Contemporary Authors

• All I Want to Do Is Live: A Collection of Creative Nonfiction Pioneers Press (Lansing, KS), 2017

1. All I want to do is live : a collection of creative nonfiction LCCN 2016962700 Type of material Book Personal name Ramsey, Trace, author. Main title All I want to do is live : a collection of creative nonfiction / Trace Ramsey. Edition First edition. Published/Produced Lansing, Kansas : Pioneers Press, 2017. Description 214 pages : illustrations ; 21 cm ISBN 9781939899286 (pbk.) 1939899281 CALL NUMBER PS3618.A4786 A45 2017 Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms

• Hatchfund - https://www.hatchfund.org/user/traceramsey

  Trace Ramsey
  NC
  Message Follow

  Author: Pioneers Press
  Credits: Pioneers Press
  Copyright: 2014
  Trace Ramsey is a recipient of the 2015 Ella Fountain Pratt Emerging Artists Award in Literature, a 2015 contributor in non-fiction at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and winner of the 2016 Alex Albright Creative Nonfiction Prize from the North Carolina Literary Review. Trace's recent publications include essays in At Length Magazine, Hippocampus Magazine, conc?s and I Don't Know How to Help You, a compilation zine from Pioneers Press. In December 2014, Trace received a certificate in documentary arts in nonfiction writing from the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University. Also in 2014, Trace's book-an anthology of the first six issues of his zine Quitter (Quitter: Good Luck Not Dying)-was published by Pioneers Press. In addition to a collection of creative nonfiction, All I Want To Do Is Live, Trace is currently writing a memoir-in-essays, Carrying Capacity, and a novel, The Ornithologists. Trace lives in Durham, N.C., with his partner and two children.

  External Links
  Farthing Street
  Briggs Avenue
  Viscera
  Awards & Recognitions
  Ella Fountain Pratt Merging Artists Grant in Literature
  Bread Loaf Writers' Conference Contributor in Non-fiction
  Alex Albright Creative Nonfiction Prize

• Trace Ramsey Website - http://www.traceramsey.com/

  Trace Ramsey is a writer based in Durham, North Carolina. He is a recipient of the 2017-2018 North Carolina Arts Council Fellowship Award in Prose, the 2017 Profane Journal Nonfiction Prize, the 2016 Alex Albright Creative Nonfiction Prize from the North Carolina Literary Review, the 2015 Ella Fountain Pratt Emerging Artists Award in Literature, and was a 2015 contributor in non-fiction at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Trace’s recent publications include essays in At Length Magazine, Hippocampus Magazine, concīs, North Carolina Literary Review and I Don’t Know How to Help You, a compilation zine from Pioneers Press. In 2014, Trace’s first book—an anthology of the zine Quitter (Quitter: Good Luck Not Dying)—was published by Pioneers Press. This was followed in 2017 by All I Want to Do is Live, also from Pioneers Press. In December 2014, Trace received a certificate in documentary arts in nonfiction writing from the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University. Trace is currently writing a memoir-in-essays, Carrying Capacity, and a novel, The Ornithologists. Trace lives in Durham with his partner and two children.

  New from Trace Ramsey, All I Want to Do is Live. Available now from Pioneers Press.

  “…this volume impresses with its fresh scrutiny of both inner and outer worlds.” Kirkus Reviews

  “Ramsey’s highly original approach to memoir, and his willingness to take narrative risks and discard a linear approach to time, draws in readers and leaves a haunting impression.” BookLife

  “With searing honesty Trace paints a kaleidoscope of his life that is almost reminiscent of Salinger’s ‘The Glass Family Chronology.'” Encore Magazine

  “Ramsey helps us to see through his suffering eyes how depression, like raw, wild-eyed nature, looks, feels, and even smells like.” Compulsive Reader

• Medium - https://medium.com/pioneers-press-authors/an-interview-with-trace-ramsey-11917097c8ff

  Kurt Morris
  Mental health advocate, writer, storyteller. Interested in loneliness. kurtmorris.net
  May 2, 2017

  An interview with Trace Ramsey
  Although I haven’t known Trace Ramsey for too long, in the past year I’ve eaten up his zine, Quitter, and his forthcoming book, All I Want To Do Is Live, which comes out on Pioneers Press on May 9th. In both his zine and book he writes of depression and searching out meaning in his life, topics of which I can relate. I recently called him up at his home in Durham, North Carolina, and we chatted about writing and All I Want To Do Is Live.

