Moving With The Elements

By Steve Semken

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1888160357
• ISBN13: 9781888160352
• Release Date: April 1998
• Publisher: The Ice Cube Press
• Length: 192 Pages

Customer Reviews

Magic and Surrealism Surround These Stories

I dare not review this book. Not because of its content, but because of the weather. Semken's latest book of essays and short stories is about the weather. And it seems, in accordance with the surrealism that surrounds, grabs a hold of and fully digests the reader, that the moment I finished _Moving With The Elements_, lightning started to flash outside like an airport search light, sweeping the darkness at regular intervals. If my hair stands on end, if I feel light-headed or if my laptop starts to turn blue and crackle, I can only blame the enchantment placed upon Semken's grimoire, his book of magic. To begin with, Semken's drifting line reminds me of Jim Harrison, "I watch as loose snow whirls up into the air, then falls gently to form a snowdrift, into what I call the wind's footprint." It is fluid, descriptive and gives name to the unnamable. His essays could be compared to those of Sigurd Olson, if not for the shamanistic element in each. ! His stories remind me of Richard Braughtigan's _In Watermelon Sugar_: gentle, with a child-like sense of wonder, and a big heaping glass of surrealism. "How that man had spent two months eating an electric fence. That he had taken a metal file and made a pile of electric dust which he added to his coffee each day." Some of his stories, like Flannery O'Connor, are allegorical. But to compare Semken's work to these other authors would be to overlook the fact that Steve Semken writes like Steve Semken. His voice, style, and command of words are his own. With characters named Levi Toughskin, Rico Rembrandt and Decker Tab, the reader sees that the author is not only being true to his work, he is having a little fun. He also works with themes important to him: being at one with the natural world; being able to look into the lifetime of a tree or a rain cloud; small towns trying to survive; fighting between the monoculture of the established locals and the odd! ity of the rare individual; and finally, a community makin! g contact with the unexplainable (I'm talking weather phenomena, not Roswell!) Some of the four star pieces found in this work include: "Backdoor Painting", a gothic tale that would make Rod Serling and Washington Irving sit up in their graves simultaneously; "Winter Air - Stone Beating", a must read nature essay for those who enjoy winter camping and stargazing; "Slow Rain Birth", a spring evocation appropriate for readings by both naturalists and pagans; and "Broom Totem", a story of a witch-woman who finds a way of becoming one with the landscape of the Great Plains. In this last piece, Semken transcends himself as a writer, being able to take on the female perspective in both the main character and the broomstick vantage he gives the reader. _Moving With The Elements_ is a surrealist venture of the landscape. Semken's stories and essays stroll in the prairie wind that breathes life into them In his work, we find out wh! y astronauts primarily come

Nature and Fantasy Merge As Story!

Fantasy and Nature play main roles in Semken's "Moving with the Elements" In a journey through the Great Plains and into Texas, Steve Semken's introspective characters have the ability to show up in trees, paintings and even water. It is a roller coaster ride through realism and fantasy that one can be taken into to escape the doldrums of everyday life that most of us allow ourselves to slip into without ever realizing. Throughout this naturalist handbook, Semken weaves far fetching excursions of characters like Levi Toughskin and Rico Rembrandt in "Bright Dynamite Creek." Toughskin and Rembrandt discover a whirlpool in a nearby creek. Through experimentation with firecrackers, feathers, seeds and eventually themselves they find a place where things change shape under water allowing them to find out what or who they really are. It may sound silly here, but the reader must actually go to this place and experience it as an individual to fully understand reality and to see things from the other side. In another essay, "Vanilla Ice Cream," Semken allows the reader to return to innocent childhood memories where a younger you could be content making ice cream for everybody gathered at a family reunion. Semken writes, "Now I am beginning to realize that this is what real life is about. Collecting the good stuff together a few days a year and being able to smile in a group without doubt. That life is about storing away good memories that give you a sense of time and community and pride." "Backdoor Painting" focuses on Mr. Lystroder and Aunt Mar, characters who have the ability to create paintings with people alive in them. They control the outcome of the victims' painted lives. Lystroder and Mar decide to make a painting of the main character, Aunt Mar's nephew, his wife and child who try to leave the town of Doorall to experience the rest of the world. Lystroder and Mar believe that things shrink when they leave D! oorall. Try to imagine what happens next. The nephew finds himself in one of his Aunt's paintings with no backdoor painted in for him to escape out through. It is a winding ride between reality and fantasy that Semken takes the reader through his essays. He brings enough realistic detail to his stories that the reader thinks, "I've been there before, I know the place he is talking about . . . " only to find out a few sentences later that when you were there things happened differently and maybe you should have let your imagination go a little. Although the characters in Moving with the Elements are not all strongly linked together from one essay to another there is a constant theme of nature and man needing to live harmoniously. I touched the bark on my flowering crab last week and wanted to pull off a little piece that was beginning to curl away from itself. I remembered at the last moment the essay "The Sycamore Throne" with Peron Beet and decided not to pull off the bark just in c