Originally published by the Sierra Club in 1995, this handbook has already helped thousands of aspiring writers, scholars, and students share their experiences with nature and the outdoors. Using exercises and examples, John Murray covers genres, techniques, and publication issues. He uses examples from such masters as Barry Lopez, Annie Dillard, Larry McMurtry, Edward Abbey, Ernest Hemingway, and Henry David Thoreau. Also included are recommended readings, a directory of creative writing ...

So...what is this book about? At its core, its a poetry and art book. But, in retrospect, its so much more. Growing up in the 80s I was influenced by two thingsart and music. Combine those two things with a personel reflection on the times and what was going on in the world (when I wrote each piece) and you will get a hint of what you will find within the pages of this book. The writing of this book brought me from a high school student, to a college student, to a Soldier in Desert Storm, ...

What happens if you combine history with the personal thoughts from a couples lifelong diary and journal entries and the creative writings of a modern-dayahemauthor? This is exactly what you will discover within the pages of this story. Come and take a trip through a combination of songs, poetry, personal thoughts, and a small expedition through a few historical events that you may not have learned about in school. It all begins with the renovation of an old Victorian house built in 1904 i...

More than twenty-five years after his death, iconic writer and nature activist Edward Abbey (1929–1989) remains an influential presence in the American environmental movement. Abbey’s best known works continue to be widely read and inspire discourse on the key issues facing contemporary American society, particularly with respect to urbanization and technology. Abbey in America, published forty years after Abbey’s popular novel The Monkey Wrench Gang, features an all-star...

That public services exhibit unpredictability, novelty and, on occasion, chaos, is an observation with which even a casual observer would agree. Existing theoretical frameworks in public management fail to address these features, relying more heavily on attempts to eliminate unpredictability through increased reliance on measurable performance objectives, improved financial and human resource management techniques, decentralisation of authority and accountability and resolving principal-ag...

"Ursula Le Guin at her best . . . This is an important collection of eloquent, elegant pieces by one of our most acclaimed contemporary writers." —Elizabeth Hand, The Washington Post Book World"I have decided that the trouble with print is, it never changes its mind," writes Ursula K. Le Guin in her introduction to Dancing at the Edge of the World. But she has, and here is the record of that change in the decade since the publication of her last n...

"A winning portrait of America at its weirdest." — Publishers Weekly STARRED ReviewFrom the shrouded forests of the Pacific Northwest to off-the-wall cryptozoological conventions, one man searches high and low for the answer to the question: real or not, why do we want to believe?Bigfoot is an instantly recognizable figure. Through the decades, this elusive primate has been featured in movies and books, on coffee mugs, beer koozies, car pol...

Award winning essayist Scott Russell Sanders once compared the art of essay writing to "the pursuit of mental rabbits"-a rambling through thickets of thought in search of some brief glimmer of fuzzy truth. While some people persist in the belief that essays are stuffy and antiquated, the truth is that the personal essay is an ever-changing creative medium that provides an ideal vehicle for satisfying the human urge to document truths as we experience them and share them with others-to capt...

The Island of Lost Maps tells the story of a curious crime spree: the theft of scores of valuable centuries-old maps from some of the most prominent research libraries in the United States and Canada. The perpetrator was Gilbert Joseph Bland, Jr., an enigmatic antiques dealer from South Florida, whose cross-country slash-and-dash operation had gone virtually undetected until he was caught in 1995–and was unmasked as the most prolific American map thief in history. As Miles...

**"Re-centers and gives voice to a diversity of women naturalists and writers across time." —**Cultivating PlaceIn Writing Wild, Kathryn Aalto celebrates 25 women whose influential writing helps deepen our connection to and understanding of the natural world. These inspiring wordsmiths are scholars, spiritual seekers, conservationists, scientists, novelists, and explorers. They defy easy categorization, yet they all share a bold authenticity that ...

Layering climate science, mythologies, nature writing, and personal experiences, this New York Times Notable Book presents a stunning reckoning with our current moment and with the literal and figurative end of time.Desert Notebooks examines how the unprecedented pace of destruction to our environment and an increasingly unstable geopolitical landscape have led us to the brink of a calamity greater than any humankind has confronted before. As inha...

A collection of the year's best essays selected by Robert Atwan and guest editor Rebecca Solnit."Essays are restless literature, trying to find out how things fit together, how we can think about two things at once, how the personal and the public can inform each other, how two overtly dissimilar things share a secret kinship," contends Rebecca Solnit in her introduction. From lost languages and extinct species to life-affirming cosmologies and literary myths that o...