  Kurt: When did you start writing? Has it been something you’ve done since you were a kid?

  Trace: Not really. I wrote a little bit in college. I audited one creative writing class. After college it was a while before I started writing consistently. I had a weekly column in an alt-weekly in Wilmington, North Carolina. I moved there after I went to school in Western New York, where I grew up. I wrote that for a couple years and then got into doing a political zine called Pawn. From there I started writing more creatively. Up until that point it was more political stuff: news and local journalism. There was nothing really creative about it. I started the zine Quitter as a one-off. It caught on and I decided I wanted to keep doing it. It didn’t come out very often. I’ve done maybe one a year. There was a big break around 2008 for a couple years. Then, when I wrote Quitter #7 is when I got to be more serious about it and wanted to become more of a creative writer and start submitting and writing essays and getting into the literary culture as much as I could. I started taking workshops and classes and meeting other authors. That was when I really decided I wanted to be a writer. I think that was 2013.

  Kurt: What spurred you to want to get involved with that literary community and go to conferences and workshops?

  Trace: I think it was just wanting to get better at the craft of writing and draw inspiration and meet other writers who were kind of in the same position I was who were not really beginners but beginners in a different arc in their writing career. People who were still working their jobs­ — a lot of the writers I met were working with their writing degrees, which I do not have. I work in a warehouse packing vegetables in boxes. I don’t have that writing background. I don’t have an MFA. I have a certificate from The Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University that really wasn’t creative writing. It was a whole bunch of different classes on documentary film and photography as well as writing.

  Kurt: That’s interesting you mentioned getting involved in the literary community because I’ve had that opportunity, too, here in Boston, with an organization called Grub Street. They’re a writing community and they put on a big conference every year. It’s been really interesting for me because I have those roots in punk and DIY, but a lot of the push at these writing communities and the workshops and the culture is generally, “You’ve gotta get in these big journals and you’ve gotta get an agent.” But I kind of exist outside of that and you do, too. I was wondering: Why is that? Is that something where you’ve purposely sought to be outside the mainstream or is that the avenue you’ve been given?

  Trace: That’s the avenue I’ve been given and am most comfortable with, but if I was offered a larger opportunity I probably wouldn’t say no. I don’t have any issues from a punk or anarchist background to say that if I met an agent who was interested in my work and wanted to move it up a notch — I would seriously consider that. I wouldn’t find it at odds with where I am now.

  Kurt: Why wouldn’t you have a problem with it considering your background with punk and anarchism?

  Trace: I think writers write because they want people to see it and connect with it. If I were to stay writing zines and not pursue getting essays published in larger journals — it’s kind of like branches on a tree. You have the zine community, which has been very supportive of me and my work and I don’t think branching out to literary journals is alienating that fanbase. The support that I’ve gotten from other folks saying, “Pursue that other branch and see where it takes you.” It opens up a different audience. The way I also think about it is going out in a different direction brings other people into the zine and DIY community that they may have had no idea existed. They’re like, “There’s all these literary punks that are writing really good stuff and I should check them out, too.” It’s bringing both audiences along and trying to also keep writing stuff that connects to people. I think the more people that read my stuff — I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing unless someone’s telling me “Don’t write that because it’s going to alienate X, Y, Z of the literary community. The MFAs of the world will not like this.” I don’t really care about them. From the people I’ve met I don’t really see that happening.

  To be honest, it’s not like I’m trying to sign some three book, six-figure deal. I’m just trying to get my stuff out to as many people as possible. There’s a scale that indie publishing is up against. You’re competing with huge marketing budgets. You’re competing for access to all these gatekeepers that I think is a huge problem. With the folks at Pioneers Press trying to get this new book (All I Want To Do Is Live) out into different distribution channels, there’s so many things you have to have to get into — Ingram is one of the big distributors. In order to get into Ingram you have to have x, y, and z, which either costs a lot of money or the author gets basically zero dollars for everything that goes through that channel. So we have to pick our battles and say “We’re not going to go that route because it leaves us nothing.” Just because the book is in there doesn’t mean people are actually going to find it. So how do we get around that and still have any sort of money left in our already small marketing budget?

  Kurt: And have you figured any way to do that?

  Trace: Yeah. It’s very time-consuming. It’s a lot of postage and follow-up emails and phone calls. You have to bother a lot of people.

  Kurt: And how is that going for you?

