Threshold: A Memoir

Our families and communities serve as the threshold we cross into our lives. Whether it’s a metaphorical threshold or the actual physical threshold that marks our front door, the crossing informs who we choose to become. This memoir is a series of twenty stories about one ordinary American family’s struggle to thrive across race and through time and space. From five-year-old Joseph Swope kidnapped and adopted by a war chief to my father blasting up U.S. Highway 41 with a turtle for a co-pilot trying to save a marriage, this memoir reveals what happens when communities fail and how they thrive. These are the stories of people who worked together and shared resources. There's the smell of wheat dust and sweat and the ozone that precedes a storm and there's the clang of green beans into a metal pot while friends and family sit on chairs dragged out into the yard where it's hard to discern the border between fireflies and stars. I can remember how safe and comfortable it was when everybody knew my name and they may not have always been glad I came, but I knew they wouldn't let me "go under." Perhaps we can retrieve that feeling in a new century.
Review: Threshold is a work that is substantial . . . in scope, ambition, stylistic polish, acumen and conviction. [It is] a sophisticated achievement . . . an excellent example of the increasingly popular genre known as creative non-fiction. Threshold is full of compelling individual portraits—the midwife Grandma Hendricks, homely George Colburn, and the uncaring doctor who commits an unforgivable atrocity . . . and portraits of individuals seeking to establish the connections that might create the community needed to enhance life beyond the survival mode . . . . It is a refined and stylistically polished work. Dr. Robert M. Luscher, author In John Updike: A Study Of The Short Fiction