Manitou Alum/Director Publishes Book on Grief & Recovery

By Sara

Tuesday, October 25th 2011

Joel Peckham Jr. is a writer, poet, musician, professor, and a lifetime member of the Manitou family. He first came to Manitou as an infant with his parents, Joel & Jeanne, and returns each year, now as founder and Director of the Camp Band. In 2004, an auto accident took the lives of his wife and oldest son. This collection of essays tells that story and tries to make sense of it in way that might shed some light on how we all grieve and seek to comfort those who grieve.

“Joel Peckham’s Resisting Elegy is that rarest of documents, one that looks unflinchingly into the deepest kind of loss a human being can suffer, the death of his wife and first son and the shattering of his own body in a foreign land thousands of miles away from home. He asks, “Where did they go, that family? What happened to that man? Why am I not haunted by his ghost?”—and he asks these with such wonder and grief that readers can only respond in kind with their own wonder and grief. By such books as this is the essential human journey laid bare for all to witness and to feel in trembling recognition as his prose reminds us that our most urgent task—always, always—is to love fearlessly and without apology, to love so much, finally, as to connect the living and the dead, the grieving and the joyful. A radiant, miraculous book."

Resisting Elegy: On Grief and Recovery, is now available for pre-order at Amazon.com.