  Trace: We haven’t really fully implemented it yet. We’re working on it slowly. Pioneers Press folks have their hands full. I have a more than full-time job and a family and also am trying to write new stuff. So things have to get cut out in order to make the release fit the ambitions we have for it. How do we get this very limited release book into the hands of people who are actually going to read it and maybe keep it instead of looking at it and trying to re-sell it to the used book store and not have any attachment to it?

  Kurt: How did the book come together? Why did you decide to make it what it is as far as a compilation of different things: interviews, poetry, and the zines?

  Trace: So, Jessie at Pioneers wanted to do a new edition of Good Luck Not Dying, my first book, which was Quitter numbers one through six. It was almost out of print. I thought that could work and do issues one through ten. But the more I thought about it I thought that maybe I could be done with the Good Luck Not Dying era of Quitter. Like I said earlier, I think there is a big break between number six and number seven as far as the actual quality of the writing and the intent behind it. I think a lot of it came from having a child and that opening up a lot of possibilities for me as an exploration of my childhood in comparison.

  That was the reason I decided to go in a different direction and start with number seven and do seven through ten and add in the other zines I had and also add in the essays that were published elsewhere that were based originally on the content of the zines. As far as the interviews, I thought they would be fun for someone.

  Kurt: [laughs]

  Trace: I don’t see a lot of those in books and it’s a curiosity to me how people get to where they are and what spurs them to write the way they do. I thought it gave a little more depth. What did you think?

  Kurt: I liked the flow of the zines going together one into another. But I’ll be honest that while I liked the poetry and interviews, they threw me off. I would’ve liked it to just end with the last issue of Quitter. But is poetry something you’re writing more of nowadays?

  Trace: No, not necessarily.

  Kurt: Okay. Because I was thinking that if you have more poetry you could put that together into another book of just poetry and that would be really cool, too. I don’t think it detracted from the overall message at all. It just wasn’t what I was expecting in the sense of — well, I didn’t really know what to expect. I didn’t know what all was going to go in there. But it was hardly anything close to a fatal flaw or anything to that degree.

  I did like the poems. I liked the interviews of themselves. It would be interesting if you would do more poetry and do that into a book, though.

  Trace: I hadn’t really thought about going in that direction but there’s always time, I guess. Maybe.

  Kurt: Yeah. It sounds like there’s maybe not as much as you’d hope. You could always get rid of one of the kids, I suppose, but that’s probably not something your wife is going to go for.

  Trace: Yeah, that’s probably not going to happen.

  Kurt: [laughs]

  Trace: I like them.

  Kurt: The thing that sticks out to me in your writing is that the kids play a huge role in the themes of the book as well as that idea of family being helpful with dealing with mental illness. It comes across a certain way to me, but how do you see that relationship between family and mental illness?

  Trace: I’m not quite sure. That’s what I’m constantly trying to figure out. Where does it come from? Is it the whole nature or nurture thing? I wanted to avoid my kids coming to the point where they feel something is wrong or don’t have a support system or understanding of what is going on. Looking back through other family members I think there is a pretty big genetic component to it. I know addiction is pretty strong in my family. I’ve dealt with that. I’ve been sober for quite a while. I think it’s nine years next week.

  Kurt: That’s awesome.

  Trace: Yeah. That’s another thing I’m worried about is how to explain without completely saying, “You should definitely not drink or try any drugs because you’ll get instantly hooked.” That’s how I am — I have very addictive tendencies. But that doesn’t mean that’s how the kids are going to be. I don’t think I completely answered your question or got close to it.

  Kurt: [laughs] For me, I’ve made the decision not to have children because of my mental illness. It doesn’t mean I’m not open to adoption, but it’s a tricky place to be. I like that you explore it because I think if I had biological children it would be something I would be writing what you’re writing about, too. So it’s interesting for me to read your writing because it’s a “What if?” for me and I get to see that played out. I didn’t know if you had any more thoughts in that relationship beyond what’s in the book.

  Trace: I think it’s going to be constantly unfolding as I write more and as the kids get older. Their view of life is going to change as it gets more detailed and they have more memories to roll in. It will also trigger more memories for me when they get to ages that I hadn’t thought about in a while or they do something I hadn’t thought about in a while. And trying to relate that to the constant struggle of mental illness and trying to cope with it on a day to day basis. I’m also trying to be honest with the kids about it. It’s not necessarily something they’ve noticed yet. Another unfortunate thing is that how they see me is how they might see how most other people might act day in and day out, when it’s obviously not the case. It’s not that I’m constantly in an up and down cycle but there are down times that have no explanation and I don’t know how to explain something that doesn’t have an explanation to a kid. Sometimes nothing happens and sometimes the trash bag breaks and that’s the trigger. Something so stupid and how do you explain that to a kid?

