My gauge on how the writing of these writers may come to impact me personally has been brought more into focus by the letters between Annie Dillard and Gretel Ehrlich. The first letter I read through expressed Dillard’s enthusiasm for Ehrlich’s then new book, Questions of Heaven, and in that letter, Dillard remarks on her own project about  her intertwining thought on “Israel and ancient China.” My brain flipped over in surprise, because I’ve had similar conversations with a close friend of mine. I finished Ehrlich’s The Future of Ice over the winter break, and my curiosity hums over the Buddhist undertones in the writing of Ehrlich, a practicing Buddhist. The hum once became so loud in my head that when I visited family in Denver, Colorado, I stopped by the Shambhala Meditation Center early in the morning on New Year’s Day for tea. And for the past year or so, I’ve delved curiously into Israeli history and Jewish culture. Behold, in front of me, the handwritten thoughts of Annie Dillard writing about the parallels of Israel’s history in response to Gretel Ehrlich’s Questions of Heaven.

Way cool. To me, at least.

of ice, of sun, of glaciers.

I am reminded of the curious insights in simple poems

and their gifts to understanding.

When I first accepted Dr. Warner’s offer to work in the Sowell Collection for the 2011-2012 academic year, I never thought I would find myself seated in the Holden Reading Room, casually skimming through the correspondence of Hoagland and Ehrlich in relation to either Nature Classics, John Muir, or their own individual efforts to write and publish. Yet what initially began as a job entirely devoted to the conference in April has blossomed into a fully-fledged component of my dissertation project currently in-progress. Specifically, my exposure to the collection has granted me continual access to a treasure trove of information from and about some of North America’s greatest living nature writers.

Muir, obviously, doesn’t fall into this category since he died in 1914. His work, however, was already a part of my research when I joined Dr. Warner in August of last year. A subsequent perusal of the collection’s archives brought me by happy accident to the correspondence of Hoagland and Ehrlich, the respective works of both authors, and the realization that both their names appear on the cover of my paperback edition of Muir’s  First Summer: Hoagland as series editor, and Ehrlich as the author of the edition’s introduction. Although the collection does not possess Hoagland’s original request to Ehrlich for writing the introduction, Ehrlich’s response is beautifully preserved on a postcard dated 28 May 1985: “Yes of course I’ll do it. & I’ll do my best. All the years I lived in L.A., the Sierras were my refuge. I tramped all over, summer & winter – not as rigorously as Muir of course, but I love the range & Muir astonishes me – it seems he walked all over Calif.” Which, judging by Muir’s biography, he nearly did.

Returning to my copy of First Summer, I find that Ehrlich’s fascination with Muir and his mobility continues. For he was, as the introduction admits, “a walker first, a writer later” (vii). Ehrlich begins the essay with a note about Muir’s penchant for walking that I cannot help but feel begins immediately after the conclusion of her postcard to Hoagland: “John Muir had already walked a thousand miles or more by the time he reached San Francisco in 1868. He was thirty years old. So it was nothing for him to walk the width of California, from the Oakland ferry dock through the Diablo foothills, across the San Joaquin Valley, over Pacheco Pass where he saw for the first time the magnificent stretch of thirteen-thousand-and fourteen-thousand-foot peaks (and higher) belonging to the Sierra Nevada, the mountains he would later call ‘The Range of Light’” (vii). All the while I am enamored by Ehrlich’s prose about Muir’s writings with feelings of lushness, rhapsody, and vividness – the very words she first used to describe the book to Hoagland. I have never actually visited the Yosemite Valley; the closest I have ever come was San Francisco at the tail-end of a summer road trip. Yet the power of Ehrlich’s own words about Muir’s writings have put me there. A remove from a remove of sorts, but it works.

None of these musings details the respective writings of Hoagland or Ehrlich. I’ve yet to read any of the former’s John Updike-praised essays or the latter’s respected works (other than The Solace of Open Spaces). Nonetheless, a brief exploration of two names from a paperback Penguin Nature Classics book has proven incredibly insightful. For my research, my dissertation, and  – most importantly – my own passionate attachment to a famous range of light in central California in which I’ve never stepped foot.

