FIFTY MILES
Also by Sheryl St. Germain
The Small Door of Your Death. Autumn House Press, March 2018.
Words Without Walls: Writers on Addiction, Violence, and Incarceration.
Editor, with Sarah Shotland, Trinity University Press, 2015.
Navigating Disaster: Sixteen Essays of Love and a Poem of Despair.
Louisiana Literature Press, 2012.
Between Song and Story: Essays for the Twenty-first Century.
Editor, with Margaret Whitford, Autumn House Press, 2011.
Let it be a Dark Roux: New and Selected Poems. Autumn House Press, 2007.
Swamp Songs: The Making of an Unruly Woman. University of Utah Press, 2003.
The Journals of Scheherazade. University of North Texas Press, 1996.
How Heavy the Breath of God. University of North Texas Press, 1994.
Je Suis Cadien. Translations of poems of Jean Arceneaux. Cross Cultural, 1994 (chapbook).
Making Bread at Midnight. Slough Press, 1992.
Going Home. Perivale Press, 1989 (chapbook).
The Mask of Medusa. Cross Cultural Communications, 1987 (chapbook).
Sheryl St. Germain’s Fifty Miles is an honest, whole-hearted exploration of addiction and its aftermath, a study of grief, hope, survival, and the cruel reality of failure. While St. Germain’s son Gray did not live to tell his own story, she manages here to tell it with care, compassion, and profound insight. Beautifully-written, deeply-felt, Fifty Miles is the story of so many of us who’ve fought addiction or suffered alongside loved ones caught in the net.
— Dinty W. Moore, Between Panic & Desire
These heart-breaking, candid and beautifully crafted essays reach beyond the death of a child. They examine the difficult work of surviving the aftermath. What St. Germain offers is not just her story, but the broader wisdom of distilling grief’s many voices. In so doing, she remains an artist of the highest order.
— Barbara Hurd, Tidal Rhythms and Listening to the Savage
In the era of photoshop and Facebook, we’re never been more in need of an honest and vulnerable writer like Sheryl St. Germain. With a poet’s ear, a critic’s insight, and a mother’s fierceness, she investigates the life of her troubled son and her efforts to heal after his death. This is a necessary book for anyone who hopes to understand addiction, grief, healing, or the human heart.
— Beth Ann Fennelly, Poet Laureate of Mississippi, author of Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs
This isn’t a book about failed relationships, or loss, or grief, or addiction, or parenting. It is much more than that. To give it a label is to strip away the beauty of it—how these essays dissect and interweave and meditate on the emotional complexities of being part of a world that constantly breaks our hearts. It is about love, yes, and guilt, yes, and pain, yes, and memory that clings and holds and haunts. Sheryl St. Germain has created worlds within these pages—some in the unreal plains of a video game, some in the fraught vulnerabilities of motherhood—where she unspools a life cut short and how to reconcile and forgive and remember.
— Ira Sukrungruang, Buddha’s Dog & other Meditations
A book to break your heart, then mend it again. In 50 Miles, poet and memoirist Sheryl St. Germain narrates in finely-wrought essays a story of a multi-generational family beset by problems with addiction that, far too often, proved fatal. Empathetic and brave in her reporting, St. Germain recounts a delicate daisy-chain story of sobriety and survival. Whether trekking in Alaska, hiking in Wyoming, studying glaciers and swamps, or traversing the Amazon, this author seeks understanding. She is the one who crochets the world back together in interlocking loops of yarn and enters gaming environments as a night elf healer avatar to aid fallen warriors—all intentional acts that suggest ways to cultivate healing and resilience. In 50 Miles, Sheryl St. Germain illuminates a phosphorescent pathway out of the dark cave of devastation and grief, back into sunlight.
— Debra Marquart, The Horizontal World: Growing Up Wild in the Middle of Nowhere
FIFTY MILES
Sheryl St. Germain
© 2018 by Sheryl St. Germain
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher:
Etruscan Press
Wilkes University
84 West South Street
Wilkes-Barre, PA 18766
(570) 408-4546
Published 2020 by Etruscan Press
Printed in the United States of America
Cover image: Surrounded By Hours (detail) © Bill Gingles, Acrylic on canvas, 40”×30”
Cover design by Carey Schwartzburt
Interior design and typesetting by Todd Espenshade
The text of this book is set in Baskerville.
First Edition
17 18 19 20 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
Names: St. Germain, Sheryl, author.
Title: Fifty miles / Sheryl St. Germain.
Description: Wilkes-Barre, PA: Etruscan Press, 2020.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018017729 | ISBN 9780999753446 (46)
Subjects: LCSH: St. Germain, Sheryl--Family. | Mothers and sons--United States--Biography. | Parents of drug addicts--United States--Biography. | Drug addicts--Death--Biography. | Women poets, American--Alcohol use. | Women alcoholics--United States--Biography.| Women alcoholics--Rehabilitation--United States--Biography.
Classification: LCC PS3569.T1223 Z46 2020 | DDC 818/.5403--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018017729
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