The new book by David Oates
What We Love Will Save Us offers moments of transcendence and hope, told in personal essays that are tender and funny, searching and human. This book is about keeping faith and experiencing darkness:
There’s a random dangerous rightness abroad in this wide shining world. It’s a rightness, not a correctness. We don’t need so much to counter other people’s errors as to bring the light and joy of that right and beautiful world: what we desire for our planet and ourselves. What we are doing instead of hating and denying and bombing.
Our job is to work on what we love. Daily. With precision and determination.
David Oates finds wildness and grace breaking out in unexpected places – from city streets to mountain peaks – offering a crucial balance to his dramatically personal account of what it has been like to be a “citizen of the regime” during eight years of unprecedented propaganda, torture, waste, and war. What is the right response, when the government that belongs to us goes seriously off course? How does a person’s private and creative life relate to the life we share in common?
Brief and beautifully intense lyrical essays explore hope, pleasure, and creativity (and the outrage that must never be allowed to eclipse them). Readable, memorable, smart but straight from the heart – these essays give voice to our shared experience of a dark and frustrating time in the nation’s life. They should find a wide audience.
Kelson Books
paperback – $11.95 / pages 191 / ISBN 978-0-615-31419-8
publication date: September 16, 2009 (available via bookstores, amazon.com, or direct from Kelson Books)
distributors: Ingram, Baker & Taylor, Barnes & Noble (returnable)
CONTACT: Peter Doyle, Creative VP or David Oates
EMAIL: kelsonbooks@gmail.com
PHONE: 503-327-9733
Portland writer Carol Frischmann blogs her way through the book – http://thiswildlife.com/essays-opinions/what-we-love/
Praise from advance readers:
“What We Love Will Save Us is a journey. David Oates knows what kind of place he’s looking for—a place for hope and truth, imagination and renewal. What We Love Will Save Us is. . . compact and expansive, erudite and carnal, playful and angry and full of subjunctive dreaming and inescapable facts.”
– Ana Maria Spagna, author of Test Ride on the Sunnyland Bus: a Daughter’s Civil Rights Journey
and Now Go Home: Wilderness, Belonging, and the Crosscut Saw.
“Personal honesty, humor, zinger endings. . . This is a stirring, creative collection of essays stoked with ideas, some of them urgently of our time and place, some timeless. People with regard for language will reread passages for their genuinely beautiful writing. I got a lump in my throat (and had to take a walk) after I read the final six words: ‘Brief lists, perseverance, and long vistas.’ AMEN. A mantra for our century.”
– Jeff Gersh, founder and principal of NarrativeLab Communications
“There is a tightly wound lyricism to these very American essays, crafted out of bumps and bruises and sheer joys. David Oates is a writer companion you’ll want to have as you hike across this beleaguered planet – testy on the switchbacks but more than congenial around the fire; at the end of the day, he always chooses the best campsite.”
– Paul J. Willis, author of Bright Shoots of Everlastingness: Essays on Faith and the American Wild.
Kelson Books
a division of
Mullen and Elder, Creative Investments
Portland – Taos – Kuala Lumpur