For those who want to open life’s envelope rather than pass it on sealed, you will find no better companion than Jana Richman. Her new book of essays, Finding Stillness in a Noisy World, provides soul food for end times. Couldn’t we all use a dose of soul food right now?
​
A sixth-generation Utahn and a gifted writer, Richman has given us four books rife with pleasure and trouble. She dares to take her seat right in the middle of conflict. Her novels (The Last Cowgirl and The Ordinary Truth) explore the particularities of family drama in times of drought, both emotional and environmental. Her memoir Riding in the Shadows of Saints simply claims the entire scope of Mormon history, on a solo motorcycle tour. In her new collection of essays, published by University of Utah Press, Richman’s voice holds such assurance and humility, the reader can relax and relent and recall what it is to be thoughtful in and about one’s place.

​
These are certainly not namby-pamby essays. A stubborn rancher’s daughter, Richman lives by choice in Escalante where Bill Clinton was burned in effigy on Main Street after Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument was born.

If you've ever watched a black sheep tear a family apart and wondered about her point of view, this novel is for you. Pritchett is a brave writer. With a poet's heart. Her generosity in life and on the page continue to amaze and inspire me.

"We brought the earth inside us," Ed Kanze writes after eating his first harvest from a new garden planted in the wild and wooly, dilapidated-summer-house property that houses both his young family and this beautiful memoir. "With the help of tarps, old bedsheets, stray bits of plastic, and one old shower curtain, we managed to cover our plants to keep them alive on frosty nights." His dilapidated new old house lies in the northern Adirondacks, where summer is as long as an eyelash and winters dump great slabs of snow on your roof. Where a garden harvest is never guaranteed. "It was a lot of work for not a lot of yield. All the same, we reaped a hidden reward that justified the labor and the suffering."

You are in for rewards aplenty in this generous, powerful memoir of a lifelong naturalist who takes up residence in the land where his ancestors settled and thrived, a land devoted to the co-habitation of the wild and the settled. The Adirondack Park is the largest park in the United States, a massive tract of six million acres enjoyed by wildlife and people, rivers and homes, bears and snowshoeing locals.

Touring the Adirondack woods with Kanze, you'll learn that "salamanders are living relics of an age that long preceded the dinosaurs." The average opossum "develops cataracts and arthritis and dies of old age at two or three." That when a veery sings its notes swirl "around and around as if pouring down a drainpipe." Chestnut warblers sing "Pleased to meetcha!" and the "black-capped chickadee seems a perfect, pugnacious little Churchill. It spits danger in the eye."

Humor, humility, make-do willingness, and blessed receptivity are the hallmarks of Kanze's Adirondack: Life and Wildlife in the Wild, Wild East. You see him and his young family struggle to wrench a dry, warm, insect-free life out of their summer-home-turned-year-round home, with much hammering and help from neighbors. You meet not only the local flora and fauna, but the family members who populate Kanze's past and make his present so interesting. The brief colorful view of his grandmother Florence who would "rush up to greet us in a paisley dress and flurry of arms and lipstick." His frightening Aunt Nancy who "beckoned me to the bed, saying, 'Come here' in a singsong voice that had undertones of power and lunacy." Much time is spent with his adored grandfather who "always looked like he'd walked out of an Adirondack history book." Many of the strongest reflections are by and about this fine man, "a man ordained by the sun and moon" to deliver "the body and blood of the Adirondacks" into Kanze's boyhood heart.

Love also resounds in Kanze's description of his children. He and his wife Debbie chose not to have kids until their forties. Contemplating this with some concern, Kanze consoles himself that "surely if I could foster a great-horned owl to adulthood with a mix of loving care and chopped-up, defrosted lab rats, and I could form tender bonds with skunks, I could muddle my way through the early stages of fatherhood." Imagine his surprise, after the birth of their first child, when he felt he had "become a sort of fire hydrant. My valve had been wrenched open, and now all I could do was gush and gush and gush love, love, and more love."

