The Williamses anchor Jefferies' profound inquiry to our churning world and illuminate their own passionate quests for truth and understanding." —BOOKLIST, starred review While browsing a Stonington, Maine, bookstore, Brooke Williams and Terry Tempest Williams discovered a rare copy of an exquisite autobiography by nineteenth–century British nature writer Richard Jefferies, who develops his understanding of a "soul-life" while wandering the wild countryside of Wiltshire, England. Brooke and Terry, like John Fowles, Henry Miller, and Rachel Carson before, were inspired by the prescient words of this visionary writer, who describes ineffable feelings of being at one with nature. In an introduction and essays set alongside Jefferies' writing, the Williams share their personal pilgrimage to Wiltshire to understand this man of "cosmic consciousness" and how their exploration of Jefferies deepened their own relationship while illuminating dilemmas of modernity, the intrinsic need for wildness, and what it means to be human in the twenty–first century. JOHN RICHARD JEFFERIES (6 November 1848 – 14 August 1887) was a British novelist and essayist who helped pioneer the field of modern nature writing. Jefferies described the English countryside with an intimate vividness and expansive passion that inspired both his contemporaries and later writers. TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS is the author of fourteen books including Erosion: Essays of Undoing, Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place, and When Women Were Birds. Recipient of John Simon Guggenheim and Lannan Literary Fellowships in creative nonfiction, she is the Provostial Scholar at Dartmouth College. Her work has been anthologized and translated world–wide. BROOKE WILLIAMS has spent thirty years advocating for wildness, most recently with the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance and as the Executive Director of the Murie Center in Moose, Wyoming. He holds an MBA in Sustainable Business from the Bainbridge Graduate Institute and a Biology degree from the University of Utah. He has written four books including Halflives: Reconciling Work and Wildness, and dozens of articles. He is involved in The Great West Institute, a think tank exploring expansion and innovation in the conservation movement and is currently working on a book about ground–truthing. Brooke and Terry have been married since 1975. They live with their dogs in Jackson, Wyoming, and Castle Valley, Utah.
Open Midnight weaves two parallel stories about the great wilderness—Brooke Williams’s year alone with his dog ground truthing wilderness maps of southern Utah, and that of his great-great-great-grandfather, who in 1863 made his way with a group of Mormons from England across the wilderness almost to Utah, dying a week short. The book is also about two levels of history—personal, as represented by William Williams, and collective, as represented by Charles Darwin, who lived in Shrewsbury, England, at about the same time as Williams. As Brooke Williams begins researching the story of his oldest known ancestor, he realizes that he has few facts. He wonders if a handful of dates can tell the story of a life, writing, “If those points were stars in the sky, we would connect them to make a constellation, which is what I’ve made with his life by creating the parts missing from his story.” Thus William Williams becomes a kind of spiritual guide, a shamanlike consciousness that accompanies the author on his wilderness and life journeys, and that appears at pivotal points when the author is required to choose a certain course. The mysterious presence of his ancestor inspires the author to create imagined scenes in which Williams meets Darwin in Shrewsbury, sowing something central in the DNA that eventually passes to Brooke Williams, whose life has been devoted to nature and wilderness. Brooke Williams’s inventive and vivid prose pushes boundaries and investigates new ways toward knowledge and experience, inviting readers to think unconventionally about how we experience reality, spirituality, and the wild. The author draws on Jungian psychology to relate how our consciousness of the wild is culturally embedded in our psyche, and how a deep connection to the wild can promote emotional and psychological well-being. Williams's narrative goes beyond a call for conservation, but in the vein of writers like Joanna Macy, Bill Plotkin, David Abram, the author argues passionately for the importance of wildness is to the human soul. Reading Williams's inspired prose provides a measure of hope for protecting the beautiful places that we all need to thrive. Open Midnight is grounded in the present by Williams’s descriptions of the Utah lands he explores. He beautifully evokes the feeling of being solitary in the wild, at home in the deepest sense, in the presence of the sublime. In doing so, he conveys what Gary Snyder calls “a practice of the wild” more completely than any other work. Williams also relates an insider’s view of negotiations about wilderness protection. As an advocate working for the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, he represents a minority in meetings designed to open wilderness lands to roads and hunting. He portrays the mindset of the majority of Utah’s citizens, who argue passionately for their rights to use their lands however they wish. The phrase “open midnight,” as Williams sees it, evokes the time between dusk and dawn, between where we’ve been and where we’re going, and the unconscious where all possibilities are hidden.
