My Country: Essays and Stories from the Edge of Wilderness

My Country, like Walden, presents a neglected world that appears as through a forgotten memory. The work is a triptych, painting three panels of approach to life in the context of nature.
The narrative essays in “Forest Walks and Other Exercises” track forest paths that skirt our tribal past while offering sheltered glimpses of the encroaching industrialized world. Personal immersion shades to political consciousness, with a view of logging, in particular, from the forest perspective.
“Interior Rainforest” paints a personal journey navigating the landscape of home life and wildlife, love and loss. These excursions and sketches depict the challenges of physical and emotional survival in and beside wilderness.
The final section takes a further step inside the world of mountain and forest, to the imaginary realm where fiction and reality collide, dance, and mirror one another, bringing new forms of life to the ecosystem the narrator calls home. “Mountain Dreams” comprises fictional stories ranging in style from animism and fairy tale, to magical realism, to naturalistic dramas of human connection.