  Kurt: Yeah. Trying to explain how the brain reacts to these random events that maybe shouldn’t be a big deal —

  Trace: They shouldn’t be any sort of big deal. In a normal healthy person’s life they’d be a frustration but they wouldn’t lead to a couple days of being completely quiet and not wanting to work or be interactive. That’s not how it should work.

  Kurt: I’m with you. I get those ups and downs, too, sometimes. It’s hard enough to explain when an adult asks you, “Hey, what are you thinking?” And it’s like, “I don’t know where to start.” Then the idea of trying to explain that to a child is much more difficult.

  Trace: Yeah.

  Kurt: When it comes to your writing — I’m always curious because for me it was a big problem and it still can be — what does your writing schedule look like? Do you write in the morning or whenever you have time? How does that work?

  Trace: It is whenever I have time. It’s a lot of little notes either on my Evernote app on my phone or a scrap of paper or whatever instrument is available at the time. When I have a larger amount of time I go back and try and piece things together and expand. I don’t have any set schedule of writing. I wish I could have that. But I don’t think it’s possible at this point.

  Kurt: I try and write first thing in the morning but it’s difficult because I live in a studio apartment and it’s hard to keep from being distracted when there’s somebody else living with you and they’re doing their thing. That’s all on me; my girlfriend’s not doing anything. But I’m sure it’s the same with you to some degree — when you have the kids and they’re getting up in the morning it’s not as though you can do your writing then.

  Trace: No, because the focus is pretty heavy on the kids.

  Kurt: As it should be.

  Trace: Now that the book is mostly all mailed out I’ll have some time in the evenings if I’m not completely exhausted from work. I have a weird work schedule, too. I work long days on Monday and Wednesday and don’t get home until midnight or one o’clock and then have to be in the next day at ten. So, it really screws with my sleep schedule, too. And I’ll stay up until midnight on the days I’m not working but that doesn’t mean I’m getting anything cool accomplished. If I’m not writing I at least try and read something.

  Kurt: What are you reading right now?

  Trace: I just started reading The Intuitionist by Colson Whitehead. It’s about elevator inspectors. I’m also reading Stephen King’s quasi-memoir about writing. It’s really good. There’s one other book I have that I haven’t started. It’s called The War of Art. It’s about creative blockages. It was recommended to me by another writer.

  Kurt: Do you have anything else coming up in regards to writing? A new issue of the zine or some article in a publication?

  Trace: The only thing definite is there’s an essay coming out in North Carolina Literary Review. They only do one issue a year and that should be out in August. I’d like to do another Quitter soon. I’m also working on some fiction and I’ll see where that goes.

  Kurt: The story in North Carolina Literary Review, what is that? Is it a story or non-fiction?

  Trace: It’s an essay. It’s based on some of the stuff in Quitter ten about my parents’ divorce. It takes that and expands on it. It borrows a little bit from Quitter nine.

  Kurt: How does something like that come about? I’ve never submitted anything for a journal.

  Trace: I try and keep stuff rotating in my submissions. I try and have at least one piece submitted to a bunch of journals at the same time. It’s pretty much what any other writer would tell you. It’s 99.5% rejections. I just got another one today. It’s just the process: you submit, you get rejected. Then something gets picked up and you get excited for a few days and then say, “Okay, what’s next?” The high is very short-lived.

  And no one gives a shit that you got published. It’s not about where you’ve been published already it’s about the piece you’re submitting. Is it the right fit for this place that you’ve just sent it to? Usually it’s because there’s so many people trying to get into all these places. It’s a law of numbers, really.

  Kurt: It seems like there’s too many people out there writing. Can’t a few of them quit? [laughs]

  Trace: Yeah, that’s never gonna happen.

  Kurt: I’ve taken a lot of writing classes and it’s amazing how many people want to be writers.

  Trace: I’d love to teach a little workshop on how to submit stuff, what to expect, and how to go about it. I’m in a writing group and hardly anybody submits their stuff anywhere but they want to get published. But if you want to get published you have to let go of it and understand you’re going to get pretty disappointed and you have to be okay with that. It would be good if someone could teach something about that and let you know that it happens and that’s the process. Someone will eventually pick it up. It will get published. It might take a couple months. It might take five years. But every time it comes back you should look at it and see if there’s something you could change. You just gotta keep at it.