Adirondack is a journey of love on so many levels. A journey toward place, landedness, family, tradition and the difficulties of our mortality. Ed Kanze generously shares his reflections on beauty and mortality, embedded in place. Even the chance sighting of a black-and-yellow argiope spider in the hydrangea hedge along his driveway in October evokes concern: "Still, how long can the game go on? The days grow shorter and colder. The spider offers a model for us to emulate. Rather than focus on the annihilation looming, it exists moment to moment, flourishing on love and food."

I loved reading this book. I feel so well fed. I am grateful to have been in the company of Kanze and every bird and turtle, pondweed, violet and vole that entered his narrative. Inclusion and involvement—there is no better way to love your neighbor. To realize the earth is inside us. What a striking memoir this is.


Enjoy a Mountain Lake PBS interview with Kanze about Adirondack.

And here is the Wall Street Journal's review of Kanze's memoir.    

And a great PBS short on salamanders, with Kanze and a flashlight, at night.

America, meet Wilma the worm. And Baby, a velvet blue jumpsuit-clad plastic doll with a strangely bendable head. And dust fairy sequins. And John T Price, who knows how to bend a sentence like Baby bends that head—"completely backward, allowing him to stare at you upside down with his glassy eyes." Which is to say, the ordinary ups and downs of Iowa family life will amaze and sometimes smite you with joy in this loving memoir called Daddy Long Legs: The Natural Education of a Father.

You will also meet Steph, John's tolerant, positive wife and the mother of his two rambunctious nature-loving boys. You will never meet the novel John is never working on, due to teaching creative writing, repairing an old house with too many levels of decay, resisting doctor's visits (who needs the bad news?), and wondering why he feels so cut off from life (AKA exhausted) when daily his boys deliver muddy earthworms to his bed, shout at him to save every praying mantis in every Walgreens parking lot, declare a no-kill zone around their entire neighborhood (mosquitoes included?) and radiate so much joie de vivre in their buck naked red rubber boot clad explorations of John's back yard you want to lie down with him for a good long nap.

But no, the next chapter brings new pleasures. New views on family life that make you say "oh, yeah, that's it!" Price's memoir is realism that redeems. And we could use some redemption, these days, help pulling our heads out of our own sorrows. If you've never had kids, there is the added bonus of gaining access to the adorable and maddening and crazy-great things toddlers say and do. I loved sharing the insider's view. (And not cleaning up any messes!)

I met John Price at a literary conference in Kansas, and then heard him read in Denver. That's where I met Baby. And Pengy, his nemesis. And Gramma K. and her grouchy chihuahua. Do yourself and your dad and your best friends a favor—read this charming book and pass it along. Reading Daddy Long Legs felt like a huge nudge to pay attention to wonder and kindness and the release of self-interest. To join the family.

But watch out for Baby—that blue velvet schemer has Pengy in his sights!   

I'm taking a summer break from blogging, but I just listened to a superb radio interview and had to pass this on. Author and Utah homegirl Jana Richman educates, informs and enlivens the debate about pumping water out of Utah's west desert. If you love the West, our big blue skies and vast open spaces, give a listen. You'll know more than you did about living in and really loving the West than you did when you woke up this morning.

Leave a comment. 
Tell your friends. 
Post the interview link on Facebook. 
Get folks talking about Utah's magnificent "big empty desert full of life."

http://www.utahpublicradio.org/post/snake-valley-water-thursdays-access-utah

I made two lifelong friends on a journey of a thousand miles, Jana Richman and Erica Olsen. I also discovered the deep beauty at the heart of the state of Colorado. The quiet strength of writers. And the profound curiosity and kindness of strangers.

Erica hosted us at her place in Dolores, a little arty town in the southwest corner of Colorado. We felt gloriously spoiled, ate well, stayed up late, talked favorite authors, and shared the book readings with her the first two nights. Erica's new full-time job kept her in meetings after that. Wonder who had the better time?!

We drove ridiculous snowy distances to read at outstanding indie bookstores, during International Women's Week. And we actually felt pretty phenomenal.

