Joel Peckham Holds Reading of 'Resisting Elegy: On Grief and Recovery'

In this thoughtful collection of narratives, author and UC Clermont Associate Professor of English Joel Peckham explores the transformative power of emotional and physical pain from the vantage point of a husband and parent who lost his wife and a child in an accident that left him in chronic distress. Along the way, he fills a need for a brutally honest, literary examination of not only grief and suffering, but also of recovery.

Peckham will hold a reading of his new book,

Resisting Elegy: On Grief and Recovery

, on May 9 from 2-3 p.m. in the Park National Bank Gallery on UC Clermont’s campus located at 4200 Clermont College Dr. in Batavia. The event is open to the community.

On February 7, 2004, while traveling from Aqaba to Amman in Jordan, Joel, his two sons, his mother-in-law, and his wife—National Poetry Series award-winner and Iranian- American writer, Susan Atefat Peckham—were in a car crash. Susan and their oldest son, Cyrus, were killed, while Joel was left temporarily crippled and suffering from intense neuropathy.

The narratives in

Resisting Elegy

are the result of this experience and its aftermath. To face the truth of the tragedy and the truth of the recovery process, Joel approaches guilt, grief, anxiety, physical and emotional therapy, chronic pain, single-parenting, marriage, writing, and cultural conflict—somewhat like essays— that is, not merely in an attempt to express the experience but to explore, examine, and explain it. This is not a memoir; it is a study of the human mind in trauma. There are no heroes in these pages, and the author has consciously resisted the mythmaking impulse—that desire to honor the dead and to give tragedy purpose by telling a sad but inspirational story. Instead, the book does a great deal to counter our assumptions about grief and suffering— assumptions that do damage both to those in pain and those who try to comfort them.

In 2003-2004, Peckham won a Fulbright teaching scholarship to the University of Jordan, and in 2011, he was a finalist for both the New Rivers MVP Prize and the Sol Books Prize. He is also the author of three collections of poetry: Nightwalking, The Heat of What Comes, and Movers and Shakers, and his literary essays on grief and recovery have appeared in a number of publications, including River Teeth, The North American Review, Under the Sun and Brevity. Joel lives with his son, Darius, and his second wife, Rachael, in Huntington, WV.

The book has been published by Academy Chicago Publishers.