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$16.00 (+ $3 s/h)

First Edition (October 1, 2012)
ISBN-13: 978-1-877655-76-0
Trade Paper
6" x 9"
294 pages

Published by Wordcraft of Oregon

Cover Photo: "Finding the Queen,"
     by Kodua Galieti
Cover Design by redbat design

KEEPING THE SWARM:
New and Selected Essays

Packed with sweetness and stinging, eleven personal essays are gathered in George Venn's KEEPING THE SWARM. Two unpublished essays narrate the prize-winning poet’s international sojourns in Spain and China; two others eulogize northwest people he loved. This book is a honey house chuckablock with eclectic gifts: stories, songs, adventures, meditations, eulogies, poems. There are new cells of joy, old black combs of grief, memories of love’s honey flow.

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ABOUT THE BOOK:
 
George Venn's memoir KEEPING THE SWARM gathers personal essays from fifty years of writing about the Northwest. Here are eleven dances of discovery in place:  
           
Alder, Washington:  “Grandpa’s Gift” tells the story of a surprise Christmas present from a man who never went shopping. Includes grandparents’ photo.
 
Burlington, Washington: “Faith of Our Fathers” tells the story of a boy who hears unforgettable singing by Upper Skagit Indians. Includes a Vi Hilbert photo.
 
Spirit Lake, Idaho: In “Winter Tales: Spirit Lake,” the poet meditates on winter traditions in a welcoming small town. Includes archival photo and a girl sliding off a snowy roof.
 
Lind, Washington:  “You Wanta Go to Town?” tells the story of the poet–as a college kid– being fired from his truck-driving job. Includes an archival Palouse harvest crew photo.
 
Silver Valley & Caldwell, Idaho:  “Singing the Silver Valley Cannonball” traces the evolution of the poet as singer—from  the hymns to musicals to secular folk song. Includes Jan Boles’ photo of a famous silver miners’ bus.
 
Washington—East and West: “Keeping the Swarm” tells the story of the poet’s parents and grandparents’ contrasting lives, roles, and forces. Includes four original 1940s photos.
 
Puyallup, Washington: “Eulogy for George L. Mayo” is the poet’s tribute to his grandfather. Two photo of the beekeeper.
 
Salamanca, Spain: “Leaving Salamanca” tells the student  poet’s story of  traveling to study at a famous  university. Events cause the poet to leave. Two on-the-road photos.
 
La Grande, Oregon: “The Red Weasel Dream” narrates the poet’s writing and presenting a funeral eulogy for his neighbor Jean Cram Haufle. Includes two portraits.
 
Changsha, Hunan: “The More We Get Together” narrates the writer’s adventures while teaching in China after the Cultural Revolution. Includes student and professor photos.
 
Rural Pacific Northwest: In  “Barn,” the poet meditates on the images, stories, traditions, and  significance of the farm structure. Barn interior photo.

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PRE-PUBLICATION PRAISE:

"This welcome essay collection by the sharpest-eyed Northwest writer conjures the region he knows so intimately. His careful portraits of mining towns, wheat harvest, bee keeping, snowland wonders ring clean and true... This venerable voice blesses every reader with another brave and rewarding book."

—Craig Lesley, author of Burning Fence

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"Keeping the Swarm is an intimate, powerful portrait of community. Dipping his pen into a mix of blood and honey, George Venn braves the scabrous terrain of memory. Venn's prose is powerful, his narrative vulnerable. The Poet's abiding respect for creatures and for environment, for song and for languages...shines brightly here. This book will make you thirst for the clear water of the mountains, and hunger for the amber-nectar of home."

—Karen Spears Zacharias, author of A Silence of Mockingbirds

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"George Venn is a gentle radical: In lyrical prose he enchants us with the closely observed words and acts of ordinary people--from the Northwest's small towns to classrooms in post-Cultural Revolution Hunan--always connecting this fabric of local life to the global issues of social justice and human interdependence. 'Who says literature makes nothing happen?' Venn asks. His memorable essays inspire us to go beyond humanities to humanitarian work."

—Jennifer Eastman Atteberry, author of Up in the Rocky Mountains

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"In Keeping the Swarm, George Venn both asks and answers the question, "After all, what are writers for?' ...In clear-eyed, honest, and eloquent fashion, Venn examines the places and people of his childhood and adulthood, proving that the pedestrian and the profound exist...[and] coalesce to form our most sacred guidebook for us to examine our own piece of the world, to recognize the beauty, grace, and peril..."

—Robert Stubblefield, University of Montana

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"From the gorgeous cover photo by California beekeeper-photographer Kodua Galieti to the very personal family photos and gentle boyhood remembrances, Venn paints a picture of beekeeping and family forever intertwined."

—Fran Bach, Washington State Beekeepers Assoc. Newsletter, Nov. 2012 (full review here)