Riding on Comets: A Memoir, by Cat Pleska
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Riding on Comets: A Memoir, by Cat Pleska
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Riding on Comets is the true story of an only child growing up in a working-class family during the 1950s and ‘60s.
As the family storyteller, Cat Pleska whispers and shouts about her life growing up around savvy, strong women and hard-working, hard-drinking men. Unlike many family stories set within Appalachia, this story provides an uncommon glimpse into this region: not coal, but an aluminum plant; not hollers, but small-town America; not hillbillies, but a hard-working family with traditional values.
From the dinner table, to the back porch, to the sprawling countryside, Cat Pleska reveals the sometimes tender, sometimes frightening education of a child who listens at the knees of these giants. She mimics and learns every nuance, every rhythm—how they laugh, smoke, cuss, fight, love, and tell stories—as she unwittingly prepares to carry their tales forward, their words and actions forever etched in her mind. And finally, she discovers a life story of her own.
Riding on Comets: A Memoir, by Cat Pleska- Amazon Sales Rank: #1951041 in Books
- Brand: Pleska, Cat
- Published on: 2015-05-01
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.50" h x .70" w x 5.50" l,
- Binding: Paperback
- 236 pages
Review
"In voice, in person, on the radio, on the page, Cat Pleska has for years been one of my favorite writers. I could read this writer’s words forever, and still want more." Diana Hume George, author of The Lonely Other: A Woman Watching America
"The gifts of Cat Pleska’s Riding on Comets are many: it is fresh, candid, gently humorous, tautly lyrical, and deeply moving." Lisa Knopp, What the River Carries: Encounters with the Mississippi, Missouri, and Platte
This is a storyteller who knows how to piece together shards of story into a brilliant mosaic of a life. A joy to read.”Janice Gary is the author of Short Leash: A Memoir of Dog Walking and Deliverance, winner of two Silver 2014 Nautilus Awards and a 2014 Eric Hoffer Prize for Memoir.Cat Pleska’s restrained but graceful prose allows us to witness four generations through the eyes of the author, first as a child and then through the years that followed as her people live, age, and die. The details Pleska offers have the immediacy of truths well told, with a resolute eye and spacious heart, neither shying away from family and personal dysfunction, nor sentimentalizing the bonds of fear and love that held her family together.”Geoffrey Cameron Fuller is an author of the true crime Pretty Little Killers and the crime thriller Full Bone MoonRiding on Comets is pervaded with a razor-sharp honesty that brings heartfelt empathy to both the sweet and the wicked. I could not stop cheering for this spunky little girl who becomes a spirited and resourceful woman, a woman who never gives up on herself or those she loves.”Marc Harshman, Poet Laureate of West Virginia and children’s book author"Cat Pleska is a natural storyteller." Laura Treacy Bentley, author of The Silver Tattoo and Lake Effect "Image by image, each unquestionably whole and mysterious. . .tenderly sear themselves into both Cat Pleska's heart and the reader’s. . .and reflect, compound, and resonate with one another until they carry us forward like a leaf swirling in the October wind.”Chris Green, Director of the Loyal Jones Appalachian Center, Berea College "Like stars that become constellations if we know how to look at them, this fine and engaging book shows us how to find and read the stories of our lives.”Rob Merritt, author of The Language of LongingFrom the Back Cover
Riding on Comets is the true story of an only child growing up in a working-class family during the 1950s and ‘60s.
As the family storyteller, Cat Pleska whispers and shouts about her life growing up around savvy, strong women and hard-working, hard-drinking men. Unlike many family stories set within Appalachia, this story provides an uncommon glimpse into this region: not coal, but an aluminum plant; not hollers, but small-town America; not hillbillies, but a hard-working family with traditional values.
From the dinner table, to the back porch, to the sprawling countryside, Cat Pleska reveals the sometimes tender, sometimes frightening education of a child who listens at the knees of these giants. She mimics and learns every nuance, every rhythm—how they laugh, smoke, cuss, fight, love, and tell stories—as she unwittingly prepares to carry their tales forward, their words and actions forever etched in her mind. And finally, she discovers a life story of her own.
About the Author
Cat Pleska is a seventh generation West Virginian, and she is a writer, editor, educator, publisher, and storyteller. She holds an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Goucher College. She is an essayist for West Virginia Public Radio and a book reviewer for the Charleston Gazette. She coedited the anthology Fed from the Blade: Tales and Poems from the Mountains. Pleska has been published in literary magazines and newspapers throughout the Appalachian region. She lives in Scott Depot, West Virginia, with her husband, Dan, one dog, four cats, and with a daughter, Katie, in nearby St. Albans.
