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Walking the High Desert

Encounters with Rural America along the Oregon Desert Trail

By Ellen Waterston

Former high desert rancher Ellen Waterston writes of a wild, essentially roadless, starkly beautiful part of the American West. Following the recently created 750-mile Oregon Desert Trail, she embarks on a creative and inquisitive exploration,...

The Propeller under the Bed

A Personal History of Homebuilt Aircraft

By Eileen A. Bjorkman

On July 25, 2010, Arnold Ebneter flew across the country in a plane he designed and built himself, setting an aviation world record for aircraft of its class. He was eighty-two at the time and...

Shapes of Native Nonfiction

Collected Essays by Contemporary Writers

By Elissa Washuta, Theresa Warburton

Just as a basket’s purpose determines its materials, weave, and shape, so too is the purpose of the essay related to its material, weave, and shape. Editors Elissa Washuta and Theresa Warburton ground this anthology...

Forest Under Story

Creative Inquiry in an Old-Growth Forest

By Nathaniel Brodie, Charles Goodrich, Frederick J. Swanson

Two kinds of long-term research are taking place at the H. J. Andrews Experimental Forest, a renowned research facility in the temperate rain forest of the Oregon Cascades. Here, scientists investigate the ecosystem’s trees, wildlife,...

Warnings against Myself

Meditations on a Life in Climbing

By David Stevenson

From his youthful second ascent of the north ridge of Mount Kennedy in the Yukon’s Saint Elias Range, an in-and-out on skis for which he had not entirely learned how to ski, to a recent...

Unpleasantries

Considerations of Difficult Questions

By Frank Soos

Even from upside-down in his recently flipped truck, Frank Soos reveals himself to be ruminative, grappling with the limitations of language to express the human condition. Moving quickly—skiing in the dark or taking long summer...

Uplake

Restless Essays of Coming and Going

By Ana Maria Spagna

For many years, Ana Maria Spagna has stayed put, mostly, in a small mountain valley at the head of a glacier-carved lake. You’re so lucky to live there, people say. She is lucky. But she...

Reclaimers

By Ana Maria Spagna

For most of the past century, Humbug Valley, a forest-hemmed meadow sacred to the Mountain Maidu tribe, was in the grip of a utility company. Washington’s White Salmon River was saddled with a fish-obstructing, inefficient...

A Year Right Here

Adventures with Food and Family in the Great Nearby

By Jess Thomson

Armed with “The Here List” and a Type-A personality, Seattle-based writer and cookbook author Jess Thomson sets out to spend a year exploring the food of the Pacific Northwest with her family. Planning to revel...

Four Thousand Hooks

A True Story of Fishing and Coming of Age on the High Seas of Alaska

By Dean Adams

As Four Thousand Hooks opens, an Alaskan fishing schooner is sinking. It is the summer of 1972, and the sixteen-year-old narrator is at the helm. Backtracking from the gripping prologue, Dean Adams describes how he...

The Nature of Canada

By Colin M. Coates, Graeme Wynn

Intended to delight and provoke, these short, beautifully crafted essays, enlivened with photos and illustrations, explore how humans have engaged with the Canadian environment and what those interactions say about the nature of Canada. Tracing...

Over the Lip of the World

Among the Storytellers of Madagascar

By Colleen J. McElroy

Gifted travel writer, poet, professor of English, and insightful observer of human nature, Colleen McElroy journeyed to Madagascar to undertake a Fulbright research project exploring Malagasy oral traditions and myths. In Over the Lip of...

Citizen 13660

By Miné Okubo. Introduction by Christine Hong

Mine Okubo was one of over one hundred thousand people of Japanese descent - nearly two-thirds of whom were American citizens - who were forced into “protective custody” shortly after Pearl Harbor. Citizen 13660, Okubo's...

Sky Train

Tibetan Women on the Edge of History

By Canyon Sam

Through a lyrical narrative of her journey to Tibet in 2007, activist Canyon Sam contemplates modern history from the perspective of Tibetan women. Traveling on China's new "Sky Train," she celebrates Tibetan New Year with...

Memory

By Philippe Tortell, Mark Turin, Margot Young

This book examines the character and relevance of remembrance, inviting readers to think creatively and deeply about the ways that memories are transmitted, recorded, and distorted through time and space. Ranging from molecular genetics and...

Subjective Geography

A Poet's Thoughts on Life and Craft

By Madeline DeFrees. .

This volume presents, in one piece, much of the careful and nuanced thought of one of the finest American poets of the twentieth century, and beyond: she died at the age of ninety-five in 2015....

Walking It Off

A Veteran's Chronicle of War and Wilderness

By Doug Peacock

Peacock’s eagerly awaited tale brings us epic personalities, grizzly bears, the trauma of war, and wilderness adventure. A former Green Beret medic in Vietnam, he was mythologized by Edward Abbey as George Washington Hayduke in...