Big thanks to Biblioklept reader (and frequent commenter) ccllyyddee, who sent me his copy of Gretel Ehrlich’s The Future of Ice. I dipped into it a bit this weekend; Ehrlich seems to be walking that strange line between the physical and metaphysical. A description from her website–

In this gripping circumnavigation of the Arctic Circle, Gretel Ehrlich paints a vivid portrait of the indigenous cultures that inhabit the starkly beautiful boreal landscape surrounding the Arctic Ocean, an ice-bound wilderness that includes northern Siberia, northwestern Greenland, Canada’s vast Nunavut, and northern Alaska. Ehrlich’s expedition, supported by the National Geographic Society, documents what remains of these cultures, specifically the similarities and differences among them, including hunting traditions, shamanic and ceremonial practices, languages and legends—the ways in which they have survived, or have been assimilated, and how they are adapting to the impact of climate change on their ice-age cultures.

Ehrlich is fascinated by what she calls the ecology of culture—the ways in which the human presence of indigenous Arctic people is intricately interwoven with land, rock, river, sea, and ice. Depicting human-caused climate change as only the latest and most destructive of the ills and abuses first peoples have been suffering for 250 years, Ehrlich’s haunting and lovely prose portrays ancient tribes and traditions on the edge of extinction and captures the austere beauty of their various lifeways in the frozen dreamscape of the world they have always known.

A slide show of gorgeous ice, dawn skies reflected in open waters sweeping back to buttresses of frozen blue, an Inuit man in polar bear pants flicking a whip towards his pack of sled dogs. These are the images which Gretel Ehrlich places before us -  though, as she explains, all of these pictures contain stories deeper than one first suspects. The ice, so awe-inspiring, is melting; the reflection of the sky in the open water is likewise a reflection of a catastrophe for the Inuit way of life, for it is impossible to travel to hunting grounds by dogsled over open water; and the whip, Ehrlich stresses, is only ever used as a gentle reminder to the dogs, who are the Inuit’s partners in survival and who are never actually beaten.

Ehrlich’s speech is a powerful reminder of what we are losing as climate change progresses, and she makes powerful, eloquent statements. On her more-than-a-decade association with the Greenland Inuit and her observations of their existence on the ice, she says, “The extinction of tradition goes hand in hand with the extinction of animals” and “Gone is a way of knowing the world.” Our willingness to stand by and let this happen, she says, is “the moral equivalent of suicide.”

I agree, and her speech, like her writing, is moving and skillful. Yet I was left with an increasingly familiar sense of dissatisfaction at the end of the talk. Several years ago I was in the audience at the Yale School of Forestry while William Cronon, the renowned environmental historian, spoke of the environmental community’s “addiction to apocalyptic narratives,” and the damage that this addiction does to our credibility and appeal. He argued that the constant stories of overwhelming crisis that worked so well in the early days of the environmental movement have now become simply overwhelming rather than inspiring. He also argued – a more subtle argument, but one with which I agree – that narratives of apocalypse inherently come with narratives of ‘final solutions’ (his words, and he acknowledged that he was using them, “in full knowledge of the associated obscenity.”) These solution narratives suggest that we still believe in the static, linear nature of systems – that once we fix this one big thing, everything will be fine. This obviously disappoints expectations (the task of protecting the environment will never be finished, a thought that sometimes makes me want to jump off a cliff, but oh well….) and the underlying assumption reflects a massive flaw in our cultural capacity to deal with complexity.

