No, that’s not a typo. I know this cusp-of-the-new-year timeframe is a popular time to spotlight favorites and best of’s and top tens from the year about to pass, but I’m in the mood to look forward, not back. A couple of years ago, I started gathering references to books I wanted to read together…
After weeks of grinding away on a recalcitrant chapter for my book project, I am dazed, cranky, frustrated, and thoroughly sick of being in the same room with myself. Deciding that it’s time to get out of my own head, I do what a lot of us do these days when we’re wondering how to…
If you’re in the Denver area, don’t miss the Colorado Book Festival on Saturday. This free event runs from 10:30 a.m. until 4:00 p.m., March 3, at the Denver Public Library. Peter Heller and Patricia Limerick will deliver keynotes and The Tattered Cover will be running an on-site bookstore. You can and follow the event on…
About a decade ago, on the afternoon of October 12, 2007, I turned off South Dakota’s Highway 79 a few miles south of the small town of Hermosa, onto a road called Windbreak Lane. In January of that year I had quit writing, and I was on my way to a writing retreat where I…
Certain holidays, I have to confess, leave me feeling inept or out of touch. Marking the New Year, though: that one I get. I might not always (okay: pretty much never) stay up until midnight, but the retrospective/prospective rituals that accompany the the calendar’s rollover to a new increment make sense to me. As December…
Back in early June, I packed my too-heavy suitcase (too many books, too much paperwork) and left the horses and the garden and the weeds and the house in care of my husband. I was off to Vermont, to the verdant roll of hills thick with maple and birch, to woods skirted with hay-scented fern…
The pattern makes sense: that these winter months are a time of retreat, a withdrawal of sorts from the outdoor domain of wild that orients a significant part of my life. The weather is cold and even if it’s not—even if temperatures are freakishly warm, as they have been for most of February this year—the…
I like being a denizen of the temperate zones. I appreciate that the seasons here, dictated by my position on the globe, are so distinct. Watching the gradual cycling of weather, light, foliage, and animal activity has helped train me in the habit of attentiveness. Yes, I’ll think, there go the oak trees, turning to…