“This is the kind of book you want to read out loud. You can almost hear Garrison Keillor’s voice as you do that. And, yeah, Keillor read two of Goodrich’s dispatches on his ‘Writers Almanac’ program in April. In one of them, “Wild Geese,” Goodrich watches birds fly overhead while he is picking pole beans and imagines heading south after harvest. In a kind of synecdoche for the book, Goodrich interrupts his own reverie, reminding himself: ‘You don’t like to leave home in the winter. Spring, fall, or summer either. True. But I do love to watch those wild geese fly over, feel these impertinent desires glide through me. Then get back to work.’ ”—from The Local Shelf column in The Eugene Register-Guard
Face Out
Going to Seed: Dispatches from the Garden by Charles Goodrich
September 20, 2010