Description

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Filled with “honest” writing and “wise” observations, “Russell’s well-written essays describe her life as an urban immigrant to the rural Southwest” (Library Journal).

In 1981, newlywed Sharman Apt Russell moved with her husband to an agricultural valley in southwestern New Mexico, hoping to create a simpler life. From building their adobe house to the home-birth of their firstborn to growing their own food and navigating the seasonal flooding of the Mimbres River, these luminous essays chart Sharman’s journey toward self-sufficiency in a land as mythical and remote as the image of the prehistoric fluteplayer found on the pottery in trading posts throughout the Southwest.

Replete with wisdom and a reverence for the Native American people whose relics Sharman discovers everywhere on the land around her, this award-winning memoir pays tribute to the power and grace of nature, our deep connection to our prehistoric past, and the beauty of living in communion with the land.

“A fine contribution to the literature of the modern American Southwest . . . [Russell] achieves just the right mix of fact and metaphor, humor and poetics.” —Booklist

“These essays say much about the difficulty of maintaining an alternate lifestyle.” —Publishers Weekly

“A lovely little book. To be kept and read and read again.” —Tony Hillerman, bestselling author

About the Author

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Sharman Apt Russell was awarded the 2016 John Burroughs Medal for Distinguished Nature Writing, whose other recipients include Aldo Leopold, Rachel Carson, and Roger Tory Peterson. Her works include the award-winning young adult historical fantasy Teresa of the New World, set in the dreamscape of the sixteenth-century American Southwest, and Knocking on Heaven’s Door, which takes place in a science fiction Paleoterrific future. Her nonfiction ranges from Diary of a Citizen Scientist to Standing in the Light: My Life as a Pantheist. Sharman is a professor emerita at Western New Mexico University in Silver City, New Mexico, and affiliate faculty at Antioch University in Los Angeles. She lives with her husband in the Gila Valley of southwestern New Mexico.