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In a Valley Surrounded by Hills
Don C. Skinner
其他書名
Stories of Growing Up in a Pennsylvania Town
出版Franklin Street Books, 2003
主題Biography & Autobiography / GeneralBiography & Autobiography / Personal MemoirsSocial Science / Customs & Traditions
ISBN15929903049781592990306
URLhttp://books.google.com.hk/books?id=TY4KAQAAMAAJ&hl=&source=gbs_api
註釋If you enjoy this book, you should really give the credit to my wife. Absent her encouragement, it might never have been written. She'd listened to my Meadville stories for years, finally urging cheerfully, You know, you really should write a book.So I wrote two other books. She loved them both. But they weren't the book she wanted. I was skeptical. Who would want to read a book about me growing up?Well, your grandchildren, among others.My initial efforts were tentative at best: a bit of story here, a fragment there, until finally (partly because of the writing itself?) it began to sink in that she had a point. Our stories are more important than we realize. The very telling of them summons back to consciousness not just the places where our pasts unfolded but the people who inhabited them, places and people that shaped who we are and, to some extent, who we may yet become. The more deeply I probed those far-off memories, the more brightly my childhood town lit up around me, and the larger became the company of shadows who gathered around my chair, looking over my shoulder and prodding me to remember.Because places change, we no longer see ourselves in them-until we revisit them as they were, and see ourselves again as we were. Maybe, I thought, reading my story will help others to explore their own, to find out how their hometowns, and the people who lived there, matter in ways they'll not grasp unless they go there.One other consideration drove the writing. Stories deserve to be told well. Forty years of preaching, teaching and writing have taught me the importance of that. If I have done nothing else here, I have tried to tell my stories in such a way that their beauty andfun-and their sad mortality-remain unmistakably present. How well I succeeded I'll leave for you to judge.