Clearly, none of this is Gretel Ehrlich’s fault, and of course the suffering of indigenous groups, the loss of knowledge, livelihood, and relationship with the environment, must be acknowledged and mourned. But writers have to figure out a way to push the narrative beyond the grief and the loss. The human capacity to go out onto the Arctic ice and figure out how to make a living there in the first place reflects a tremendous adaptability and creativity, and it is to that sense that writers and storytellers must now appeal. And by ‘storytellers’ I mean not just writers, but the environmental advocacy community that was present at the meeting and that, through their framing of issues to their constituency, plays a powerful role in steering the course of perceptions and, by extension, the political events and social currents that surround environmental issues.

At the very end of the question session, Ehrlich acknowledged that we must begin to make changes “with creativity…” This doesn’t mean that we ignore the tragedies, but it does mean that we move towards looking honestly at the future and the choices that are involved. And it means that we move this narrative to the center of our storytelling efforts. Only by acknowledging that we do have these choices – that we can stand by and let wildlife and ways of life go extinct and that to do so is a choice for which we have responsibility – do we fully understand that our willingness to do so is, indeed, the moral equivalent of suicide.

Mark Brumberg, principal of Boomerang Booksellers, is a seasoned independent bookseller. He owned and operated Schoolhouse Books, Inc. d/b/a The Globe Bookshop, a literary book store in downtown Northampton, MA from 1984 -1997. Following a stint at  Storey Publishing in North Adams, MA  in their sales and marketing department,  he designed & managed the museum and on-line stores of the National Yiddish Book Center from 1999 – 2010.

Brumberg produced and directed the popular community-based author reading series, Readers and Writers, Live! at various venues in Northampton and the surrounding towns of the Pioneer Valley from 1985 to 1999. The series featured celebrated nationally known writers, including Tim O’Brien, Chinua Achebe, Linda Gregg, Jack Gilbert, Gretel Ehrlich, Robert Francis, Elinor Lipman, Allen Ginsberg, Amy Bloom, Robert Hass, Howard Zinn, James Tate, and Gerald Stern. The series spotlighted less heralded, but equally brilliant and vibrant, writers such as Doug Anderson, Deborah Gorlin, Gary Metras, Ellen Watson, & Gene Zeiger. Readers and Writers, Live! showcased dazzling children’s book writers and illustrators such as Eric Carle, Mordicai Gerstein, Jane Dyer, Jane Yolen, Dennis Nolan, and Lauren Mills, as well as artists Leonard Baskin, Barry Moser, and Alan Robinson.

The mission of Boomerang Booksellers is to connect serious readers and collectors with the books they cherish and love.  Our goal is to make it as easy as possible for you to create a library of your favorite titles or authors that you can share with your friends and family.

We look forward to communicating with you:  in person at antiquarian book fairs, by appointment at our Holyoke, MA studio, via e-mail or by phone.

We firmly believe that In the age of digital displays, e-books, and ephemeral communications, books should play an even more significant role in our lives.

Although some may claim you can easily snuggle up in your favorite spot with an e-book reader.  I would argue that nothing can replace the physical book – printed on fine acid-free paper, beautifully bound, with decorative covers and beautifully designed dust jackets, complete with fine illustrations.

1. Flaubert in Egypt: A Sensibility on Tour – Gustave Flaubert
   
2. Rings of Saturn – W. G. Sebald
3. Travels with Herodotus – Ryszard Kapuściński
4. The Air-Conditioned Nightmare – Henry Miller
5. Songlines – Bruce Chatwin
6. The Motorcycle Diaries – Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara
7. On the Road – Jack Kerouac
8. In Patagonia – Bruce Chatwin
9. Pictures from Italy - Charles Dickens
10. Collected Travel Writings: The Continent and Great Britain and America - Henry James
11. The Roads to Sata – Alan Booth
12. The Way of the World – Nicolas Bouvier
13. Into the Heart of Borneo – Redmond O’Hanlon
14. A Time of Gifts – Patrick Leigh Fermor
15. Hokkaido Highway Blues – Will Ferguson
16. Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It - Geoff Dyer
17. Falling off the Map: Some Lonely Places of the World – Pico Iyer
18. Riding the Iron Rooster – Paul Theroux
19. To Noto: Or London to Sicily in a Ford – Duncan Fallowell
20. Angry White Pyjamas – Robert Twigger
21. Arabian Sands – Wilfred Thesiger
22. This Cold Heaven: Seven Seasons in Greenland – Gretel Ehrlich

