What I Think I Did

by Larry Woiwode

"What I Think I Did is two stories at once: a gripping account of surviving the severest recorded winter in North Dakota's history (1996), and the equally compelling tale of Woiwode's hungry years as an actor and writer leading up to the publication of his first novel. As with all of Woiwode's writing, however, there are wells and eddies and surfaces along the way that make reading him pure joy. Act One, Snow with Tints of Then, revolves around the purchase, installation and increasingly desperate feeding of a giant wood-burning furnace to heat the buildings on Woiwode's farm during the record snow and cold of the winter months. Feeding the furnace and keeping it running become a real life or death obsession for Woiwode, and this struggle in turn becomes both a central metaphor for exploring the sources of his craft as a writer and a means of joining the disparate threads of his boyhood and family life. Act Two, Then with Tints of Snow, recounts, in a more chronological fashion, his un