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Born on contested ground in Albuquerque and raised on a cosmology of fear and faith he didn't ask for but can’t quite put down, this Dad strives to reconstruct meaning in increasingly comic circumstances. He falls through bridges, buries ancient chutney in a Maine backyard by moonlight, and fishes for squid in the existential dark looking for something he can't name.
A former true believer starts writing the family newsletter and forgets to stop being honest. It's a memoir in five parts — theology, marriage, parenthood, home repair, and whatever comes after you've examined your life so hard you start to suspect the examination might be an addiction. Between chasing bats, conversations with beaver spirits and contemplation of Celestial Space Jesus, this Dad presses his minivan key fob in the driveway for no reason except that it's the one part of his day that works exactly as promised.
This is a book about what's left when the faith you were raised in dissolves and the wonder somehow doesn't: the sliding door that still feels like magic, the fairies you know are pretend, the family you built out of the wreckage of the culture you were given. It is profane, tender, theologically unqualified, and — against the narrator's own expectations — pure fucking magic.
M.A. Powers lives in Maine with his wife, kids, and a large rabbit. He works with his sister at Catalyst Press and, when he isn't fixing some part of the very old house that's always falling apart or running kids to activities, squeezes in some writing. If you need to get hold of him and he isn't inside, check the backyard for the middle-aged man standing with a thousand-yard gaze, wondering about life.