And I am convinced, be it said in passing, that the day when the ideology of tourism is finally brought to a discourse and a practice which, on the pretext of the right to exoticism and difference, offer a paltry folklore which diminishes at one and the same time the traveller and his or her host, and offers, in place of those original situations which were the passion of real travellers, landscapes whose picture-postcard aspect has a novelty value of zero – I am convinced that Sartre, the homing pigeon, will on that day be recognised as a master. People will speculate about his Queen Albermarle which Simone de Beauvoir said was to be, if he ever finished it, the Nausea of his maturity, and which he himself thought would draw a line under the modern literature of travel . . .

These days, increasingly, we travel to places that resemble an exotic version of home: the same Starbucks, Body Shop etc., as Robert Dessaix wrote:

But I’d seen it all before. At a certain point in life, like Stendhal and Chateaubriand, one has. Everything feels repackaged. The crêpe and ice-cream wagons, the miniature train, the hoopla stall, the Africans selling belts and fake Louis Vuitton handbags – even the gangs of teenagers in T-shirts emblazoned with jaunty slogans in English (I Love Beer, Fuck Work and so on) – I’d seen and heard and smelled it all before hundreds of times. It felt like the umpteenth performance of a circus act I’d thrilled to when I was five. Would nothing transformingly beautiful ever happen again?

Seeing the world through another’s eyes can invigorate our experience of travel. BHL writes of Sartre:

Sartre, a man reputedly incapable of seeing a thing, an absolutely cerebral presence who claimed coquettishly, that he had to wait until Simone de Beauvoir had described things for him before he could see them for himself.

Though I love to read great travel literature, I suspect that those worth reading would not fill a small shelf. A top ten of literary travel books, for me, would look something like this:

1. Into the Heart of Borneo – Redmond O’Hanlon
2. A Time of Gifts – Patrick Leigh Fermor
3. Hokkaido Highway Blues – Will Ferguson
4. Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It - Geoff Dyer
5. Falling off the Map: Some Lonely Places of the World – Pico Iyer
6. Riding the Iron Rooster – Paul Theroux
7. To Noto: Or London to Sicily in a Ford – Duncan Fallowell
8. Angry White Pyjamas – Robert Twigger
9. Arabian Sands – Wilfred Thesiger
10. This Cold Heaven: Seven Seasons in Greenland – Gretel Ehrlich

John Muir is one of the greatest and least appreciated men of the paste 150 years. His fierce determination to preserve the wilderness was a gift to us all. This book does him justice in all ways. Not only is it beautifully written and crafted, the author’s empathy and understanding of Muir is evident throughout. Naturally there is an emphasis on Muir’s tremendous conservationist efforts, but I was pleased to see material on his early years in Scotland and the emigration to America. Ehrlich also discusses in some detail Muir’s loss or sight and his spontaneous restoration of sight. An incredible story in itself.
Most of the book is devoted to Muir’s tireless environmental work in California. His (ultimately futile) battle to save Hetch Hetchy is described in painful detail. His triumphs are also chronicled, including his epic hiking adventures, trail forging and wilderness activism. This is a first-rate biography of an outstanding human being, and hero to envioronmentalists everywhere.

Click Here to see more reviews about: John Muir: Nature’s Visionary (Hardcover)

Fenced Out or Fenced In? (c)2009 Randy D. Bosch

Wyoming is a “fence out” State.  In other words, if you do not want your neighbors cattle, horses, dogs or children on your property, you must provide the fence that keeps them out, at your expense but still subject to regulations on construction (the wrong fence construction can overly impede wildlife migration, exacerbate injury to stock, or look pretty darned ugly!). 

Other locales are “fence in” jurisdictions, where you are responsible for containing your critters on your land and off of your neighbors property or public roads.