  Kurt Morris is a regular contributor to Razorcake, America’s only 501(c)(3) non-profit music magazine dedicated to independent punk rock. His memoir, Fiercely Lonely, is forthcoming on Pioneers Press. He resides in Boston.

Ramsey, Trace: ALL I WANT TO DO IS LIVE
Kirkus Reviews. (Sept. 15, 2017):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Ramsey, Trace ALL I WANT TO DO IS LIVE Pioneers Press (Indie Nonfiction) $16.00 5, 9 ISBN: 978-1939899286

Ramsey's (Quitter, 2014) new collection of creative nonfiction and poetry takes on the topics of depression, addiction, and loss. Structured in four parts, including nonfiction chapbooks and zines, uncollected autobiographical essays, poems, and interviews, this volume impresses with its fresh scrutiny of both inner and outer worlds. "Farthing Street," for example, begins by describing weeds in a lawn, "tall and heading out to seed, the view from our front stoop full of henbit, broadleaf plantain and pepperweed." The author's keen eye then turns inward to recollect watershed moments: a birthday present of a hunting shotgun; a first episode of depression in high school; the difficult birth of his first daughter, Tennessee. The inventory of weeds--growing in a lawn so neglected that the city of Durham, North Carolina, places a notice on the mailbox--blossoms into a full-blown essay that meanders with purpose and insight through major topics, such as his partner's miscarriage. The essay also offers an unflinching acknowledgement of how difficult early fatherhood is, especially for a person hailing from an abusive family and suffering bouts of debilitating depression, before the speaker strikes out to mow the grass while his daughter, now a toddler, waves at him through the window. Connecting current events and states of mind with potent memories gives the book a poetic resonance as well as solid structure within chapters and across the collection. The author is determined to describe the feeling of a depressive episode--"this understanding that gloom is coming"--as best he can for the sake of readers who might benefit and for his children, who might one day experience the "sinister or beautiful" fact of genetic inheritance. The inevitability of the next spell of depression is terrifying to read about yet necessary to share: "I am lightning connecting with a transformer on a pole; I am a race horse that just broke its leg." To one of the interview questions, the author responds with a great understatement: "I am not a talker, but I can write." A set of brave works featuring first-rate prose.

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Ramsey, Trace: ALL I WANT TO DO IS LIVE." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Sept. 2017. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A504217531/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=b1ccc18c. Accessed 16 Apr. 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A504217531

"Ramsey, Trace: ALL I WANT TO DO IS LIVE." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Sept. 2017. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A504217531/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=b1ccc18c. Accessed 16 Apr. 2018.

• Compulsive Reader
  http://www.compulsivereader.com/2017/06/07/a-review-of-all-i-want-to-do-is-live-by-trace-ramsey/
  Word count: 787

  A review of All I Want To Do Is Live by Trace Ramsey
  June 7, 2017
  Reviewed by Jan Peregrine

  All I Want To Do Is Live
  A Collection of Creative Nonfiction
  by Trace Ramsey
  Pioneers Press
  May 2017, $16.00, ISBN: 9781939899286

  If you took the Annie Dillard book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and mixed in personal observations of your life with depression and family, you would have Trace Ramsey’s new memoir All I Want To Do Is Live, published by Pioneers Press in Kansas. It’s not, however, simply nature musings for those who delight in the astounding sights, sounds, and smells of nature. Ramsey helps us to see through his suffering eyes how depression, like raw, wild-eyed nature, looks, feels, and even smells like.

  He has a line toward the end that I find most compelling, which he obviously does too since he used it in a cartoon for his last page. In the first panel there’s a ghost; in the second the ghost seems to get a bright idea. In the last the ghost says, “I am a ghost unsure of my method of haunting.”

  That line says so much about Ramsey’s feelings about himself, as well as, I suspect, his uncertainty about whether he’s said anything in the book that’s real and solid and meaningful.

  I’ve been reading about black holes in a book by a physicist and (trust me, there’s a point I’m making), the information we release through our negative and positive energy is stored in the cosmos and, to be brief, that reality we make reflects back to us like a holographic movie. Sounds kooky, I know, but Ramsey reminds me of how intimately connected we are not only with the nature we see and love, but also with the hidden realities out there.

  The more energy added to black holes, which trap information, the more they expand.

  So I read about his miserable episodes of depression when he succumbs to very low energy and despair, when he considers ending it all with a gun, when he muses that his child may experience his ‘disabled’ mind someday and what he’ll tell her, and I think, oh my, he’s sunken into a black hole.