As if it wasn’t bad enough to be deemed the “most single person” at her magazine’s office, budding reporter Penny has now been tapped to write a series of features called “The Dating Itinerary.” From speed dating to Tinder, old-fashioned matchmakers to up-and-coming “dark dating,” Penny now has to go on a lot of dates. Silver lining: meeting new people should be fun, right? But running into her old rival, George, at her first dating event is decidedly not. Not only does the arrogant know-it-all, who goes by Geo, have zero trouble attracting women, wherever Penny goes, somehow he just. Keeps. Showing. Up. Geo knows he’s right on the cusp of writing success with the chance to have his own syndicated column. All he has to do is follow his agent’s ideas for showcasing different dating avenues, and he’ll pull in enough to help his sister’s non-profit women’s shelter get off the ground. Sure, his itinerary is starting to look strangely similar to his old rival Penny’s, but all’s fair in love and syndication, right? The more they look for love in all the wrong places, though, the more they start to wonder if it was right in front of their noses all along. Still, the brutal dating scene just might end them, if these two don’t kill each other first.
But it is precisely this - nothing - that writer Brooke Williams and photographer Chris Noble find captivating about Escalante. In this thoughtful and exquisitely illustrated rumination, the authors tour the intricate network of chasms and gorges that began forming millions of years ago on the Colorado Plateau and today constitute a desert paradise of mesas, buttes, and boundless solitude. At the center of this landscape is the region known as Escalante, 1.7 million mostly roadless acres, where silence, darkness, and emptiness have no intrusions.".
Renee Lockhart has her eye on a lofty goal...to fill the open position of morning radio show host at the station where she works. When her co-workers sign her up for a local TV version of The Bachelor, Renee goes along with it in order to raise her profile. Upon seeing her bumbling audition, Ben McConnell, one of the most eligible bachelors in town, insists that Renee be placed on the show. But Ben gets much more than he expected in Renee... he gets a girl who can't seem to do anything right...and a girl he can't seem to resist.
Utah's Wasatch Range: Four Season Refuge updated 2nd edition is a fine art photography coffee table book with accompanying essays and 23 contributors including Utah writers, scientists, and elected officials. This hard bound book is under a black cloth cover and silver emboss. It also has a beautiful French fold jacket. Authors include Salt Lake City Mayor Ralph Becker, Congressman Jim Matheson, Stephen Trimble, and Andrew McLean. This book has also been endorsed by Terry Tempest Williams. The spirit of this collaboration is to protect the remaining natural areas and watershed of the Wasatch Mountains. This book tells the story of our relationship with these mountains--the alpine backdrop and watershed for Salt Lake City and other Wasatch Front communities, a wilderness rising in the backyards of more than 80 percent of Utah citizens. And so Garber includes people in his photos--joyfully skiing, climbing, hiking, and living in the Wasatch. Howie Garber has photographed the Wasatch for 25 years and received national and international awards for his images. The photographs of wildlife, alpine scenery, and the human element share the diversity and splendor of a unique place. Garber¹s lyrical and dramatic photographs and the eloquent words of these Wasatch writers work together to celebrate the diversity and fragility of one small mountain range that does so much for so many. Utah's Wasatch Range admirably succeeds in several ambitions. This is the culminating portfolio of a serious artist, a guide to the natural and human history of a wild landscape, and an exploration of our responsibility as 21st Century citizens to protect and preserve a threatened landscape. For locals and visitors alike, this is the book for the Wasatch.
Join us for this remarkable journey as In Soo Park, born during the Korean War, faced incredible hardships as a child. He survived and now uses his experiences to speak out for those who have no voice. Share with him the dream of having every person treated like a treasure and feeling valued while valuing others. You too can make a difference!
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