Living in the Woods in a Tree:
Remembering Blaze Foley
Sybil Rosen
The dead have a long reach. And they can
be patient. They wait till you are ready, and then they seep
back into your heart and crack it open. They ooze out of the
tissue where you�ve hidden them away and insist on being
known again.
So begins Sybil Rosen's memoir of Texas music legend Blaze
Foley, whose insistent ghost compelled her to retrace their
steps together and make peace with a forgotten past.
Living in the Woods in a Tree: Remembering Blaze Foley
is Rosen's attempt to come to terms with Foley's mystique as
the homeless 
"Duct Tape Messiah," and her
reluctant role in the creation of his myth. Set into motion
by the filming of the Austin-based documentary film Blaze
Foley Inside, Rosen's journey - both past and present -
offers a portrait of his earlier incarnation: the shy hippie
musician who called himself Depty Dawg. The search for
Depty's memory begins with her account of their druid-like
idyll in a tree house without walls in the west Georgia
pinewoods in the summer of 1975. Here Depty Dawg began to
write songs and dream up the life and legend of Blaze Foley.
The memoir revisits the lovers' adventuresome hitchhike to
Austin, Texas, where they try unsuccessfully to jumpstart
Blaze Foley's career, and follows them on to Chicago, where
their parting inspired his best-loved lament, "If I Could
Only Fly," later recorded by Willie Nelson, Merle Haggard,
Kimmie Rhodes, and Joe Nichols. With the help of Austin
musicians Gurf Morlix, Mandy Mercier, and Lost John Casner,
Rosen explores her lost love's last decade in Texas,
grappling with his tragic fate and her own grief and regret.
Her tracing of his unending impact on her life navigates a
lovers' roadmap along the permeable boundary between life and
death. Using Blaze's song lyrics and letters to her as a
compass, Rosen offers a glimpse of the healing that can
reside in remembering love.
"Living in the
Woods in a Tree is perhaps the most complete vision of the
Duct Tape Messiah as we're likely to get, and Rosen portrays
a complex, confounding subject with a simplicity and
seductiveness that's all too rare."
...Jim Caliguiri
The Austin Chronicle 10/31/08
"...a vividly evocative chronicle of late 1970s
counterculture, and a poetic discourse on self-discovery,
creativity, and love."
...Bliss
The Pasadena Weekly 12/11/08
"Rosen writes with the tenderness and heartache of a great
country song."
...Nina Shengold
The Chronogram 4/09
Nominated for the 45th Georgia
Author of the Year Award (GAYA)
Creative Nonfiction Memoir
