Blueberry Fool

"Thom Rock has crafted an enchanting meditation on some of life's urgent questions: What is memory, really? How does belief work in a world full of inevitable loss? When we seek meaning, do we need to look further than a patch of wild blueberries in summer? The language is vivid and beautifully cadenced; the stories tenderly told. Blueberry Fool consoles the distracted mind and opens it to a wondrous natural world, where asking is enough."

-Carolyn M. Bardos, author of Yesterday's Daybreak



"The wild blueberry, sometimes called starberry, is Thom Rock's North Star, which he follows into a deep exploration of faith, family, and identity. Rock's essays shine with the incandescence of the celestial berries themselves. If you've ever tasted the tart sweetness of summer or felt the bittersweet memory of loved ones you've lost, you'll sense kindred spirit in these gentle, powerful meditations."

-KRISTEN LAINE, author of American Band



"Thom Rock's Blueberry Fool is, I think, best read alone and aloud. Alone, because it invites to memory that is deeper than reminiscence. Aloud, because its crafted words are viscerally arresting. Rock encourages his reader to plunge into memories of meaning beyond the obvious. Just as Augustine saw memory, not as simply recovering past facts, but as leading toward the deepest insights, so Rock teases language to recapture the inchoate tastes and sounds of lived life. Berries and birds, fireflies and hummingbirds flicker through these pages, enticing the reader to mine the depths of the past experiences that make us who we are, of hopes adumbrated in memory and inscribed in a faith that abides in the unstable stability of questioning what those experiences mean. Rock's meditations, grounded as they are in backyard paths through blueberry fields, remind one of the evocations of nature in Matsuo Bash_'s haiku poetry, or the ecological visions of Aldo Leopold's Sand Country Almanac. These words are to be savored-like Rock's preserved berries and pickled cucumbers in midwinter. Read his meditations slowly, attentive to the flavor of words that call forth the memories from which we have constructed our sense of who we are and how we embrace faith-not as adhered belief but as the embodiment and reflection of our own lived experiences. If someday we get to hang out with sympathetic souls in heaven, I believe that Thom Rock will likely find himself in the company of Augustine, Bash_, and Leopold."



-John P. Keenan, author of The Meaning of Christ: A Mahayana Theology and, together with Linda K. Keenan, of I Am / No Self: A Christian Commentary on the Heart Sutra