Reviews - Cheryl Johnson

Reviews: From the Country of Home: A Remembrance

Joy Passanante

In an intricately interlaced tapestry of insights and images, poems, anecdotes, real and imagined letters, and memory-glimpses, From the Country of Home invites us to contemplate what Cheryl Johnson has eloquently dubbed “the beloved hyphen” between life and death. The book summons us to savor the sacred, from the grandchildren to the killdeer, the hellebores to the horses, and to reflect on what is divine.

Joy Passanante, Professor Emerita (University of Idaho), award-winning author of Through a Long Absence—Words from My Father’s Wars; Sinning in Italy; My Mother’s Lovers; The Art of Absence.

Judith Valente

Everyone’s life is material for a novel, for no life is “ordinary.” Each one offers its own measure of insight, wisdom and meaning, as Cheryl Johnson’s poems, essays and reflections in The Country of Home so ably demonstrate. The “Home” of her title is in many ways about physical locations, but much more importantly, it is about the spaces in the heart where we build a shelter for our lives and memories. I urge you to visit with Cheryl these places of the heart, at once containers for gratitude and sorrow, mystery and meaning, love and pain, disappointment and delight, and always a locus for the joy of living. This home is not a mansion, but in it are many rooms that will enchant us and fill us with wonder.

Judith Valente is the author of several spirituality titles, including How to Live: A Monk & a Journalist Reflect on Living & Dying, Purpose & Prayer, Friendship & Forgiveness and The Art of Pausing: Meditations for the Overworked and Overwhelmed.

Sister Lillian Englert

Buckle your seatbelt! Here’s a book to accompany you on your life’s journey. Filled with wonderful insights and images, Cheryl Johnson reveals with simplicity and wisdom the highlights and struggles of her LIFE. She expresses her memories with poetic creativity, inviting your personal reflections connecting your life with hers. What a gift she shares. I use her grandson Noah’s assessment of his own writing to endorse Cheryl’s book…”MAGNIFICENT”.

Sister Lillian Englert, OSB, Center for Benedictine Life at the Monastery of St. Gertrude (Cottonwood, ID), Retreat facilitator on the Spirituality Ministry team (Come to the Quiet and Advent retreats), Spiritual Director, and former English teacher at Bishop Kelly (Boise, ID)

Rev Dr. Kathy Kelly

Cheryl doesn’t just tell her story, she invites her reader to join her along a deep, spiritual dance into the meaning of memory itself. From her feisty, youngster steps finding beauty in the tiniest of plants and orneriest of animals, through a vulnerable and open telling of motherhood, you dance along until she imagines her last breaths. Your own heart will be rendered with joy and wonder when you accept her gracious offer to dance along.

Rev Dr Kathy Kelly (Rector, Episcopal Church of the Nativity, Lewiston, ID), BA University of North Carolina at Greensboro with a degree in music as a vocalist, Master of Divinity from Candler School of Theology at Emory University and a Doctor of Ministry from the University of the South. Rev Kelly practiced as a psychotherapist for 25 years prior to parochial ministry, former Priest in Charge of the Church of the Resurrection, Spokane Valley.

Dr. Walter Hesford

In a poignant scene near the close of Cheryl Johnson’s “From the Country of Home: a Remembrance,” the author visits her grandfather in a nursing home. The grandfather has a vision informed by his Coville Indian heritage. “Do you see ‘em?,” he asks. “They are setting up camp.” Reading Johnson’s remembrance is like setting up camp in a series of homes. Through poetry, prose, art, and blessings, she invites us into her childhood with her beloved grandparents in Keller, Washington, into her present life where we find her gardening and caring for her extended family, and into her studio where she creates the work we are reading. In her homey camps we are offered communion with a host of trotting and flocking animals, with kindred spirits, and with the struggles and joys of her people. Along with a beautiful and honest memoir, Johnson gives us a manual for embracing our homes.

Dr. Walter Hesford,Associate Professor Emeritus English (University of Idaho, American literature and the Bible as literature), currently coordinates an interfaith discussion group (Spirituality on Tap) in Moscow, ID, member of Latah County Rights Task Force and Emmanuel Lutheran Church in Moscow, and columnist for Spokane Faith and Values (https://spokanefavs.com/author/walter-hesford/)

Mary Clearman Blew

Subtitled A Remembrance, Cheryl Johnson’s book, in the old poet’s words, “Sings of what is past, or passing, or to come.” Lyrical and lovely.

Mary Clearman Blew, Professor Emerita English (University of Idaho). Western Heritage Award Winner for Think of Horses; Lifetime Achievement Award, Western Literature Association; Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award for All But the Waltz: Essays on a Montana Family and her short story collection, Runaway; Western Heritage Center’s prize for fiction, Jackalope Dreams.