As one of Bill Roorbach's former students, I can assure readers that his is, indeed, a fantasic teacher of literature and creative writing; Writing Life Stories is true to Bill's teaching style and spirit. WLS offers aspiring writers of all experience levels the practical lessons and exercises that will help to uncover the depth and beauty in the life stories of everyday people.

Bill Roorbach is a terrific teacher. WRITING LIFE STORIES is a clear, step-by-step writing class with excellent exercises, covering all the elements of good writing, including characters, description, details, metaphor, and some basic considerations about doing research. It offers suggestions for overcoming hesitation about writing personal material as well as explanations of typical beginning writing errors, which are often made by experienced, published writers. The examples from people who participated in his memoir classes are encouraging and touching.

Roorbach knows how hard it is to write about those parts of our lives that are most embarrassing, those family secrets we were warned not to tell to anyone. He says, "Are we going to write the sanitized versions with which we and our families face the world, or are we going to write the truth? Are we going to flinch when the subtle stuff arrives in the course of writing? Or are we going to stare it down? Probably, if you're like me, you're going to flinch. At least in the first drafts. And those places where you do so will be the places that hold your essay back, the places where your essay is dying to teach you something."

This book is organized and indexed (thank you!) and the author reminds us of the importance of regular reading. A list of suggested titles to inspire and challenge you is at the end of the book.

Sprinkled with humor and wit, WRITING LIFE STORIES is an excellent addition to any writer's library and makes a wonderful text for any basic writing class, including fiction. Buy this book and do the course on your own, letting your words flow before you allow your inner editor to review the work critically.

~~Joan Mazza, author of DREAM BACK YOUR LIFE; DREAMING YOUR REAL SELF; WHO'S CRAZY ANYWAY; THINGS THAT TICK ME OFF; and EXPLORING YOUR SEXUAL SELF (May 2001) in The Guided Journal Series with Writer's Digest Books.

Bill Roorbach accomplishes something difficult in this book; he gives the reader the feeling she is actually IN his workshop, learning among other writers. His exercises are surprisingly interesting, and unintimidating. They led me to some unexpected places with my writing. He also has a terrific sense of humor and a down to earth wisdom about writing and life. The bibliography at the end, of creative non-fiction works, is a treasure. The book is indispensible for any serious writers.

I would easily put this book among the best that I have ever read. The images that Roorbach uses keep coming back to me even though it has been well over a year since I read it. The honesty of his writing is amazing, and there were many, many times that I had to pause because the emotional descriptions were so true. Read this book-- by the end you will feel like an old friend at Roorbach's wedding, and you will be glad not to have missed it.

This memoir records the struggles of a young writer trying to find his literary voice by portraying his distraction, frustrations, and devotions to his art through his adventures with his future wife as they encounter a variety of people and animals--turkeys, turtles, hummingbirds, and bluefishes--in many beautiful natural environments. Their adventures are always fascinating andamusing, and, at times, exciting.

This book is a paper plane, it will take you away. From the first page, Bill Roorbach takes us on a wonderful journey during a time of his life, when he first meets his wife Juliet in Martha's Vineyard. It becomes a wonderful, weird, chaotic time for both. This book will make you honestly laugh out loud, and shake your head in disbelief, at the experiences and adventures that these two people take on. It is filled with nature in all it's glory, and sometimes not so glorious. This is a man that writes the way we think. The conversations that he has with himself are so lively, and funny that you will want to shake his hand heartily and say "Yes, Yes, I know just what you mean" Read it, it's worth every word.

This is another great book from Bill Roorbach adding to his SUMMERS WITH JULIET and WRITING LIFE STORIES. Roorbach writes with masculine vigor without being macho. His empathy for the elderly equals his concern for normal people with lonely hearts. He is a romantic through and through. After reading BIG BEND, you want to read everything this brilliant and sympathetic author puts out. Read this and watch for more.

