Acclaimed essayist Steven Church reflects on work, fear and fatherhood in a series of encounters that defy comfortable answers. From the depths of a tourist-trap gold mine to the edges of a meteor crater to the jagged landscapes of marriage and parenting, shift and flux are always front and center. In his sixth book of nonfiction, Church illustrates once again the immeasurable value of an open, essayistic mind.
Advance praise
“Steven Church is one of the bravest and fiercest essayists we’ve got. I’m Just Getting to the Disturbing Part made me think hard about the true nature of love, fatherhood, and fear. He takes us along road “whiskered in snow” and deep into the mineshafts where the heart’s confusions echo. I was stunned by the candor and eloquence of these pieces. I felt a lot less alone reading them. That’s what I’m always looking for in a book.” — Steve Almond, author of Bad Stories and Against Football
“There’s a moment in nearly every one of Steven Church’s essays where the inner and outer world come together or come in conflict — a moment when what the essayist is thinking, the way he considers himself, changes, and he is left to confront something he didn’t know was there. This is the power of I’m Just Getting to the Disturbing Part, Church’s decision not to reveal himself so much as to let himself be revealed. In this collection, he takes us to his own dark places, writing about responsibility, to ourselves and to others, and what it means. His conclusion? That there is no secret, no magic incantation, just our day-to-day existence, which means that we are always figuring it out as we go along.” — David L. Ulin, author of Sidewalking and The Lost Art of Reading
“An illuminating guided tour of the darker reaches of parental fears and anxieties. Steven Church is the everyperson essayist noticing and apprehending the fringes of existence, even when things don’t happen, or don’t happen the way he fears, and then scrutinizing them through his vigilant, agitated, and ultimately settling mind.” — Patrick Madden, author of Submlime Physick and Quotidiana
“Steven Church explores his varied work history for rich stories about the fears and challenges of becoming a responsible adult, but ultimately it’s his heart, particularly when it comes to becoming a parent, that yields the greatest wealth. A powerful and deeply moving collection of essays that shows a writer working at the top of his craft.” — Jerald Walker, author of The World in Flames: A Black Boyhood in a White Supremacist Doomsday Cult
“Steven Church seems to write his consciousness directly onto the page.” — Kristen Radtke, author of Imagine Wanting Only This
“In Steven Church’s latest collection, I’m Just Getting to the Disturbing Part, we are given Church’s singular and signature voice, which is driven by a deep well of curiosity for the profound, the layered, the inextricable. He is a storyteller at heart, but he never veers from the memoirist’s credo of fidelity to truth during the exploration of the self. There is often a slight remove of humor, very finely done, imbued within these essays with just the right touch of the pen to the page. These essays pulled me into their landscapes and welcomed me in through the ease of the narrator’s voice, and yet they also immediately sent me wandering through the landscapes of my own memories–as I’m certain they’ll do for you, too. At one point we’re told, ‘I have to learn to live with what I can’t understand, can’t fix, can’t maintain, and sometimes just step back and watch it move and shake and crash without me.’ Even so, thankfully, Church continues to search out and trace the connections between the imagination and lived experience—in order to more fully comprehend the world we live in–and we are all the better for it.” — Brian Turner, author of the memoir My Life as a Foreign Country and the acclaimed poetry collection, Here, Bullet.
