Let’s Talk About It – House of Sky by Ivan Doig

Come join us for the 3rd installment of “Let’s Talk About Series” held in the library basement at 7pm on Thursday, February 18th.

This week’s presenter is: Carrie Seymour, who has taught literature and writing at Boise State for 13 years. When she isn’t teaching, she helps run her family’s small fruit orchard in the Sunnyslope Orchard District.

About the book:

This House of Sky consists of three story skeins: It is an autobiography of Doig’s own growing up Montana, the story of a unique, the story of a unique, nontraditional family trinity and how it held together through thick and thin, and a portrait of a western way of life. All three are knitted together to present a very loving, but elegiac prose poem–elegiac because of the author’s mournful contemplation of his growing up which entails a wrenching away from loved ones, because the family trinity of which he was a part has dissolved through the death of two of it’s members, and because a way of life which sustained him throughout his childhood has also virtually passed into history. While Doig doesn’t protest the dying, he does mourn and memorialize it, and he takes away those qualities of endurance, courage and honesty Charlie and Bessie Ringer and all the others presented to him as a young boy growing into manhood.