Böcker av Michael Gills

"That day we topped a hill at noontime and the land fell away in a panorama so I spun on a foot gazing on the fields of blood-red poppies that sloped down to a far-off church shining, as far as the eye could see, blooming in the sun even to the reaches of the ancient church where the Camino winded, and the three of us, mother, father and daughter, embraced on the roadside with heartfelt joy, this after the hard ride. We sipped wine and broke bread in the cloister marked by the cross of St. James and it was good, this life." Finisterre, recounts a pilgrimage on the Camino de Santiago in north Spain, from Puente la Reina to the ancient cathedral in Santiago de Compostela, said to house the relics of the apostle James-Iago-walked with Christ. And from there the narrative turns toward the bluffs of Finisterre, holy site of initiation, the emotional, spiritual, and physical boundary of the fourth world. Where earth ends, the place is called, and so it does.

West, Book three of the Go Love Quartet, closes the circle initiated when Josephine Stepwell made the star-crossed decision to head West with the outlaw husband who'd lied up one side of her heart and down the other. Now, her granddaughter, who grew up sneaking peeks at a dwarf uncle's photo and all the other Washers hidden in her father's black Bible, runs away from her Utah home to Arizona, where she meets Davey the Dwarf in a south side Tucson bar catering to washed up professional wrestlers. There, with fellow dropout non-Mormon Jack, she is reunited with her long lost kith and kin, standing in for her father who'd long ago promised the blood father he'd never met that he'd return. Only he never did. In the mean time, grandfather Buddy'd died, was buried in a cemetery with all the rest of the Washers, and it's there the circle finally closes, with champagne and hard words at the grave side. Steeped in the Stepwell catastrophes of love, West interweaves the strands left hanging in the Quartet's first two novels. It offers healing and, finally, peace to those who have departed in a world of hurt.

In this book of creative non-fiction essays Gills tells us stories from his life. The title piece, "White Indians," is a "visionary memoir" that recounts Gills' experience as a participant at a Native American Sundance ceremony on Zuni Territory, New Mexico during July 2005. The ceremony unfolds on a wolf refuge and at night, tending fire, the howling is startling music that informs this text throughout. Sixty men and women dance and pierce themselves during four days, offering flesh to a ninety-feet tall cottonwood, wrapped and glimmering with thousands upon thousands of prayer ties. The breathtaking pageantry of the dance is offset by the shock of seeing flesh offerings taken in the splendor of elaborate costumes and the continuous drumbeat and singing under an enormous sky.As firekeeper, the narrator is responsible for heating stones for the sacred inipi. Later in the dance, a scarred old heyoka (backward/forward man) ushers him into the arena where for some time he moves among the dancers under the tree. His perspective is an insider's, riveted by every detail. The result is the first of a two-book work, seldom if ever seen in American Literature, that places this ceremony in the larger context of Native American prophecy-the return of lost white brother, and the end of the fourth world.