I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned on this blog that Ted Kooser – Pulitzer Prize winner, former U.S. Poet Laureate, and all around writer extraordinaire – has a new book coming out in September. But I don’t know that I’ve mentioned any details of this book, and now is as good a time as any.

When Ted Kooser was a little boy, he spent lots of time with his grandparents – his mother’s parents – in the small Iowa town where they lived. His grandfather owned a gas station, and other aunts and uncles lived simple lives on small farms outside of town. Young Ted spent days fishing with an uncle, playing in his grandparents’ yard, visiting elderly relatives in tiny, immaculate houses with sagging beds and luxurious vegetable gardens, admiring his grandmother’s irises.

Kooser said he spent years putting off writing about his mother’s family because he wanted the story to be perfect. Finally, in 1997, when his mother was ill, he began to write. The result is a slim book – about 75 pages – of prose that he completed not long before his mother died in 1998. He showed it to her before she died, and she approved of his work.

We’re publishing that book this fall. It’s called Lights on a Ground of Darkness. The beauty of this book is that it tells not just Kooser’s family story , but the story of many, many immigrant families on the Great Plains during the 1950s – of hard work, of potential (both realized and unrealized) of families in which English was only spoken outside of the home, and of a way of life that died with a generation. It’s the type of book that every writer descended from immigrants would like to write. But I think Ted does it best.

Have a great weekend.