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?
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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.

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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.

I trekked downhill to the Air BnB Haus in ski crazy Park City, Utah to listen to actor Geena Davis talk about women in the media. 

I had no idea how much inspiration could be packed into one small arty Sundance Film Festival room.

First, the venue. It's hard not to love a place whose logo is built out of trees. 

The Air BnB public room has old barn wood as backdrop, mismatched checked woolen blankets for curtains and axes sunk in the wall, upside down, to hold your coats. 

I'm smitten before Geena even arrives.

SEE JANE, her non-profit fight to get women into films at the same ratio as they occupy our planet—50%—has led her to embrace her data nerd. When she noticed women and girls were left out not just of starring roles, but any roles in Hollywood and TV, she did the math. SEE JANE research has proven that 17% of people appearing in film and TV are women. 83% are men. Not just starring roles, not only speaking roles, but in crowd scenes, too, women are a smidgeon of the total populace. If you repeatedly create worlds of 83% men, is it any wonder that "the more TV a girl watches, the fewer options she thinks she has. The more TV a girl watches, the lower her self-esteem." 

Thanks, Geena, for caring enough to plainly reveal what's been accepted in media since the 1940s: if women aren't eye candy, or propping up and/or longing for a man, they aren't interesting. Which tends to get me all steamed up. I may not be involved in film, but I'm a writer committed to telling women's stories. Women's stories are the ones I want to read. It's a real hunger, because most of the stories revered and relished in the last 2,000 years are men's stories. Can't everyone see we're starving for balance? 

She can't get 50% of the doctors in the US to be women overnight, or 50% of the Congressional members to be women, but she can get 50% of the doctors and politicians on screen to be portrayed as women in a heartbeat—by showing her data to media moguls and shocking them into choosing gender balanced casts.

To date, every studio who has seen her presentation gapes in wonder at the truth of it. They all thought gender bias had been overcome. When they hear how skewed their imaginary worlds are—17% not 50% women—they instantly want to right the imbalance. Geena and her numbers have that power over people. The media jump on board. She's presented to Disney Studios a dozen times, they have so many departments that need enlightening.

And here's another of her beautiful ideas:

Davis is not asking media folks to write more WOMEN'S PARTS. That would be slow and hard and generate resistance. She is saying, take any part already written and cast a woman. Don't change a word of your script. That is, women (are you ready for this?) are people. Women can do anything men can, short of turning into the Green Hulk.

And that's the message that a balanced media will give to girls. Not to mention the entire world, as more of Davis' data shows that 80% of all world media is generated by the United States. We are exporting dreadful images and examples for girls and women worldwide.

P.S. I haven't captured Geena's  humor. When executives from a children's film studio heard her figures on how kid's movies excluded girls, they said, "We have Belle!" Davis questioned the wisdom of having a girl with Stockholm Syndrome represent 50% of humanity. When fans told her they loved Thelma and Louise so much they took their own Thelma and Louise trip, she wondered which part: convenience store robbery, drunken rapists, risky one-night-stands, or the launch off of the . . . but she refrained from spoiling the ending for us.

P.S. Robert Redford, founder of Sundance Film Festival, has said, "There should always be an artist at the table." Meaning the negotiating table. Geena Davis is doing just that, bringing her artist's view and waking up her fellows in film.

P.S. The Air BnB Haus has the most startlingly homey vibe, if you ever need to have coffee in Park City.

HUGE P.S. The BBC just reported that the season opener of CALL THE MIDWIFE, with its largely all-woman cast, had more viewers than DOWNTON ABBEY or SHERLOCK HOLMES!

Beat butter with electric mixer for 30 seconds. Add brown sugar, cocoa powder, coffee granules, baking soda and cinnamon. Beat until combined.

Beat in eggs. Beat in as much of the flour as you can. Stir in remaining flour. Cover and chill dough for 1-2 hours or until easy to handle/not sticky.

Place powdered sugar in small bowl. Drop a teaspoon of dough into sugar and roll into ball. Place balls 2" apart on cookie sheets.

Bake in 350 degree oven 8-10 minutes, till edges are firm. Cool on a wire rack, if you can stand the wait. Delicious warm.

