Kingfisher Salutes  John Keeble

John Keeble, author and proud farmer:
a Renaissance man for our times?

Keeble has published three volumes of fiction, plus a factual account of the 2006 Exxon oil spill in Prudhoe Bay, Alaska. He is a retired college teacher, lectures, and more than hobby farms in Eastern Washington. He deserves far more literary attention than he has already gained, but this is increasing rapidly, as many Keeble buffs are anxiously awaiting his next novel or collection of short fiction.

The notes below are from earlier reviews of  his books.

To date:
"Yellowfish (1980) is the story of one Wesley Erks, who is hired to smuggle four young men from Hong Kong and Ginarn Taam, a politically compromised man traveling from Communist China, across the Canadian Border and south to San Francisco. Erks's task is complicated by several facts: One of the young men is slowly dying of a knife wound, his relief driver is the tough, amorous wife of the man who hired him, and his car is being followed, no matter what route he takes, by another car whose occupants are waiting for the right moment to assassinate Taam. The novel tells of the encounter between the Orient and North America—dramatized and humanized by the developing relationship between Taam and Erks. It also has a spectacular Northwestern scenic dimension and an abiding interest in the history of the routes Erks is traveling. Yellowfish is wired to the imagination of the Northwest, and to the American character."

"In Broken Ground, Keeble uses the course of a construction project in the high desert of eastern Oregon as the basis for a novel with deep political, mystical, and—for its time—prescient implications: the impingement of American imperialism on its own native territory. Set in the 1980s, the project underway is to be a “prison for profit” where alien captives will be incarcerated in secret. Broken Ground is a novel about the seen world of excavated earth, steel, and concrete, and the unseen world of ghosts and spirits, bound together by an undertaking that expresses both the overt and political evil of our time."

The following review is slightly edited down from one by Mary Ann Guinn in the Seattle Times, on November 24, 2006:

Nocturnal America, winner of the 2006 Prairie Schooner Prize for fiction, is a supremely satisfying set of nine loosely connected stories that interweave raw emotion, spiritual searching and violence — sometimes the implied physical threat that trembles under the skin of everyday events; sometimes murder.

The stories they depict are both mundane and heroic. In the story "I Could Love You (If I Wanted)," Lola, a single parent, is at war with herself about whether to care for her invalid mother: "Lola did not want to bring her mother to her house, but that night she cleaned it as if it was foreordained. It was doom she felt, made out of the old contradiction: the necessity that she care and her wish not to care."

"The Transmission" is a compact, incredibly tense piece of work, in which the struggle to drop a transmission into a truck explodes a family, unleashing sex, self-loathing and recrimination. The battle with the transmission, which prefigures the upheaval to come, is so vivid it will make the sweat pop out on your brow.

"The Fishers" is an elegy to Louise, a city girl (Tacoma) who moves with her sweetheart to Eastern Washington and builds a life on a farm there. It shows how faint a thumbprint we leave on the places we inhabit, as Louise and her family watch a way of life emerge, bloom and vanish within three or four generations: "She and Ed had watched the number of farms dwindle. The money passed increasingly into the hands of a few educated farmers who ... became adept at buying up more real estate and playing the subsidy programs against their investments. But the old days linger as a memory and exert a force upon the imagination of the people. There is a form of deeply held dreaming that continues, inspired by this memory as if by a relic."

"Zeta's House" has the stillness of a prayer. The narrator visits a friend after his daughter's death, and recalls a previous visit in the family kitchen. As the family shucked corn, the mortally ill 6-year-old girl braced herself against the counter, watching. "One of her brothers ... moved to her and placed his arm gently around her. She put her head against his waist. 'It sounds like it's raining,' she said. Everyone listened. In fact, it was clear outside ... Having her there seemed a gift. It was as if she'd been sent to us to stand watch for a time at the entrance to the other, adjacent world."

"Chickens" is a crystalline recollection of post-World-War-II life in a small Saskatchewan town, perhaps similar to the one Keeble grew up in. The narrator, a minister's young son, grows to understand "that his parents, as pastor and pastor's wife, were positioned at the core of the town ... They were the spiritual sieves and the last wall of defense against the chaos of personal trouble and gossip." The settlement's postwar serenity is rent when a solitary German man moves in, starts a large-scale chicken ranch, and upends the old rhythms of the community.

The story, "Nocturnal America," follows Fay, who has signed up to work as a kitchen assistant on an oil tanker. The giant backdrop of this piece — the tanker, the ocean and Prince William Sound — make the humans moving over it seem particularly vulnerable and defenseless.

The final piece, the novella "Freeing the Apes," involves a man's tortured past as a U.S. government operative. A murder, a fire, a Kennewick Man-like discovery and a trail of mysterious and mystical symbols are left as trail markers to unfolding events.

Keeble at home, after a presumed hard day at work at the plough or keyboard

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