Homecomings: A Writer’s Memoir
Date: August 30, 2023
ISBN 978-087195-475-6
Price: $24.95
43 chapters, 336 pages
Indiana Historical Society Press
Indiana History Center
Direct Orders:
450 W. Ohio Street, Indianapolis, IN 46202
Catalog: www.indianahistory.org
Table of Contents
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I am happy with the covers of my Homecomings: A Writer’s Memoir, which covers the fifty plus years of my writing and publishing life. The book, published by the Indiana Historical Society Press, will come out this summer, near the end of August. The book contains 319 pages and 43 mostly short chapters in three sections: I Indiana Origins; II Exploring German Roots; III Indiana Return. See this link to the Table of Contents.
I took the two cover photos (originally slides) in 1977, when my dad, born in 1904 in nearby St. Henry, and I visited the Krapf Homestead, built in the 1850s and sold in 1911 when my great uncle Alois Krapf sold the farm and house and moved his family to Missouri. My dad died in 1979 - he and I had never before been inside the house, which no longer exists. It stood just over the Dubois Co. line, in Spencer Co., right near I64. I am pleased that the covers include two different views of the Krapf Homestead, as I call it: the front cover shows the house from the view of the back road leading up to the brick house, with lots of wood inside it, and the back cover shows a view from the front of the house, overlooking the valley below.
Krapf Homecomings Poems: Links to Online Appearances
1.”The Local News”, scroll down to third poem of this link.
2.”Etheridge Knight’s Blues”, text and audio of NK reciting the poem with bluesman Gordon Bonham on guitar.
3.”Fall Day,” by Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by N. Krapf. Text and audio recitation.
4. ”He Portrays Himself on Wood," from “Lines Drawn from Dürer”. Text and audio recitation.
5. “Rural Lines After Brueghel,” a cycle of 5 poems.
6.”Back Home,” poem in stained glass at the Indianapolis International Airport, a stunner!
About This Book
A few words about why it took so long for this book to become finished. In the early 1970s, after I started writing poems on faraway Long Island, some small magazines asked me to write short essays about what I was doing and why. I enjoyed writing such essays and eventually continued to do it on my own. When we moved to Indianapolis in retirement in 2004, I was selected as Indiana Poet Laureate four years later and more requests came in. By that time, I wrote largely to discover what I was doing and why, but I knew by then I had a solid memoir in progress. There were three earlier versions, with titles that weren’t quite right. Finally, I could tell the book was complete and the title that came to me, Homecomings: A Writer’s Memoir, was right. In these fifty plus years, I had grown a lot, came to understand what my goal as a writer was and that it was time for this book to come out. I learned a lot about what my mission to write was and want to share it. If you read the book, you’ll understand what I mean.