beloved brother, Bret, at age forty is brilliantly conceived and fascinatingly written." -- World Literature Today "Stafford's story cannot conjure up his brother's return to life, but it does perform the magic of memoir. Even when there are gaps that cannot be filled, voids that cannot be crossed, the act of telling the story can provide the 'episodic evidence' that leans 'toward understanding' and holds the broken self together." -- Western American Literature "The epigraph of 100 Tricks Every Boy Can Do is a line of Stafford's father: 'Why tell what hurts' This exquisite book is Kim Stafford's answer. It's difficult to tell what hurts, he explains, but 'the darkest things hurt more when they are not told.'" -- The Seattle Times "Then, after so many years unable to work it all out, the encouragement of a new friend led to the remembering. And remembering led to the writing of this beautiful and brave story -- a story in which Kim Stafford put his arm around his brother, once again. And as they walked together, everything was OK." -- The Eugene Register-Guard

Author Bio

Kim Stafford is a writer and teacher living in Portland, Oregon. He is the founding director of the Northwest Writing Institute, a zone for exploratory writing at Lewis & Clark College. His books include Having Everything Right: Essays of Place (Sasquatch Books), The Muses Among Us: Eloquent Listening and other Pleasures of the Writer's Craft (University of Georgia Press), A Thousand Friends of Rain: New & Selected Poems (Carnegie Mellon University Press), and Early Morning: Remembering My Father, William Stafford (Graywolf Press).