The Breathless Present

At once a writer's autobiography and a road book, with vivid portraits of an unusual group of people-ranging from an early mentor and one-time neighbor, the late poet Archibald MacLeish, to world renowned jazz great Wynton Marsalis (with whose bands Carl Vigeland traveled for many years) and the author's charismatic, tormented father, also a musician-THE BREATHLESS PRESENT tells several intersecting stories in a variety of voices that mirror music's power to transmute memory and affirm life. The son of musicians, Carl Vigeland grew up in Buffalo, New York; after graduating from Harvard, he lived in Conway, where he taught school, worked on a farm, and reported for small newspapers while freelancing for several magazines. The author of six other books, he lives now in Amherst, where he teaches writing at the University of Massachusetts. Married, he is the father of three children.