"I can rarely say of a memoir, 'I could not put it down.' I could not put this one down. Michael Hicks's story is marvelously compelling. Every life plays out in a sequence of intended or accidental events, and the pull of the Tao into places unexpected and uncanny. But here? Get ready. There are many surprises ahead." --from the foreword by Steven L. Peck, author, A Short Stay in Hell and Heike's Void " Wineskin is the least plausible and most compelling conversion story you're ever likely to read.
An astonishingly well-documented and vividly portrayed recollection of a singular consciousness at once alive to the currents of change in the 1970s in America and in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and keenly attuned to the transcendent and eternal. Altogether remarkable." --Kristine L. Haglund, author, Eugene England: A Mormon Liberal "Intimate and surprisingly revealing, Hicks's memoir opens to us a unique journey to Mormonism. The prose is compellingly and unusually frank. Readers will quickly find themselves in the volatile and intriguing era of 1960s and '70s America and its searching countercultural impulses. Hicks magnifies the intensity of his yearning for Christianity, leading to his LDS Church conversion, and the personal experiences that embellished and complicated his life. Wineskin is a real treat.
" --Ronald O. Barney, author, Joseph Smith: History, Methods, and Memory "Michael Hicks is a true polymath: composer, performer, arranger, scholar, teacher, artist, editor, award-winning poet, and now memoirist. There are no dull moments here. Some chapters are so rife with surprise and reversal that if this were packaged as fiction no one would believe it. The prose is brisk and detailed, the voice relaxed but revelatory, the tone both earnest and ironic. And the story, or rather stories--for there are legion--are absorbing. How could they not be, steeped as they are, in the rhythm and Americana of 1960s and 1970s counterculture and a young man's search for true religion. This volume makes clear, above all, that Hicks is a quester, with an insatiable desire to ask big questions, make connections, and create art, and lots of it, out of life.
Pick up Wineskin only if you're ready to binge-read your way through Hicks' topsy-turvy but ultimately redemptive world."--Lance Larsen, Utah Poet Laureate, 2012-17.