  I read his lovely, earthy prose about life in the rural South of the United States and I wish I knew what all those flowers with unfamiliar names looked like. What they smell like without the shadowy veil or sour smell caused by his disease. It’s impossible to imagine his world except in the shattering way he perceives it.

  Let me be honest. Ramsey doesn’t realize he wants to live until his short essays and ‘flash fiction’, collected from previous, award-winning work, lead us far into the book, past a poetry section. Maybe, as he hopes, the energy flowing out of his words will connect and resonate with you.

  While I don’t suffer a chemical imbalance in my brain that runs in my family, as it does Ramsey, I sadly created an interior black hole upon suffering a traumatic CNS injury that turned my life upside down and could have ruined it if I hadn’t fought my way out, as has Ramsey, through writing.

  Is his second book a commentary on our chaotic times, a mirror revealing its turbulent social climate, as the back cover suggests? I believe that’s a narrow perspective.

  It seems to me that Ramsey describes the timeless effects of our breaths mingling with the air, our trembling embrace of the universe. How could these not stretch beyond our present reality? His compulsion to bring forth life, in children as well as words, marks him as one of us, his frustrating circumstances as another layer of humanity’s story.

  I’ll end with these words from the book:

  “I am not myself in this moment. Or maybe it is better to say I am just a splinter of the person who opened up the mailbox a few short weeks ago. Circumstances changed. I became a father..it has become hard for me to maintain simple daily functioning, let alone keep up consistent self-appraisal.”

  But then…aren’t we all just splinters of people we’ve been?

  About the reviewer: Jan Peregrine has recently published a Kindle book called Dr. Freudine Is In: The Tale’s Tail, which may be enjoyed by itself if you don’t want to bother with the amusing first two.

• Hippocampus
  https://www.hippocampusmagazine.com/2018/01/review-all-i-want-to-do-is-live-a-collection-of-creative-nonfiction-by-trace-ramsey/
  Word count: 581

  Review: All I Want To Do Is Live: A Collection of Creative Nonfiction by Trace Ramsey
  January 2, 2018
  Reviewed by D.M Clark

  cover of all i want to do is live text and ostrichTrace Ramsey’s All I Want to do is Live: A Collection of Creative Nonfiction (Pioneers Press, May 2017) is a hodge-podge of the author’s essays, poetry, creative nonfiction vignettes, chapbook and zine pieces, and various interviews he’s done throughout his career. If that sounds like a lot to take in, it is. But I must say, Ramsey is pretty damn good at what he does, and each piece taken of its own accord is also pretty damn good.

  As a collection though? Like I said, it’s a lot to take in. There isn’t a central story that brings all these pieces together. No discredit intended to Ramsey, but it was jarring to read three or four chapters of what seems like a novel, then jump ship to something else completely for a while, then jump again — etc. There are illustrations, pictures, and various graphical elements strung throughout the book to (perhaps) indicate separation between each piece, but I was still left scratching my head a good many times. But if you can get past that and just go with it, the stories are very good. They are sectioned off into essays, poetry, and so forth, so you can always use that good ole’ TOC to gain your bearings should you lose them.

  Now, about the writing. Ramsey is at his best describing scenes involving nature, though the topics he covers are extremely various and too numerous to cover here. For example, from the piece titled Farthing Street: “The weeds in the lawn are tall and heading out to seed, the view from our front stoop full of henbit, broadleaf plantain and pepperweed. The purple flowers of the henbit are easy to spot from any window in the house, forming a raised mat of contrast against a green understory.” If this passage got you going, then you should definitely check out Ramsey’s work.

  I, personally, like Ramsey’s prose (poetry, too). His sentences have that string of conscious words-shoving-words-ahead-of-them quality that some of our best authors have. It reminded me of Faulkner or McCarthy without the length at times, while at others it was all Thoreau or Berry. I’m not saying he is or isn’t on the level of these guys, but their stamp is allover his work.

  Still, I can’t get past the structure of this book—maybe because it isn’t a book but a collection. It says so right on the front cover. Though the illustrations seem to separate different pieces, I’m not sure what some of them are alluding to, or how they fit in with the pages they are backing. I also felt the interviews in the back of the book didn’t quite jibe with the rest of the package.

  Overall, I’m pretty sure I will read Ramsey again. But I think next time I’ll look for a more conventional format in which to view his work. There are just too many distractions in All I Want to do is Live for repeated viewings. But, I suspect, it is a good primer for his work.

  So now, all I want to do, is read.

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