Engine Running: Essays

Engine Running: Essays

by Cade Mason
Engine Running: Essays

Engine Running: Essays

by Cade Mason

Paperback

$22.95 
  • SHIP THIS ITEM
    Qualifies for Free Shipping
  • PICK UP IN STORE
    Check Availability at Nearby Stores

Related collections and offers


Overview

Runner Up, 2021 Gournay Prize

Engine Running explores debut author Cade Mason’s gradual distancing from home and old selves alongside an increasingly fractured family doing the same. Starting at the beginning of his parents’ love and working past its end, he combs through memory to piece together a portrait of a family then and now: of a father, reeling after a blindsiding divorce; of a mother, anxious to move on; of a sister, caught in the crossfire; and of a son, learning to embrace his sexuality even as he fears that his own loves may have deepened the rift between his parents. 
 
Lush and innovative, these essays contemplate childhood memories and family secrets, religion and queerness in the rural South, and the ways rituals and contours of manhood are passed through generations. Most of all, we feel with Mason what it is to grapple with and love a place even as you yearn to leave.
 

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780814258507
Publisher: Ohio State University Press
Publication date: 12/05/2022
Series: 21st Century Essays
Pages: 192
Product dimensions: 5.40(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Cade Mason holds an MA in English and Creative Writing from the University of North Texas, where he has also taught. His work has appeared in Hotel AmerikaDIAGRAMNinth Letter, and Literary HubEngine Running is his first book.

Read an Excerpt

Generations (Like Surrender)

We're several miles from town, Post, Texas, where there's nothing much but cotton and the sky, and all around us it's the bare-slate land I'd once called home. I'm visiting from what feels far away-the Metroplex. I've ridden out with my father, and his, to load a couple of cattle into a trailer.

(And it takes no time to realize that I feel like less a man out here.)

I don't belong, I think. Not here, not anymore, at least. Anyway, I sure don't look the part: black jeans hug skinny to my legs, undirtied and near brand-new; my white Converse, the most worn part of me, appear stain-spotted gray along their sides; and my blue t-shirt, a hug against my belly, is just a shade or two darker than the bright sky that holds solid above us. It's the one constant, I think, the thing about this place that hasn't changed, that won't ever: that sky.

(And the country-here-now, I think, it makes me feel so small.)

I'm 26, and like a child, I'm stepping back to watch the work. My father's found an old plow part. It's sizable, near rusted. Half buried in the dirt. It's settled near the base of the leaning yellow house where we've stopped to get the trailer. Where several generations of my father's family learned to work, and hard. There's a picture of them here, what's tucked, yellow-faded, into one of my grandmother's many picture albums. It's the first generation lined and coupled up together, standing by the porch. My grandmother has made it her aim to document her family and her husband's family's history-our history-and she taps the corner when she pulls the photo out and shows me: 1925, it says in chicken scratch, above the sepia earth. The men wear suits with vests or else something close: a dark pant with a dress shirt and a tie, and they look, I think, like men. Two women of the three wear white dresses where the matriarch wears black, and every dress meets skin or dark hose at just below mid-calf. All eight of those standing in the photo arch their shoulders forward as if some great weight has settled at
the very moment they've been captured. Their row of faces stare toward the camera's lens, and the biggest smile is hardly one at all; their eyes must face the sun as they squint, tight, and their mouths appear as solid lines to match them. Even the youngest of this group-or the one who I imagine must be: the girl on the left of the porch's steps who can't be much older than 16, maybe 17-her body appears to struggle against itself, as if she's working to hold herself up from something unseen-some force that's pulling down and tying her to the earth. The man who stands up highest, on the first step of the porch beside his wife, he has my father's hands, and his father's hands. It's a small fist curled at the edge of a dress shirt's cuff-a tint darker than his face-cracked and lined with dirt.

Now, all these years later, my father's father-the man that I, my sister, my cousins and our parents all call Grandaddy-nearing 80-he helps my father raise the piece of plow. The movement shakes off dust, or well enough, so that it powders down and back into its place like snow. I step forward from my lean against my father's truck-what's bright, bright red, and, still, what's somewhat new to me-longing to do something, anything, with my hands. But Grandaddy waves me off with a nod of his head. And my father waves me off with a nod of his head. And the motion makes me wonder how they see me. If they think I might get hurt.

(They're gentle signs, I think. But there they are.)

Table of Contents

Part I

Exodus 3

Knowing Me, Knowing You 5

The Howling-Out 28

On Roadside Crosses 32

Generations (Like Surrender) 69

Part II

What We Are 81

Part III

Baptism 101

Axis 107

Blurs 123

Child of the Clouded Brow 133

In Case You Find Us Unresponsive 149

Part IV

Coda 171

Acknowledgments 177

From the B&N Reads Blog

Customer Reviews