In this deeply affecting memoir, Larry Woiwode addresses his son as heir to his emotional interior. With beautiful language and a poet's sensibility, Woiwode begins his story by relating a near-death experience with a malfunctioning hay baler--the kind of mistake that can kill a novice farmer. This episode launches a delicately woven series of memories, from snippets of Woiwode's days in New York as a young writer working with the late great William Maxwell, to his days as a young father, husband, and teacher trying to scrape enough together to buy a ranch in western North Dakota, and finally to the prospect of an empty nest and the step from death that he finds rapidly approaching. As Kirkus Reviews rightly said of Woiwode's previous memoir, A Step from Death is a work of purest sense and sensitivity, rife with scarred beauty, naked triumphs, and vivid storytelling.