Books // SOME DAYS YOU EAT THE DEER, SOME DAYS...
Some Days You Eat the Deer, Some Days…
Notes on Jay Kirk’s Avoid the Day: A New Nonfiction in Two Movements
by Heather Shayne Blakeslee
EXCERPT //
While I picked Kirk’s memoir off the shelf at Headhouse Books in Philadelphia, it’s more true that the cover picked me. The description promised a voyage to Transylvania and on a ship in Antarctica. It offered a journey into the mind of Hungarian composer Béla Bartók, who hunted folk songs to transfigure into his classical compositions, and an exploration of the curse of fathers and sons. A little sticker on the corner said “Signed Copy,” and, indeed, it would be, if a half-assed squiggle in green highlighter counted as a signature, which I feel strongly it does not. But I wasn’t after a signature. I was ready to hunt stags and folk tales, gypsy fiddlers and curses, hand-lettered type, and a weirdo illustrator and designer who got a weirdo author.
Let me lay my cards on the rustic, farmhouse table: I’m a folk singer-songwriter who loves and sometimes writes in the vein of Eastern European folk music. The name of my first record is Bones and the second album, Cultivar, has on the cover a drawing I made of a stag with Amaryllis flowers blooming from its horns, birds nesting among the branches. I used to collect and wash off deer bones I found in the woods as a teenager and young adult in rural Pennsylvania, divesting them of maggots and mold and trying to make them gleam in some appreciative act born from a near-religious instinct. I still have on a shelf in my bedroom the partial skull of a young buck I collected in a field near Coopersburg, Pennsylvania, in my late 20s on a photo expedition. //
For full text and images, consider reading RQ in print, on a Sunday afternoon, sun streaming through your window, coffee in hand, and nary a phone alert within sight or in earshot… just fine words, fine design, and the opportunity to make a stitch in time. // Subscribe or buy a single issue today. // Print is dead. Long live print. //