Response to Larry Woiwode's "Winter"

Larry Woiwode’s “Winter” is certainly a unique piece in terms of writing style.  The detail I noticed right away was the odd tense.  The opening phrase “In our seventeenth year on a farmstead” seems past tense, yet it is soon followed up with present tense verbs (“I decide”), making the voice seem passive throughout.  Woiwode is discussing the event as if it were presently happening, yet he speaks from a distance, detailing events that have already occurred (“unaware that we’re heading into the worst winter recorded in the state’s history”).  This makes for an interesting structure, but also a clumsy one.  It’s as if the reader has their feet on each end of a seesaw, trying to keep a balance as they read, the prose constantly switching between past and present.  This removed me from the story multiple times, if for no other reason but to try and keep my balance.  I also think this style caused Woiwode’s ending to suffer.  The story was meant to be suspenseful, the ending climactic, yet I felt the end was overwritten and attempted to be more dramatic than the event really was.  Perhaps it was language that bordered on clichéd philosophies (“Life, brief as a breath, over?”), but I also think that helter-skelter style had great impact.  We realize by this point in the narration that the events described have already happened, yet Woiwode is still trying to pass them off as some thrilling present.  If he’s writing the story about an event that has already occurred, we realized that he didn’t freeze to death trying to fix his furnace, so his false “present” is unbelievable.  If the story was told in plain present tense, the events would have seemed more urgent and I could have gotten lost in the excitement.  Also, if the story was told in the plain past tense, at least the piece wouldn’t have been trying to masquerade as something it wasn’t, and I could have focused on the events and not my skepticism.