I read this wonderful collection of stories with a sense of absolute delight. Bill Roorbach knows the secret desires in the hearts of all his befuddled, passionate men. In "Fog," he enters the world of a boy's first romantic love and makes it surprising and new, erotic and terrifying, thrilling and funny: "Then she wanted to know how it felt and I wanted to know how she felt and we said tingling and bursting, the same for both of us, almost hurtful, and she said, 'Love you.' Which I tried to say, too, but it came out just like the vowel sounds in English class." The remarkable "Taughannock Falls" has the sweep and complexity of a full novel, though it fills only thirteen pages. Two middle-aged men, estranged since one married the other's girlfriend twenty years earlier, re-enter each other's lives under extraordinary circumstances: Stephen has fallen into a mysterious catatonic state, and Bob believes he might be the only one with enough knowledge, love, anger, and desire to pull him out again. "Not a movement from my old friend. Not a blink of the eye, not a nod of the head, not a tear on the cheek, not a tap of the foot, not a twitch of the lip. He looks tremendous--healthy and wise, clean and brave, courteous and kind." When Stephen finally snaps open, he is a bursting boy, delivered not into the present, not into his handsome, forty-five-year-old body--but tossed backward into the life he left in his twenties, into a time when no love surpasses the manic joy he feels with his friend "Bobbo." What amazes me about all the stories in this collection is Bill Roorbach's vision of grace. There's a fast heat on the surface of every tale, a love of language that is playful and exact. The levity, the crisp dialogue, the sharp sting of interior revelation, all serve as counterpoints to quiet explorations of mercy and forgiveness, tenderness and compassion. The title piece is a tour de force that pushes Bill Roorbach's enormous talents as a storyteller to their limits. Dennis Hunter--wealthy, widowed, seventy-four years old and still bound by love to his wife Betty--is an unlikely candidate for a job with the United States Forest Service that pays just above minimum wage. And he's an even more unlikely candidate for a troubling, giddy, unavoidable attachment to a married woman in her forties who watches birds and weighs as much as he does. But Mr. Roorbach is a writer who knows and celebrates love at every age, in every marvelous incarnation. These two will swim the River of Ghosts to make love in Mexico where Martha believes she won't be breaking a parting promise to her husband, a vow "not to mess around with any man in Texas." This isn't an easy moment physically or spritually, and Dennis Hunter, besieged by desire, never lets us forget the moral complexities, the fear, or the wonder. "She was forty-seven and married and standing waist deep and naked in the Rio Grande not twenty feet from Mexico. Dennis felt her gaze . . . and followed Martha, climbed in the river after her . . . he was being swept away in the current, pictured himself washed up on a flat rock dead and naked miles downstream. But Martha got hold of his hand laughing and they stood waist deep together in the stream rushing past, silty, sweetly warm water." This collection is pure pleasure for all the senses, a balm for the spirit, an immersion in a world where passion is the greatest risk and love the only certain path to rapture and redemption.

This is an amazing book--you get all the best of nonfiction, and not just some little area some scholar or writer thinks is creative nonfiction. Roorbach is inclusive without being soft-the selections are just great writing, some of it shocking, even. And his introductions are so smart, funny, and on the money. I first got the book for a class--but it changed my life and my reading habits utterly. Enjoy!

It's exciting to find so many of Bill Roorbach's essays collected finally into one volume. I have loved reading his work in various journals and magazines; reading them again here, along with essays I'd never read, is such a satisfying experience.

I found myself laughing out loud on the subway reading the first essay, "Honeymoon," as Roorbach described some of the challenges of comunicating in France. "Into Woods," the title essay, is one of my favorites. It was an essay I made my whole family read.

What I admire most about Roorbach's work is how much he can cover in an essay. He will start out in one place and then end up somewhere completely unexpected. His is such an amiable presence... so funny, so smart. Hey, he had me reading about fishing and liking it :)

I look forward to any journey he takes us on.

Congratulations, Bill, on an excellent novel! I picked up this one and "Big Bend" at approximately the same time a few months ago and was thrilled with each! The generally quiet, brief dramas of the short-story collection led beautifully into this longer, more fully-explored novel.

As a former student of yours a few years back at OSU, it was with decidedly great anticipation and pleasure that I opened up this novel. I remember your reading on campus of the "Bucket!" scene (still my favorite passage, I think) and I had been eager to hear the whole thing. You didn't disappoint. Thanks for all you taught (and continue to teach me) about what it means to write. Your "Writing Life Stories" book is invaluable to me--I open it up and can almost feel myself back in your classroom again. Thank you, and keep up the good work!

PS - I gave you four stars here only because I want to see if you can top this with your next one!