We took turns quelling fears and triggering laughter. That wasn't hard, because our hosts for the first two nights were the outlandishly high-spirited Great Old Broads for Wilderness. You won't find a stronger, more dedicated crew of outdoorsy women anywhere. And they "do it in the wild."

The tour turned three introverted writers into extroverts, who spoke on air and fluffed our hair and kept our readings to eight minutes each to keep our listeners riveted.

We signed and sold our beautiful books, too. 

The trip held surprises. Rowdy old-time Texans danced in the bar in Durango. Wine flowed at the reading in Telluride. Crested Butte runs on a laid back friendly energy that soothed us on day three. Thanks, Townie Books, for giving us a most pleasant intimate reading experience. And then at last, Jana and I drove the long and winding road to Paonia, where we were welcomed by our own marquee!

Intrigued, one Paonia man said to his wife, "We're going to that Grateful Dead tribute band!" They showed up at the reading and stayed to listen, asked questions and bought two books. The mountain-clad rural town of Paonia pulled out all the stops for us: lunch out with High Country News editors, two farm goats trundling down the dirt road that led to our cabin—shy as we felt most nights before our readings, a home-cooked dinner with our host librarian, a hefty library crowd and over an hour of questions about the writing life. (It is amazing what a person will admit to when the question is asked just right.) Then, at our small off-the-grid cabin, heavenly quiet under a multitude of stars.

A book is not finished when the printer binds it or the publisher ships it. The little nipper still needs attention. Sometimes that attention cries out ROAD TRIP! So women pack their bags, check their tire pressure, consult MapQuest, put on sunglasses and go.

Three women launched a book tour to meet audiences and sell books. We fell in love with strangers' questions, writers' minds and the state of grace called Colorado.

Deepest thanks to Between the Covers, Maria's Bookshop, Townie Books, Delta County Library in Paonia, Torrey House Press, High Country News, The North Fork Times/Delta County Independent, KDUR and KSJD, KVNF, Tom Yoder, Nancy Stoffer, The Durango Herald, The Durango Telegraph, The Cortez Journal, Shelley Silbert, Libbey, Danica, Daiva and Laura Lee! And to those two adorable goats who shared the road with us.

"I have made no money. I am as poor now as ever I was in my life — except in hope, which is by no means bankable."

Edgar
Allan Poe   

Let me be honest. Poe and I both know firsthand hope is not bankable. Another year almost over, another book published, and earnings as a writer I have none. I haven’t yet succumbed to insanity with a black raven perched above me, dimming the bust of the Goddess of Wisdom, calling “Nevermore!” And yet, this December, this darkest time of year, when the cries of the citizens of the world—animal and leafed and wind- and wave-filled—shock me with their waning health, and I recognize the futility of willpower, and tremble at the ferocity of the world’s polarities, I realize my mortality and ask, as Poe did, “Is there--is there a balm in Gilead?—tell me—tell me, I implore!”

And here things decidedly brighten. Because no raven but a Sufi teacher flies in the open window. He’s cawing about the end of the world, December 21, 2012. Will we succumb to catastrophe this time, or start a geo-spiritual renewal, or wake up the morning after the newest apocalypse and find things are exactly the same?

Click here to read Amidon's superb essay. Click here to read Poe's "The Raven."

Look up. Breathe out. No judgment, first or Last, will end this “world of division.” Your openhearted view can.


Click here to listen to "It's the End of the World as We Know It."

imagine you’re in a dance. 
would you count the footsteps? 
would you tell your partner how to do it? 
or does your heart tell your feet 
where to go?



when you see a great painting, when 
you feel it in your viscera, is it the paint 
you are responding to? 
is it the mind of the painter? 
or is it what’s evoked beyond paint 
and painter?



in a forest, in a stand of countless trees, on a clouded afternoon with no one near, what is greater, your sense of being you and lost, 



or standing among giants? 
out of control.

for writers—and it takes a long while—you learn to shift your allegiance from language and control and showing off and longing to be known, to serving the powers that move through you. 

nothing and everything counts. nothing and everything tell you to proceed without assurances.