Winter's Light: New England Society from Bradford to Edwards

by John Preston

Book Overview

Coming home to find yourself: a gay man sets down roots in native soil. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0874516749
• ISBN13: 9780874516746
• Release Date: January 1995
• Publisher: University Press of New England
• Length: 199 Pages
• Weight: 0.95 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.8" x 8.8"

Customer Reviews

You Can Go Home Again

It's hard to believe John Preston has been gone for 15 years next month (April 2009). Yet his voice still speaks across the years, past the barrier separating this life and whatever comes after this life. His stories of what it means to be a New Englander, from a place whose people are so conscious of belonging to it and of being shaped by it, continue to touch and move and inspire. I re-read Winter's Light, this posthumous collection of John's New England writing, not long after I myself was diagnosed (like John) as HIV-positive. After years of living "away" (as New Englanders put it) in big cities--much like John--I was struck in middle age by the idea of returning to my own native Connecticut, the place I had always considered home even in the years since I'd fled it as a restless teenager eager to know a bigger world. I found in John's words a kindredness and validation of my own hunger for the authenticity and deep sense of belonging to a people and a history that are at the heart of what it means to be a New Englander. I was especially touched by John's description in one of the essays about the men who gathered at his neighborhood barbershop in Portland for camaraderie and local gossip. He recalled how they would rib him about being gay. But woe unto anyone else who might make anti-gay comments about John to them. It was one thing for them to tease him, but, John wrote, "I was their queer," and good tough Yankees look out for one another--chalking up their differences to "just the way it is." I highly recommend Winter's Light, particularly to anyone who has journeyed away from a place where s/he started out and still feels bound to. John Preston showed that we can go home again if we are able to continue being the people we have become while we were away. He showed that sometimes our journeys in life return us to where we began, but as changed people who come back with a new appreciation of our homeland, and wisdom about life we didn't have when we went away.