Award-winning author and poet John Terpstra launched his book, The House with the Parapet Wall at Redeemer on Thursday, February 5. As part of the celebration, he shared with a room full of Redeemer students, faculty and community a reading from this, his fourth work of non-fiction. The genesis of the book is a stationary store in Seattle. There, Terpstra buys a journal, leaves the shop to sit on a park bench, and cracks the pages\u2019 stiff spine. He begins writing; writing all about his mother. The house that is The House with the Parapet Wall is Terpstra\u2019s childhood home, one of the brick and mortar of nineteenth-century houses in Hamilton. The book tells the story of the house and how it collides with the story of the life and death of his mother. \u201cThey came simultaneously,\u201d he says, \u201cI just wrote and let them come together.\u201d What began as therapy would sprout the roots of his next prose project, the pursuit of which was encouraged by the editor of Hamilton Arts & Letters, a literary journal. His words are, as artist Frances Cockburn puts it, \u201cridiculously moving,\u201d and the audience sensed their depth. At a question and answer period after the reading, one man asked the author what he learned about himself throughout this piece\u2019s creation. Terpstra sort of laughed in referencing the fifth commandment: \u201cHonour your father and mother.\u201d He is more intentional now than ever in doing so, saying \u201cIt counts! And I know [my parents] will understand.\u201d That led him to talk about their passing with a striking and refreshing sincerity: \u201cI don\u2019t know what to do with death, really.\u201d His mother\u2019s diminishing health caused her to lose abilities at the same rate she\u2019d gained them as a child; it\u2019s growing in reverse. \u201cIt\u2019s not about the dying but the losing. Nobody wants to leave and miss out on what follows.\u201d His website is titled \u201cJohn Terpstra: writer and cabinetmaker,\u201d yet he avoids drawing parallels between the two crafts, calling the concept \u201ctoo cute.\u201d But the semblance is difficult to overlook. Both entail the shaping of unlikely parts, the drawing from one\u2019s environs, and the fusion of thought and senses. For example, when asked why he chose prose over poetry for this project, he answered with reference to woodwork: \u201cIt\u2019s like doing a whole renovation instead of furniture alteration. It\u2019s the longer haul.\u201d In closing the evening, Dr. Deborah Bowen praised Terpstra for his physical and spiritual understanding of \u201cthe passing of things\u201d and for his changing, yet recognizable, voice. She noted that people have had trouble differentiating Terpstra\u2019s poetry from his prose when read aloud. A selection of John Terpstra\u2019s books are available at Redeemer\u2019s Peter Turkstra Library and Redeemer\u2019s Campus Bookstore.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Includes reading from Hamilton author’s recent book","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"acf":{"sub_title":null,"post_featured_image":null,"post_image_vertical_position":null,"post_hero":null,"post_featured":null,"post_featured_order":null,"post_hide_me":null,"use_drop_cap_and_lead_in":null,"lead_in_num_words":null,"hide_recent_articles_sidebar":null,"hide_popular_stories_in_body":null,"cover_story":null,"cover_artwork":null,"cover_photo":null,"related_faculty_members":null,"related_academic_programs":null,"search_keywords_and_synonyms":null},"yoast_head":"\n