There are all sorts of ramifications to “fence out” and “fence in”, as well as practical considerations and emergency provisions.  Leaving a gate open after passing through is an egregious crime against the fence owner, whose stock may then pass through onto an adjacent road and be killed, often while killing occupants of passing vehicles that hit them.

Pulitzer Price winning author Gretel Ehrlich wrote that, in the high plains range country in a big winter blizzard, the cattle herd often moves with the scourging wind until halted by a fence (a physical boundary).  Halted in their move to escape, the herd will turn to face the storm and, as a result, may drown as the clouds of snow envelop them, are inescapably inhaled into their lungs, and melt.  The wise caretakers cut the fences and keep the cattle moving with the wind until the storm abates.  The good neighbor understands this necessity for survival and works with them (I’ve lost the publication citation for this recollection – if you have it, please comment with it and I will edit it into this post). 

Just be sure to immediately repair your neighbor’s fence when the storm abates!

Also, in the harsh winter, the trees may suffer terribly from thirst.  Although snow may pile high around, it is crystalline, not liquid, and cannot be absorbed.

Vital resources are all around us in great plenty, but we thirst, struggle and perhaps die because we are not allowed or refuse to use them in the form and place that they are available.  Sometimes we stubbornly refuse to use “given” resources within the boundaries that we have, refusing out of fear of being accused of ambition or of looking over the fence at greener pastures, or out of vainglory.

Sometimes the resources are overly plentiful, but we have not prepared ourselves to separate the useful from the tempting yet killing overload – a gluttony of ideas, relationships, things, opportunities or grief and pain, but we refuse to cut the fence to escape the deluge or our mentors and peers refuse in their deadly exercise of “power and control”.

These boundaries, and our reactions to them, can paint a grim picture of life.  However, the point is not to wallow in despair behind one’s own fences, or to break through driven by avarice and greed for what is not healthy or wise.  Instead, give consideration to what constitutes the fences in your life.  Are they a safe boundary to keep you from the danger of things beyond – whether from others, the environment, or from your temptation by foolishness?   Are the fences a control set in place by yourself or by others to limit your response to wise teaching, counsel, growth and healthy relationships?

Sometimes, the fences are invisible, like our humane dog fence or Les Nessman’s office in the television show WKRP in Cincinnati.  At other times they are very physical walls of space, health, environment or relationships. 

After determining the nature of your fences, and differentiating the beneficial ones from the detrimental ones, start repairing the good and tearing down the bad.  Sometimes, a “good neighbor gate” may be installed – just remember to always close and latch it when you use it!  

If you absolutely need to build a fence, first make certain that your “neighbors” understand the need and that it is truly beneficial.  And remember,

Don’t fence me in!

Sea ice is so beautiful. You know it’s cold when the ocean starts to freeze! Thanks to David Susuki’s The Nature of Things series for the inspiration. This post’s title is courtesy of Gretel Ehrlich.

Have a listen to some of the bands we’ll be playing with on our tour next week:

• MODERNBOYS MODERNGIRLS (of course!)
• MICHOU (Jan 15 @ Phog Lounge, WINDSOR, ON)
• THE WHIPPING WIND (Jan 16 @ Call the Office, LONDON, ON)
• AT THE BREAK OF DON (Jan 21 @ Divan Orange, MONTREAL, QC, co-produced by Passovah Productions and CKUT 90.3FM)
• OLD WORLD VULTURE (The Horseshoe, TORONTO, ON free show)

This is the ethos behind the Home Ground Project, an ongoing collection of terms and descriptions of land feature that points towards the intimate and interwoven ways in which people adapted to living in the New World, particularly North America.

Home Ground: Language of an American Landscape

One “bristled with more than a hundred colored pushpins, each bearing a tiny paper flag with a Deni’ina place-name on it, the Athabaskan language spoken by the indigenous people still living there.” The other map—representative of its “relatively new landlords”—had less than a dozen English names.

