National Honors for Brock Clarke’s Reflection on Death, Life, Pets, and Friends

This then led Clarke to think about the people he loved who were still alive and the realization that basically he wanted to write about all of them before it was too late.

The result was an essay titled "Woodstove," originally published in the magazine Five Points. The piece has been chosen to appear in the 2024 Best American Essays anthology, to be published in October 2024. "The honor means a lot," said Clarke. "It's a very goofy, very personal piece. That it got chosen as one of the Best American Essays of the year, well, it's encouraging, to say the least!"

The eponymous woodstove Clarke refers to is the one in the basement of the rural, upstate New York house he grew up in, and where "it was cold all the time." In the essay he recalled how his father obsessed, among other things, over the constant effort of trying to keep the house warm.

At one point in the essay, he describes how his father placed the frozen corpse of Buffy, the family's pet cocker spaniel who had died outside of natural causes, in front of the woodstove to thaw out. Clarke, who teaches classes on different forms of creative writing, said he chose the title "because the woodstove, like the essay, like art in general, is just one of many things that can't bring the dead back to life." ​

Clarke's most recent book is I, Grape; or The Case for Fiction (Acre Books, 2021), a collection of fifteen pieces, all written by Clarke over the course of about twenty years. Read more.