Makes 40-50 bite-sized cookies. Eat with milk & the company of your favorite dog.

Prologue:

We have tipped the balance scales of our homeland. We've infected the skies that now drench to the bone. Topple bridges. Blanket farmlands. Turn streets into rivers. Turn rivers to 20' walls of water whose pictures hang crooked and upside down. Whose people are missing. Lost together on islands that used to be cities. Whose propane tanks explode while floating downstream. Fire one year. Flood the next. Colorado caught in the tumbler of a weatherworld never yet seen, the hundred year floods on the fast track to ten. Damage random. Safety random. The choruses drastic--Come gather 'round people wherever you roam. Admit that the waters around us have grown. Time for--simplify, localize, tenderly care for the land and skies—changing.

Story:

A crustacean, a little lobster with orange speckled pincers, nearly walked under my bike tires yesterday, disoriented on the sidewalk. I stopped the bike—my first tour of the world after three days of pounding rains—and called to Jeff up ahead. The tiny red creature turned toward my voice, lumbering toward the curb and road just inches away. Jeff stopped only long enough to pick it up—as I cried, "You can't pick them up, they'll pinch you!"—just behind the head. He mounted his bike with the little shelled clacking crawdaddy held delicately under his right handlebar. Off they went for a nearby ditch. But the ditch was a phony, lined with black plastic and ugly pipes, so Jeff kept sailing. Past the drowned gopher town, past the sluicing horse pasture with an awe-filled flying crustacean.

I called encouragement as they picked up speed. "Not the lakes!" Jeff said over his shoulder, "Too close to the street." The silty man-made Rec Center lakes fell behind as he headed for South Boulder Creek. A quarter mile that mudbug flew. Earthbound, waterbound no more. We left both bikes at the police tape and sawhorses--Danger! Trails Closed. No more danger than this flying crawfish had endured. What forces had dropped it in our concrete cultured cut-off world?

We squished through the mud-covered concrete path to the wild-flowing creek, dropped down the wet embankment and Jeff set the dull red complexly segmented waggling kid down feet first in a shallow puddle. Bug became silt. The mudbug back to earth. And water. Hidden and harbored by home. 


Come gather round people, gather and admit and accept it, that soon you'll be drenched to the bone.

Epilogue:

18.22" of rain fell on my house in 2 days. 20" of rain is the annual average here. Until now. Now is the time for all good people to come to the aid of their country. My country is underwater. More rain moves into our skies today. Heaven help the cattle and horses and farmers and ranchers east of us. 4 people dead. 218 are missing. 10,000 refugees. Rivers roaring at us—CHANGE.

Tomorrow, my novel Tributary is one year old. Cake, candles and Doo Wops? Nope, we're going to float sunflowers down Boulder Creek just as we did to launch her.

She won the WILLA Finalist Award for 2013 in historical fiction, so thanks are in order. I'm feeling grateful she's out on bookstore shelves, and relieved that a new book's in the oven. 

What new book? It's a dirty secret. I'm cooking up mud pies. Planting little cupcake flags in the soul of soil. I did love taking a break from blogging to get this new book begun. But here's the real dirt on what else happened this summer . . .


A fuzzy browed baby house finch took up residence in the newly dug garden patch, to recover from a nest fall. Four days of friendship, shared watermelon, mashed up dog kibble and sharp peeps of hello, and that bird flew off across the neighbor's long backyard once we'd all assembled to marvel and wish her well. We nicknamed her Brandi after Ms. Carlile.

I feel like I should save this book for winter, read it like a seed catalog to warm my imagination. But that ain't happening! It's inspiring. We all do grassroots activism, yes? Well, Kayann takes you to its source: "a vast web of fibrous grass roots" that anchor her farm's soil with tentacles ten feet deep! Even though this particular prairie grass would swallow up her whole farm in a heartbeat if they stopped cultivating, and even though Smooth Brome Grass is a thuggish Eurasian invader, she finds it comforting. This grass that "thumbs its nose at all things human." (A fine metaphor, as some environmental activists have been know to do that, too.)

So I am celebrating the toddlerhood of my novel with great reading . . .

suburban gardening, and trips to the neighborhood Oz on my old five speed Schwinn.

I hope your end of summer blooms as abundantly!