Book Review #18 aka Thoughts About a Time Long Past
Whip & Spur / "Dawn From Twilight"
By Dr. Iver Arnegard
This is the book I am most positively biased toward. I will just state that up front.
Dr. Arnegard was one of my favorite professors for my Creative Writing degree, as he could probably guess if you were to ask him. He has a more genuine personality than most people I've run across seem to have. Using some of my new spirituality jargon, he was - and still is, in my opinion- a more authentic and honest person who didn't mind sharing the occasional vunerable moment in times he felt he could. There were many conversations we had about random writing shenanigans to the occasional comment about society and the world at large. I could not imagine what kind of writer and person I would have become had he not been part of my Creative Writing journey.
I am coming back to both this short story collection and the bonus short story with about eight years between graduation and the present date. I think about five years since I last saw him and the present date as well. The last time I saw him was a quick breakfast at a Village Inn where he talked about moving to Alaska and how much better he thought he would feel. I have not really talked to him since then for reasons I will get into later.
Whip & Spur is a beautiful short story collection. If you like immersing yourself in the feel of a rural life where cities are replaced with nature and the noise of urban life is replaced with natural chaos, then you would really like this book. Each character of each short story feels so real, as if Arnegard is introducing us to our new favorite friend to talk to at a barbeque or out-of-the-way bar hop. My personal favorite of the stories within Whip & Spur has to be "Bone Saw," mostly because of the ending. But I won't spoil that for those of you who want to pick this collection up. It feels like a shorter read, but I guarantee that these stories will stick with you for a long time.
"Dawn From Twilight" was given to me during my Creative Non-Fiction class, if I remember correctly. This one was definitely more personal than Whip & Spur, even though those stories still felt like they had a piece of Arnegard's personal experiences wrapped in them. "Dawn From Twilight" is a piece mainly about one person's experience with feeling freedom and their prospective father-in-law's experience with the trends in the petroleum oil industry (usually referred to as Peak Oil in this piece). While enjoying the beauty of Alaska, this protagonist (Who I naturally assumed was Arnegard himself several times, given the way the character behaves compared to the way I remember Arnegard behaving. I had to shove that assumption aside several times.) gives his girlfriend's father a lot of time to talk about his observations about Peak Oil, or the peak production of oil and the statistical trends of oil production globally. It really is a fascinating piece that makes me wonder how this conversation has shifted or changed since we have dealt with a pandemic and several financial experiences since I was given this piece. This is another one I would definitely look up online and read if I was you, reader.
Honestly, overall, I would recommend anything Arnegard writes. But again, that is my bias showing.
Now, about that think I said I would "get to later." It isn't really anything majestic or tragic, unless you were to ask the version of me that lived five years ago. I haven't really had the courage to reach out to him again because of a choice I made on my end around that time. Our friendship was still pretty strong at that point. It was around that time that he was finishing up his sabbatical and the university he worked at during that time was making some renovations that needed him to clear his office. Luckily, I was able to get permission to help him out with that through two mutual connections in professors in that same building. And if those two professors I mentioned happen to read that, thank you for allowing me to do that for Arnegard.
After I helped out with that and saw him for both the second-to-last and last time, I felt like he was trying to move on from the university he was working at. While he seemed to enjoy his time there -and in Colorado as a whole- he seemed more invested on being in Alaska. I would honestly say that if the state of Alaska was a woman, he would have married her in a heartbeat. I could really see the joy and peace he had just thinking about moving to Alaska. I will heartily admit it was hurtful to see him so eager to move and move on from what he built in Colorado. But at the same time, I understood the desire to move on -or rather, move away- from things. Probably more than he thought. So after he left, I sent him a few texts and then quietly got rid of his number and most of the things that reminded me of him. Thankfully, I did not get rid of Whip & Spur or "Dawn From Twilight" in my self-destructive coping moments. And I am very thankful of that. More than I think I can express in a blog post.
If you want to read more recent things he's written, I would recommend his own blog that he updates randomly (click on the hyperlink for that).
And if -by chaos or by design- this blog post reaches Dr. Arnegard: Hi there! Long time, no speak. I haven't been the best person in the universe about speaking to old connections, and I apologize for that. Feel free to find me somewhere around the internet if you want to chit chat again.
For the rest of you, I hope you can get your hands on Whip & Spur and give it a read. It is definitely worth is.