Amy Hale Auker's first book of essays, Rightful Place, was the story of a woman finding beauty in her place, the Llano Estacado. Her new collection of creative non-fiction, Ordinary Skin, explores her mid-life transition with prose poems and essays that illustrate a new terrain as well as new ways of being in the world. Touching on faith and body image and belonging, these essays explore our role in deciding what is favorable or unfavorable, as well as where we some day want to dwell, and who came before us. In that touching, they feel their way with observations about current affairs, drought, mystery, and the hard decisions that face us all as we continue to move toward more questions with fewer answers. This exploration is informed and softened by hummingbirds, Gila monsters,bats, foxes, bears, wildflowers, and hidden seep springs where life goes on whether we are there to see...
Michael Ventura’s owned only one car his entire life: a green ’69 Chevy Malibu. Its wheels have crisscrossed the American landscape over more miles than a round trip to the moon. From Times Square...
Edited by Scott Slovic, James E. Bishop and Kyhl Lyndgaard
Price: $39.95
ISBN: 9780896729285
Pub Date: June 2015
Energy scholar Vaclav Smil wrote in 2003, “Tug at any human use of energy and you will find its effects cascading throughout society.” Too often public discussions of energy-related issues become...
A memoir of home, nature, and change in the American West, Light in the Trees makes cultural and environmental topics personal through a narrator’s travels between past and present, rural and urban....
From the Texas panhandle to the mountains of Arizona, Amy Auker has lived the cowboy life—as wife, as mother, as cook, as ranch hand, as writer. In fine-grained detail she captures the prairie light,...
From Custer’s Last Stand to the shooting of Bonnie and Clyde, The Accidental Historian chronicles one man’s fascination with the past and the different ways he has immersed himself in American history over fifty years. Akers explores incidents, little-known episodes, and fascinating sidelights from some of the most popular events of years gone by. Through artifact and antique collecting, writing, relic-hunting, visiting historic sites, and good old-fashioned primary source research, Akers has experienced and relived a great deal of the country’s historical panorama. He relates his observations with humor, scholarship, self-effacement, and zeal, enjoyably bridging the gap between academic and popular history. His anecdotes will entertain and edify anyone curious enough about America’s past to stop and read a historical marker.
Edited by Kurt Caswell, Susan Tomlinson and Diane Warner
Price: $21.95
ISBN: 9780896726550
Pub Date: January 2010
In October 2004, Barry Lopez invited a group of writers to meet with him, Bill McKibben, Alan Weisman, and Dennis Covington at the Junction campus of Texas Tech University. Out of this meeting grew a community that has since collaborated on a number of initiatives and projects tied to fate, community, and nature, including this collection of essays. To Everything on Earth is a journey through many landscapes. It begins with stories that look at the external landscape, the world around us, asking hard questions about the capacity to destroy what we love best. The stories then turn inward, into the human heart, perhaps searching for an answer there. The journey ends by addressing perhaps the central question of our time: how best do we make a home on earth?
“Twilight Innings is packed with sometimes painful, sometimes funny, but always insightfully drawn experiences that come from everyday life. Fink’s essays have a beginning, middle, and an end. They...
Davis had the chance to look back at America from Communist Hungary, and what he saw changed his view of himself and his country. He discovered that he agreed less with Thoreau and Abbey, and even less with European critics, and more with Chuck Berry—glad, mostly, to be living in the USA as he crossed and recrossed it, heading west from his boyhood home in Missouri to California and many points between. In his essays, he celebrates the achievements of Westerners in creating or reinventing themselves and their places, while around and between them, the American West continues to impress and astonish.
It is through brief moments in our lives that the spiritual most often communicates itself. Fleeting as they are, these small encounters with the “familiar wild” instruct us in dealing with change and loss. They are the icons that point not so much to answers, but to a way of living in the tension between life and death. Written as reflections, rather than full-blown arguments, Icons of Loss and Grace offers no final resolution to the questions it presents. Yet in these essays we may recognize that delight and sorrow are soul mates, that loss and redemption are a part of the same sacred ground, and that pain can evolve into grace.
