Last week, I started reading Peggy Shumaker’s memoir, Just Breathe Normally. This is a book the University of Nebraska Press published as a hardcover a few years back, before I had begun working here. This fall, the press is releasing it as a paperback. Drawn by its beautiful cover (a swimmer gliding through cool blue-green water), I picked it up as soon as it came arrived in stock. I’m glad I did. 

Just Breath Normally jumps back and forth between two difficult times in Shumaker’s life: her childhood, in which she was the oldest of four children of poor, alcoholic, unpredictable parents; and, in adulthood, a period of recovery after a bicycling accident that almost killed her. The episodes in Shumaker’s life – snapshots of childhood and, years later, of recovery – are written almost like postcards. Some stories are told in a paragraph or two; others in a few pages. Many resemble poetry more than prose, with good reason: Shumaker is the author of many books of poetry.

Among my favorite stories in this collection is a remembrance of a favorite blue dress with translucent puffed sleeves (I imagined the dress as being the same color as the water in the photograph on the cover). To the author, the dress was magical, but perhaps not as special as words of comfort the author’s teacher whispered after the dress ripped: You don’t need a special dress to be special.