The disparity “dramatizes a truism about belonging, about intimacy with a place,” Lopez writes. “Given a much larger frame of reference, [it] amounts to an observation about modern loss and belonging that many of us can identify with.”

This recognition of “modern loss and belonging” has always been at the heart of Lopez’s writing. From his early work, the introspective River Notes, Desert Notes, and Field Notes, through his comprehensive volumes of natural history– Arctic Dreams and Of Wolves and Men, to his recent collections of short, and sometimes magical fiction, the overarching theme is always one’s relationship (or lack of) to place.

Home Ground continues examining this relationship, while offering new sets of tools for readers to do so as well. An enormous work—480 pages and 102 illustrations—the book brings together a community of 45 writers—Terry Tempest Williams, Gretel Ehrlich, Charles Frazier, William Kittredge, Robert Haas, and Jon Krakauer among others—to define over 850 words and phrases related to landforms and water.

In addition, hundreds of quotes—from Faulkner to Twain to Dagoberto Gilb—serve as reminders of the defining roles the land itself has always played in American Literature.

While many of the terms come from science ( ecotone, river capture, dendritic drainage, or glacial drift), the real treasures of Home Ground are the folk terms. Handed down from Indians, brought by explorers, or simply amalgamated by homesteaders, loggers, and farmers, these are terms like looking glass prairie, hassock, gulch, vale, draw, lek, cuesta, kiss tank, morro, ciénega, vega, and nunatak. Words whose precise meanings and stories are forgotten as economic growth displaces / consumes the communities where they were once everyday language.

Lopez writes, “It has become a commonplace observation about American culture that we are a people groping for a renewed sense of place and community . . . It is with these thoughts, about the importance of belonging, of knowing the comfort that a feeling of intimate association with a place can bring, that we began work on Home Ground. We wanted to recall and to explore a language more widespread today than most of us imagine, because we believed an acquaintance with it, using it to say more clearly and precisely what we mean, would bring us a certain kind of relief.”

A good quote can bring me out of a depressed state, can put me in a somber mood, or can easily sum up how I am feeling at any specific time.

J. Richardson wrote a poem, and I use that word loosely because its setup was quite unconventional, that was composed of short thoughts he’d had over a period of time.  It was odd, but ingenious.  The one that stuck with me was “Tragic hero, madman, addict, fatal lover. We exalt those who cannot escape their dreams because we cannot stay inside our own.”

To me, Richardson simply captivates that idea that everyone has deep down.  No, none of us desire to go crazy, become dependent on one substance or another, or have a love affair go astray.  But we all have that inner desire for others to recognize our greatest dreams and where they could take us.  We want to turn every dream we have and make it into a reality.  And when people ultimately don’t appreciate our innermost desires, as is usually the case, we yearn to cocoon ourselves in our beds where our dreams ultimately belong, and stay there.  This is where we begin envying madmen and addicts who can never leave their cocoons, who never have to cave to the harsh realities of society, where dreams are rarely ever reached.

And then there’s Nick Drake.  The songwriter who can bring me to tears in a single line, and in the case of his song”Fruit Tree,” a single note.  Read these lyrics before I give more background.  Please.

“Safe in the womb
Of an everlasting night,
You find the darkness can
Give the brightest light.
Safe in your place deep in the earth
That’s when they’ll know what you were really worth.”

So many of his songs foreshadow his imminent demise.  And whether you know that he took his own life or not when you being analyzing his lyrics, they are absolutely mind-blowing.  He connects with his listeners in every song.  He makes them unlock their fears of death, loss of love, and the general fear of living.  Simply reading his lyrics makes readers overwhelmingly aware of their mortality.

And when I’m woe begotten after thinking about Nick Drake’s grave lyrics, I find quotes that have the power to bring me back to a more balanced state.  I have one quote by Buddha that often does the trick:

“Let us rise up and be thankful.  For if we didn’t learn a lot today, at least we learned a little.  And if we didn’t learn a little, at least we didn’t get sick.  And if we got sick, at least we didn’t die.  So let us all be thankful.”

