Memory’s Wake

Memory's Wake is a work of nonfiction that is by turns memoir, family biography, regional history, and photo essay. The account revolves around my mother's childhood and the abuse she experienced at the hands of her family, mainly my grandmother, during the 1930s and 40s in the Finger Lakes of New York. The book weaves her account with General Sullivan's genocidal campaign against the Iroquois, the cult of the Publick Universal Friend, weird religious visionaries from the "burnt-over district," and secret messages hidden inside bedroom paintings. It is also a tale that, while presenting the awful facts of my mother’s girlhood, contrasts that tragedy with her transcendent desire to fashion an idyllic childhood for her two children. Memory's Wake is a testimony to one woman's uncanny ability to stop the cycle of abuse and dehumanization she inherited--in the words of Gerald Vizenor, an act of "survivance."

Spuyten Duvil Press, 2011

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"Memory’s Wake is a brilliant, haunting masterpiece. Owens uncovers a tale of devastating brutality and intimate struggle with prose so inspired, so precisely, languidly beautiful it leaves you breathless. This story of one mother’s unfathomable hatred and one mother’s transcendent love is more than a personal history. Through revealing his mother’s trials and trauma Owens delivers us into the arms of our best and strangest self. The self capable of more than survival, capable of grace. Not since David Wojnarowicz’s Close to the Knives has an American writer excavated the landscape of familial, spiritual and historical wreckage with such intelligence and honesty. Memory’s Wake is a profound and deeply moving memoir, apocalyptic in the truest sense of the word."
     -- Cara Hoffman, author of So Much Pretty

"Derek Owens’ Memory’s Wake is a solitary son’s journey into the forgotten burrows of New York State’s “Burnt Over District.” He uncovers an ancient American Furnace ready still, even in its twilights, to spread the upheavals of trance, hallucination, and the showers of whispers that seem to rain down out of this so often overlooked geography. He lets himself be bitten deeply by the ghost-footed noises he uncovers and the unsheltered wonders of our claimed and unclaimed ancestral broods who ignited the firestorms of prophesies, dooms, raptures, and locks of talking hair spilling their secrets into the beginning of our twenty-first century lives."      
     -- David Matlin, author of It Might Do Well with Strawberries  and Prisons inside the New America.