Listening to the River by Malachi Mccormick

My review

Handmade book from The Stone Street Press

Listening to the River is a slim volume (52pp), handmade by McCormick. It is stated as limited to 595 editions, but the reviewed copy is numbered 708. It is Japanese four hole binding.

This is a memoir of Malachi McCormick’s childhood in Ireland. It focuses on his father during one summer of McCormick’s childhood. It was originally written as a letter to a younger brother, but eventually grew into this memoir.

Malachi’s father was an avid fly fisherman. His entire four week holiday was spent during the summer along the banks of the River Suir in Ballysteen. The elder McCormick would pack his boys and his fly rods and head to “The Hut,” their humble abode 30 feet from the river. The boys engaged in the idyllic boyhood pastimes of exploring and skinny dipping while the father fly fished or tied flies,

The summer written about was one in which Malachi became witness to his father as hero. It was the summer in which his father stopped a runaway horse, wrestled a young bullock and saved a young man from drowning. These deeds, while physically heroic, were nothing compared to the way his father verbally handled someone who had been writing threatening letters to the elder McCormick. “It may well have been the first letter by an adult that I had heard in my life, certainly the first one written with such focused purpose. Its effect was immediate and compelling. I was thunderstruck by its power, its clarity, the unerring choice of words, the stunning force with which it made its point.”

The book explores the idea that sometimes memories are better than trying to recapture the feelings through revisiting a place. Malachi is disappointed when he returns to his haunts 35 years later. “My very psyche, it felt, had been violently shaken…confused as to whether it should let go the old image, or block out the new reality.”

This is a fun read, bringing one to reflect on his own childhood and father. It also reinforces the importance of writing about family and place to pass on to our loved ones.

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