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Threshold: A Memoir
Threshold: A Memoir
Threshold: A Memoir
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Threshold: A Memoir

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Our families and communities serve as the threshold we cross into our lives. Whether it’s a metaphorical threshold or the actual physical threshold that marks our front door, the crossing informs who we choose to become. This memoir is a series of twenty stories about one ordinary American family’s struggle to thrive across race and through time and space. From five-year-old Joseph Swope kidnapped and adopted by a war chief to my father blasting up U.S. Highway 41 with a turtle for a co-pilot trying to save a marriage, this memoir reveals what happens when communities fail and how they thrive. These are the stories of people who worked together and shared resources. There's the smell of wheat dust and sweat and the ozone that precedes a storm and there's the clang of green beans into a metal pot while friends and family sit on chairs dragged out into the yard where it's hard to discern the border between fireflies and stars. I can remember how safe and comfortable it was when everybody knew my name and they may not have always been glad I came, but I knew they wouldn't let me "go under." Perhaps we can retrieve that feeling in a new century.
Review: Threshold is a work that is substantial . . . in scope, ambition, stylistic polish, acumen and conviction. [It is] a sophisticated achievement . . . an excellent example of the increasingly popular genre known as creative non-fiction. Threshold is full of compelling individual portraits—the midwife Grandma Hendricks, homely George Colburn, and the uncaring doctor who commits an unforgivable atrocity . . . and portraits of individuals seeking to establish the connections that might create the community needed to enhance life beyond the survival mode . . . . It is a refined and stylistically polished work. Dr. Robert M. Luscher, author In John Updike: A Study Of The Short Fiction

LanguageEnglish
Release dateJan 30, 2013
ISBN9781301878116
Threshold: A Memoir
Author

Faith A. Colburn

Faith Colburn is a sixth-generation Nebraskan with a master’s degree in creative writing from the University of Nebraska at Kearney. She holds a bachelor’s degree in journalism and political science and a master’s degree in journalism from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Her book, THRESHOLD: A MEMOIR, took the outstanding thesis in the College of Fine Arts and Humanities award at UNK for 2012 and she received UNK’s Outstanding Work in Fiction Award during its 2009 student conference and several awards from the Nebraska Federation of Press Women.Her short fiction has appeared in Kinesis magazine and The Platte Valley Review and her poetry has been published in The Reynolds Review. As a public information officer for the Nebraska Game and Parks Commission, she wrote numerous articles for NEBRASKAland magazine, including copy for photo essays and historical articles. She also gained intimate knowledge of the landscape that often appears as a character/catalyst in her work.Ms. Colburn has spent several years gathering oral family histories and biographies, including a 100-year memoir of the Lincoln newspaper publishing family, with an emphasis on their use of production technology. During a stint with the University of Nebraska’s Research and Extension Center as a communication specialist, she focused some of her research efforts on the history of a farm family in western Nebraska that amassed 10,000 acres of land over several generations in drought-prone high plains region. As a communications specialist for a Lutheran social ministry organization, she spent five years telling the stories of people with developmental disabilities. Those efforts helped her learn about the glue that holds families and communities together and the wedges that drive them apart. She has drafted a fiction collection that mirrors the true experiences of people she’s known.

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