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Most helpful customer reviews
4 of 5 people found the following review helpful. “The Time of Perfect Mud Pies By Kandi Workman (from The Yellowjacket, newspaper of West Virginia State University)Riding on Comets, published by Vandalia Press in Morgantown, WV, is a collection of Creative Nonficiton essays fused together to create Pleska’s memoir. According to Pleska, she has been working on the pieces for this compilation for the last twenty years. Pleska has taken a lifetime of memories and condensed them into one grand story about her Appalachian life and experiences, exemplifying herself as a master of the tradition of storytelling.The memoir, at a total of 253 pages, has an introductory story and from there is divided into 6 sections. Each section chronicles the memorable and, often times, life-changing moments of Pleska’s life in personable scenes with the use of poetic lyricism and the nuances of the Appalachian language.The introductory story, “The Time of Perfect Mud Pies,” is vivid recreation from a child’s perspective about West Virginia living, family, childhood, and mud pies. This piece, the voice of the memoir, hints at the dichotomies life and death and happiness and hardships that are to come, setting the stage for the rest of the book.In the six sections that follow the introduction, Pleska addresses the processes of human experience: beginning life, human growth, innocence, experience, death, recovery, strength, and acceptance. Although the book at its base is chronologically progressive, the stories dip in and out of Pleska’s memory bank with flashbacks.The stories captured in “Images,” the first section, is reminiscent of how young children experience life in images without much pre-recognition or after-thought, lacking the language skills to express those images. Here, Pleska reflects on certain matters-of-fact parts of life, like the death of her great-grandmother, with great imagery derived from the memory of a 4 year old girl.In “Awakening,” Pleska addresses the questions that youngsters start to have as they grow, becoming more inquisitive by nature. She reflects on things like the question she asked her grandmother about the possibility of past lives as they picked strawberries. She remembers how there were so many under-answered questions, with much left unknown or unsaid.“Awareness” is the section directed toward coming of age, cognitive recognition mixed with child’s play. In this section, Pleska portrays how the pre-adolescent Pleska was becoming aware of life’s cause and effect relationships. For instance, her mother’s unhappiness and depression is more evident to her, as well as some of the related causes. The young lady Pleska was learning to read the signs of body language and adjusting to the world around her that was out of her control.In “Reaction,” time progresses, as does Pleska, the young activist. Pleska recaps different events, such as staging a sit-in for injustice at her school and speaking up about what bothers her. She is finding her voice at a time when a very important figure in her life, her mother, was losing her own.“Loss,” a very brief section, signifies the effects of Pleska’s father’s alcoholism on himself, her mother, and on Pleska.“Strength” is the section that exemplifies adulthood, maturity in age, thought, and behavior. Pleska retells memories about caring for two ailing parents, her loss of them, and the strength to forgive, accept, and forever love these two important people in her life.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful. ... Comets is the result of a twenty-year labor of love, and that is evident from the first page By Janey Riding on Comets is the result of a twenty-year labor of love, and that is evident from the first page. I read it in an afternoon. Even if I hadn't been an almost-neighbor to Cat Pleska (having lived in the same state, West Virginia) I would be telling you that her memoir has a unique and delicious flavor conveyed through language, is a treasure chest of sensory details, evokes the reader's own memories, and builds nicely from chapter to chapter as the little girl grows up. Pleska has said the book is like a series of television episodes about her and her family. You will want to tune in.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful. The Glory of Comets By John Tipper The memoir starts in the early 1950s, when Pleska is a child. Early on, the grown women (grandmother, aunt and mother) talk about a near-death experience of the narrator. The grandmother relates how "Cathy was sick." At about one-year old she contracted croup and turned blue, with a high fever. A doctor could not come because of deep snow. We learn a concoction of cheesecloth, fried onions and a sip of whiskey revived her. This incident is only alluded to once or twice more in the book. The myth of the healing story or rejuvenation operates in the memoir at a subconscious level. The heroine was on her death bed.The family is working class and moves around a great deal in central West Virginia: at times in apartments, other times small houses. Vernon, the father, a binge drinker, works for Kaiser Aluminum, and is charming and handsome. Cat's mother is such a good one she is practically an archetype, nurturing, intelligent, reading to her novels. The emphasizing of education will serve the girl well; she becomes an omnivorous reader, herself.As in many blue collar families, violence lurks under the surface, as when Cat witnesses her grandfather and uncle engage in a drunken fist fight. Vernon now and then comes home from juke joints angry but then settles down. For the most part, Cat leads a poignant, healthy and humorous upbringing. Academically, she eats up elementary school, then tries out for the cheerleader squad in junior high and makes it. She must keep her grades up and be a "good girl." There is a scene at a carnival that jeopardizes her image, but she comes out all right.When the Vietnam War rolls around, many about-to-be soldiers hit on her, and she is sympathetic to them but does not marry. She works as a waitress and enters college relatively late.The writing is imaginative and doesn't lapse into sentimentality even during the end. And one thing Pleska has going for her is an excellent memory and eye for detail (to use a cliché).
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