To Everything on Earth: New Writing on Fate, Community, and Nature - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 089672655X ISBN 13: 9780896726550

Publisher: Texas Tech University Press, 2010

Synopsis

In October 2004, Barry Lopez invited a group of writers to meet with him, Bill McKibben, Alan Weisman, and Dennis Covington at the Junction campus of Texas Tech University. Out of this meeting grew a community that has since collaborated on initiatives and projects tied to fate, community, and nature. To Everything on Earth is a journey through many landscapes. It begins with stories that look at the external landscape, the world around us, asking hard questions about the capacity to destroy what we love best. The stories then turn inward, into the human heart, searching for an answer there. The journey ends by addressing perhaps the central question of our time: how best do we make a home on earth? “If To Everything on Earth sounds like a toast, it is exactly that. And if most of these fresh voices express tales of angst, fear, breakage, and doubt about their places in diminished societies and on damaged ground, every one distills beauty too, and in the end, a measure of redemption.” ―Robert Michael Pyle, author of Wintergreen, The Thunder Tree, and Sky Time in Gray's River Contributors Shelley Armitage Kurt Caswell Susan Cerulean Lisa Couturier Matt Daly Peter Friederici Susan Hanson Marybeth Holleman Joy Kennedy-O’Neill David Lukas Jordan Fisher Smith Susan Leigh Tomlinson Diane Hueter Warner

About this title

About the Author

Kurt Caswell, assistant professor of creative writing and literature in the Honors College at Texas Tech University, is the author of An Inside Passage, which won the 2008 River Teeth literary nonfiction book prize. His essays and stories have appeared in numerous magazines and journals, including Isotope, Janus Head, Matter, Ninth Letter, Northern Lights, Orion, and Potomac Review. He lives in Lubbock, Texas. Susan Leigh Tomlinson is director of the Natural History and Humanities degree program in the Honors College at Texas Tech University. Her work has appeared in Writing on the Wind: An Anthology of West Texas Women Writers. Diane Hueter Warner works in Texas Tech’s Southwest Collection/Special Collections Library, where she is responsible for the James Sowell Family Collection in Literature, Community and the Natural World.William E. Tydeman is an archivist in the Southwest Collection at Texas Tech University. Bill McKibben, author of many books on nature and the environment, is a scholar in environmental studies at Middlebury College and lives with his family in Vermont.

From the Back Cover

In celebration of our planet

In October 2004, Barry Lopez invited a group of writers to meet with him, Bill McKibben, Alan Weisman, and Dennis Covington at the Junction campus of Texas Tech University. Out of this meeting grew a community that has since collaborated on a number of initiatives and projects tied to fate, community, and nature, including this collection of essays. To Everything on Earth is a journey through many landscapes. It begins with stories that look at the external landscape, the world around us, asking hard questions about the capacity to destroy what we love best. The stories then turn inward, into the human heart, perhaps searching for an answer there. The journey ends by addressing perhaps the central question of our time: how best do we make a home on earth?

Reviews

Starred Review. In this superior essay collection, each of 13 nature writers (linked by Bill McKibben, who provides a foreword) deliver an exquisite, powerful piece on life and how it's lived. Besides nature, these writers are united in the strength and economy of their prose: "One day a strong goose came into my life," Lisa Courturier begins, in a story of her wildlife rehabilitation center; Susan Cerulean calls a swallow-tailed kite, "living origami." McKibben, citing Barry Lopez, asserts that "the real topic of nature writing is human community"; in her contribution, Diane Hueter Warner compares ferocity in nature and in humanity, "a tornado in the black of night" against a vicious home invader. Mortality is another recurring theme; Jordan Fisher Smith's entry features a dying man: "each lungful of oxygen, each moment, and then each next moment-these are all life is made of when nothing else can be counted on. And for this reason there is a strange peace at the center of catastrophe." Featuring an array of polished voices and exquisite imagery, this collection is not to be missed by fan of nature writing or literary nonfiction.

Edition details

• Publisher: Texas Tech University Press
• Publication date: 2010
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 089672655X
• ISBN 13: 9780896726550
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 160
• Editor: Kurt Caswell, Susan Leigh Tomlinson, Diane Hueter Warner