Minrose Gwin
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Minrose Gwin, Wishing for SnowWishing for Snow a memoir by Minrose Gwin

Published by HarperCollins/Harper Perennial, June 2011

"An eloquent memoir …. Gwin's mother is very much alive in this lyrical book. She haunts the pages with her own words, shakes webs from Gwin's closeted memory, and stirs up the dust of a life lived intensely, madly, and often painfully. Gwin seems unsure that the "story" she tells is hers alone, is actually true, or is even worth telling. Yet, it is this vulnerability and Gwin's courageous frankness that fully engage the reader, and this is definitely a real-life story we all need to hear." –Booklist

In this brave and beautifully composed tribute to her mother, Minrose Gwin accomplishes something rare in the craft of the memoir: not merely a record of a devastating mother-daughter relationship but a redemptive act of artistic witness as well. In telling the story of her mentally ill poet mother, Erin Taylor Clayton Pitner, Gwin looks backward and forward at a Southern family, linking personal and cultural malaise while also attempting to envision the person her mother longed to be, the woman Gwin never knew.

Erin Taylor wasn't always "insane." Her childhood diary from 1930 reveals a cheerful, observant Mississippi girl who steadfastly wished for snow, though "usually it didn't come. And when it came it didn't stick." From a dreamy college student to a young divorced mother who then remarried, grew middle aged, and began to write and publish poetry, Erin Taylor spiraled deeper and deeper into the psychosis that eventually defined her existence until her death from ovarian cancer. Gwin searches for her mother amid the poetry, letters, recipes, traffic tickets, newspaper clippings, medical reports, and quixotic lists left behind. She even conjures a ghostly "Erin in the office" who tells her own version of Gwin's memories. Written on a card table in Gwin's New Mexico yard over the course of 10 years, WISHING FOR SNOW (Harper Perennial; Trade Paperback/ebook releases; On Sale: June 21, 2011) is a haunting, lyrical memoir and deeply felt quest to understand the mystery of another human being's interior life.

WISHING FOR SNOW was originally published in hardcover by Louisiana State University Press in 2004.