Standpipe: Delivering Water in Flint
BELT/ 2021
Standpipe is a brief, elegant memoir of the author's work as a Red Cross volunteer delivering emergency water to residents of Flint, Michigan. A collection of short essays and vignettes, Standpipe sets the struggles of a city in crisis against the author's personal journey as his mother declines into dementia and eventual death, just before the emergency is declared in Flint. Written with a poet's eye for detail and quiet metaphor, Standpipe is an intimate look at one man's engagement with both civic and familial trauma.
Advance Praise for StandpipeStandpipe is an exceptional and useful book for our times. At once, it is a knight's tale of unsullied ideals, of Dave Hardin's quest to deliver clean water to the poisoned citizens of Flint; but it is also the tale of submerged American populations, American migrants of many colors and beliefs journeying within our own country, and come (somehow) to fitful rest in America's vast, often indifferent middle." — Richard Ford Flint, Michigan has a reliable witness in Dave Hardin. Standpipe delivers much to wonder in the “water wonderland.” Racism, poverty, neglect and a failure of leadership have horrific consequences. A very worthy and timely read."--Thomas Lynch, author of The Undertaking: Life Stories from a Dismal Trade |
Hardin on Writing Standpipe'You're On Your Own': How to Write about an American Crisis
David Hardin on Telling the Story of Flint, Michigan Recently, I listened to a conversation between New Yorker editor David Remnick and Dr. Atul Gawande, a surgeon, MacArthur Fellow, Harvard professor, and medical advisor to President Joe Biden. They discussed the looming difficulties of vaccinating a nation as diverse and divided as the United States. Remnick and Gwande addressed the challenges of manufacturing and distribution, keeping and accessing accurate records, and ramping up from scratch a federal response to what is one of our gravest national threats in the last century. They were recounting, it occurred to me, a story many Americans seem to have forgotten: one of people coming together as a community. A once familiar story of the essential virtues of commonwealth. - More on LitHub
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More Praise for Standpipe
The short diarylike entries are like sun shining through trees, revealing light and shadow, hope and despair. They are artful yet concise, candid yet snappy as gum, and vary between personal grief and the grief Hardin witnesses, sometimes within the same paragraph, drawing the thinnest line from his middle-class upbringing to the “grinding, generational poverty” of the residents he serves. The fugitive quality of the book’s structure and plot also parallels the arc of his strained on-again, off-again relationship with his mother, who eventually descends into dementia."--The Washington Post
In exquisitely chiseled vignettes, Hardin captures the deplorable conditions in Flint and the injustices that have plagued it for generations. In short, self-contained chapters, Hardin evokes the anguish, as well as the quotidian existence, of Flint’s residents, and entwines reflections of his own unhappy childhood and difficult relationship with his mother, who was declining into dementia and eventually left him to work through his grief." --The National Book Review
A standpipe is a temporary mechanism for delivering water where it is not otherwise available. In 2016, former schoolteacher David Hardin trained as a Red Cross Disaster Relief Volunteer to become a human standpipe, delivering fresh bottled water to the residents of Flint, Michigan, whose government had been poisoning them with lead in their water supply for more than two years. This on-the-ground account of the people, social circumstances, and economic conditions of this once vibrant and now devastated city is a story of redemption, but not so much for the people of Flint as for the author himself. By providing for the essential needs of others, Hardin uncovers a path to heal his own legacy of filial estrangement and personal loss.”--Vince Carducci, publisher, Motown Review of Art
Dreaming Bob Wills
Dave
Praise for Dreaming Bob Wills
Dave Hardin's poetry reaches the "inner in" of our humanity. His unique images and poetic ways of capturing true human emotions is uncanny and totally original. I have long enjoyed his poetry, and I appreciate his love for the craft. Dave is a fine poet who should be read." M. L. Liebler, author of I Want to Be Once (Wayne State Press) and editor of Heaven Was Detroit: Essays on Detroit Music and the RESPECT: Poets on Detroit Music (2020 Michigan State Press). David Hardin loves language and music, as a poet should, and his virtuosity with both shines through the poems in Dreaming Bob Wills, taking the reader on a journey across America, but firmly centered on the state of Michigan. His erudition, too, informs his work, drawing easily on his eclectic knowledge of world literature and culture. This is a book to be savored, like good sipping whiskey. --Arnold Johnston, author of Where We’re Going, Where We’ve Been (poems) and The Witching Voice: A Novel from the Life of Robert Burns |