"Good heavens, honey... it's a hippie house!" -Amy's mother regarding her temporary Kansan home
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Sophia Alexander with
House of Steps by Amy Blackmarr
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I’ve just consumed The
House of Steps while visiting my
dear friend Kelly in North Carolina. Kelly keeps an ‘Amy room’
with a sort of shrine to her sister's award-winning books in it—and I don’t blame her one whit, as they
are that well-written. In fact, their mother is thought to be descended from the national poet of Scotland, Robert Burns, so perhaps
Amy did not pull her writing genius from nowhere!
The House of Steps
is an anecdotal collection of short essays about Amy’s experience of moving
(for a few graduate-school years) to a remote, cobbled-together house in Kansas with her dog. It’s
a worthwhile follow-up to the raw authenticity of her first essay
collection, Going to Ground, which sprang
Thoreau-like from her pen during her pond residence at her family’s remote,
south-Georgia cabin. Both essay collections, quite atmospheric, remind me of
those by fellow Aries Southerner, Barbara Kingsolver. Blackmarr's essays fill me with a love for Georgia's natural environment, though I sense no equivalent appreciation for her
temporary Kansas surroundings.
In fact, my favorite tales from The
House of Steps actually relate back to her family and girlhood in Georgia,
but this may be personal bias, since I’m familiar with the family. Nevertheless,
I particularly enjoyed reading about their mother’s genteel reactions to Amy’s
strange new Kansan house and Amy’s perverse defense of it. Yet while Amy does allow isolated glimpses
into her past life, they come only as she mulls her existing environment and
life itself—and I do so enjoy hearing Amy’s unique take on her world. In summary,
I do recommend Amy Blackmarr’s books, including House of Steps, as quirky, rich, perception-expanding,
sometimes-amusing, regional, atmospheric reads.