Sometimes the bluntness of quotes, like the one just mentioned, is exactly what we need to make us leave our cocoons and keep on trucking down the poorly paved roads of life.  And that can be a beautiful thing.

Only geography can frame my mind, only water can make me stop.  I come, not for solitude—I’ve had enough of that in my life—but for the discipline an island imposes, the way it shapes the movements of thoughts.

~Gretel Ehrlich

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TKE: Last time we talked, you gave us the lowdown on the vocabulary of Loose Girl. Can you give us some new vocab that reflects your current life?

KC: PDD-NOS: Pervasive Developmental Disorder, Not Otherwise Specified. This is the diagnosis my son received a few years ago. It means he has some, but not enough, symptoms that would qualify him for an autism diagnosis. Yet it also puts him on the autistic spectrum. It also means, “We don’t really know,” and is therefore a pretty useless diagnosis. Those six letters have changed everything about who I am and what I live for. Mostly, I’ve learned what it means to have special needs, and I’ve come to know that my own special needs are much bigger than his.

Intimacy: Loose Girl is about how I came to stop not having intimacy. Since I’ve been married, I’ve been forced to learn how to have intimacy. This learning has been at a crawl’s pace for me. I’m really, really bad at intimacy. I mean crippled bad. I believe we tend to make lots of assumptions about what intimacy is, what it should look like, etc. I’m fascinated by this, and have spent lots of time just considering the concept. I tend to believe that our cultural narrative about intimacy is probably off-base and immensely unhelpful – maybe even harmful – for most people.

TKE: Are there any benefits to having been a Loose Girl — is there something (or some things) that you are glad you went through?

KC: Oh, sure. I like how my past set me in the direction I eventually went, to become a writer and therapist. I love that I gained the perspective I did, and that I was able to write a book that has been meaningful beyond my own self.

TKE: Who/what are your favorite authors/books, and why?

KC: I hate that question! Not because it’s a bad one, but because I can never narrow down my answer, and later, long after I’ve already answered I inevitably think of three names or books I should have said. But… here are the few that come to mind right now. Some favorite authors: Lauren Slater and Gretel Ehrlich. Some favorite books: The Autobiography of a Face by Lucy Grealy and The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros. The reasons: Slater and Ehrlich are the two nonfiction writers who made me want to write nonfiction. Both see their worlds through intensely unique perspectives. Ehrich, in particular, sees herself more clearly by examining the natural world around her with stunning, accurate prose. Grealy’s book, in my opinion, is one of the best memoirs ever written. She is a master at making her self matter to the larger world. She took something already interesting, if topical–childhood cancer–and expanded the issue to encase female beauty and feelings of self-worth, issues we could all relate to. And she did it with beautiful prose and a tremendous ability with storytelling. Cisneros’ book, which is fiction, holds my favorite narrative voice. No one has ever repeated as well what she has done here. Her chapters are short, quiet, and minimal, and yet they explode with the many complicated experiences of being young, female, poor, and of color.

Gretel Ehrlich, The Solace of Open Spaces (Penguin, 1986).
In 1976, after a personal tragedy, Ehrlich moved from the East Coast to a small ranch in Wyoming, where she found herself again. Ehrlich writes about Wyoming’s landscape and weather, about her neighbors and her new work as a ranch hand. A powerful, spare book which finds nourishment in desolation. For a long while, this was one of my favorite books.

Here is a short bio of Ehrlich, an excerpt in the Norton Book of Nature Writing, edited by Robert Finch, and another excerpt in The Place Within: Portraits of the American Landscape by Twenty Contemporary Writers, edited by Jodi Daynard. Here are reviews by Judith Moore (The New York Times) and Paul Krza (National Review) and posts by Moe and The Blogging Forester. And you can listen to a recent piece on NPR by Ehrlich about training a colt.

Buy this book at Amazon.com.