The title comes from a Delmore Swartz poem that says it all in the quotation from the book's proem: "What am I now that I was then?/ May memory restore again and again/ The smallest color of the smallest day."
The memory of a middle-aged man brings back the admiration and the emulation he had for his delinquent older brother, whose opposition to the Vietnam War and the social conventions of that period brought about his strange death. An engrossing mystery surrounds this death through the intricate juxtaposition of that memory and the current life of the narrator-brother in the 1990s. The novel is an exciting page-turner that takes us into the family, the marriage, and love life of the surviving brother.
Roorbach has used all his artful prose to produce a novel with the same appeal as his book of stories: BIG BEND. He has selected the powerful relationship between brothers and the curious twists of memory as vehicles to produce n intriguing first novel.

Bill Roorbach's first novel is a thrilling and tender tale that moves swiftly and with stunning clarity between the past and the present in order to conjure the life of Coop Henry and slowly unravel the role he played in the death of his radical, violent, charismatic older brother. What I love most about this novel (and about all of Bill Roorbach's work in fiction and creative nonfiction) is the passion of his narrative. His people are brimming with delight even in the midst of their suffering. They are joyful companions for the reader because they see and embrace the natural world, their lovers, their own exquisite and haunted memories. Coop Henry awakens us with his desire to speak the truth. For decades, he has lived a lie, pretending his brother Hodge is still alive, living underground or in another country. As long as Coop is trapped in an unloving marriage, as long as he allows himself to be estranged from his mother and father, as long as he denies the full force of the fear and rage and love he felt for his brother Hodge, he can sustain the illusion. But a new love shatters him, returns him to the memories of his first love, the tall cowgirl who seduced and betrayed and transformed him. Remembering her means remembering Hodge as he truly was. Finally, the novel becomes a letter to Hodge--a rant, a confession, a plea for understanding and forgiveness, a confrontation, a communion. This is holy work, the work of love that is large enough to include grief and guilt and anger. Bill Roorbach offers us a rare vision, a glimpse of the violence we all endured and prepetrated during the Vietnam years--and he shows us the path we must walk if we ever wish to transcend the damage we have done to ourselves and others. Coop Henry is a man who insists on the possibility of love, who would rather risk being destroyed by the truth than face being smothered in silence. THE SMALLEST COLOR sings! The language is lyrical and surprising, the voices crisp and mesmerizing. I loved spending time with Coop Henry, and his intimate letter to Hodge seemed like a letter to me. We were that close, and his story became absolutely necessary.

I'm a sucker for any anthology that ends with Richard Petty accepting the National Book Award. . . This one also has a lot of heart. The first of what promises to be an annual collection of stories promoting "a rebirth of beauty and life-affirming values," the Silver Rose Anthology offers a strong mix of voices and attitudes. Not every story here will appeal to every reader (the opening story, for instance, does little for me), but the collection overall is outstanding. Personal favorites (in addition to George Singleton's outrageous "Richard Petty Accepts the National Book Award") include Robert Olen Butler's seamless "Rafferty and Josephine," Julie Orringer's touching "Note to Sixth-Grade Self" Patry Francis'"Limbe," and Patricia Hackbarth's provocative "A Brief Geological Guide to Canyon County."
Move over Bill Henderson, Katrina Keneson, and Larry Dark. Watson's in the house!

When Kevin Watson gathered the stories for this anthology, he was doing us a public service. This is a hard world: hearts break, and lives are shattered. Stories that don't deal with those realities aren't true to life. But there's so much more to life--and should be to art. These stories are "life-affirming" in the best kind of way: They don't stay sunk in gloom, but they don't stoop to easy answers. Each one shows us a new facet of getting on with life, making things work, following the path. The individual stories are excellent--I especially like the story by Pulitzer Prize-winner Robert Olen Butler, although it's one of several strong stories--and in their cumulative effect, the collection becomes (and I mean this in the best kind of way) inspirational.

i only gave this book 5 stars because i could not give it more. i went to a reading of one of the writers and soon went on to read the rest. it has a good mix of voices, but by far the best writer is Heidi Shayla and her story "The Coffin Builder's Romance", it is a beautiful story of quilts, boxes, and of course, coffins. it is my all time favorite anthology, and i would definetly recomend it.