From John Burroughs Medal winner Sharman Apt Russell comes a new edition of a Southwestern literature classic. From the flooding of southern New Mexico's Mimbres River in the summer, to the year-round search for community in rural America, the author recounts her experiences in creating a life for herself in the remote southwestern desert. She, along with her husband, chose to leave a faster lane in order to find a way of life not possible in a larger urban area: building their own adobe home, giving birth to their first child at home, and developing self-reliance and a deepening commitment to each other. Her reverence for the land, its history, and native inhabitants always informs her writing, and her intelligence and strong narrative voice ring clearly throughout this remarkable work. Like the best personal memoirs, the book is also about the events, people, myths, and emotions that define the days and seasons. Winner of the Mountains and Plains Regional Book Award and New Mexico Zia Award.
About the Author: Sharman was awarded the 2016 John Burroughs Medal for Distinguished Nature Writing--past recipients include Aldo Leopold, Rachel Carson, and Roger Tory Peterson--for her nonfiction "Diary of a Citizen Scientist." She is deeply honored and pleased. Although considered a science and nature writer, essentially the author writes about whatever interests her and seems important--living in place, archaeology, flowers, butterflies, hunger, pantheism. Recent awards also include the WILLA Award for creative nonfiction from Women Writing the West, an Arizona Authors Award for her YA novel "Teresa of the New World," and a New Mexico/Arizona Book Award for her science fiction "Knocking on Heaven's Door." For more information, and other news, please go to her Facebook author page Sharman Apt Russell. Or her website www.sharmanaptrussell.com. A little bit of bio: Raised in the suburbs of Phoenix, Arizona, in 1981 Sharman settled in southern New Mexico as a "back to the lander" and has stayed there ever since. She is a professor emeritus in the Humanities Department at Western New Mexico University in Silver City, as well as an associate faculty at Antioch University in Los Angeles. She received a MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Montana and a B.S. in Conservation and Natural Resources from the University of California, Berkeley. She has two children who are grown up--quite sadly and naturally, they left home. As a teacher, her philosophy is simple: her goal is to increase a student's authority as a writer. She works to encourage and support that authority. She helps students better revise their work. She teaches students how to talk about writing with other writers and help them feel more centered in who they are as writers and why they write. She also serves as an editor and mentor and can model a writer's life. As well as teaching at WNMU and Antioch, for the last twenty years she has been a visiting writer at universities and colleges across the country.