Friends (Paperback or Softback)

Friendships serve as a cornerstone to a rich life. Each of these twenty-four accomplished authors share authentic stories that consider the meaning of life affirming, sometimes life-saving or gut-wrenching, and fun realities of investing in each other: Spicer than Chicken Soup.

The investment in friendship offers a reciprocal return that may support you and your friend throughout life’s challenges and joys. Friends:Voices On The Gift Of Companionship presents genuine and literary accounts of shared experiences with those who energize and shape all our days.  Share these stories with your friends.

• Celebrate and clarify the value of friendships. 
• Honor those who have helped you through life’s challenges.
• Acknowledge the profound value of the big friend, the one who moved through life’s phases with you.
• Recognize the importance of the friends who have served as witness to your growth and change.
• Remember the friends you lost along the way but who brought you and still bring you joy.
• Learn the value of a friendship that changes.
• Accept the times no one stood with you.
• Consider the meaning of the memories no one ever speaks of.
• Navigate the mostly virtual friendships.
• Thank the teachers and the givers.
• Say good-by because it’s time or because you have no other choice.
• Navigate relationships when paths diverge.
• Thank a friend, by sharing these stories.

You are invited to consider, value, and celebrate the friendships of your past, present, and future. We recommend reading with a friend or book group—a great gift.

Amy Lou Jenkins BSN MFA is the award-winning writer of Every Natural Fact and more. She's published hundreds of essays in literary magazines, anthologies, magazines, newspapers, and online venues. Winner of the Wisconsin Council of Writers Nonfiction Award, Jade Ring, US Best Books. Midwest Connections, Mesa Refuge Environmental Writing Fellowship and more. She's taught Writing at Carroll University, U of Iowa Nonfiction Now, Milwaukee Area Tech College, U of Madison Write by the Lake and dozens more venues. 
 

Praise for Amy Lou Jenkins

• "Any reader drawn to the outdoors will cherish Every Natural Fact and its author's sensual intelligence potted in the fertile soil of a boundless curiosity for the world. Amy Lou Jenkins is the Anna Quindlen of the north woods, the Rachel Carson of the good land of Wisconsin, bequeathing to her son and to all of us an indestructible sense of wonder." - Bob Shacochis, National Book Award-winning author of Easy in The Islands and The Immaculate Invasion  
• Braiding together history, memoir, gentle parenting guidance, and superb nature writing, Jenkins' prose illuminates the details of ordinary life.-Susan Cheever, author of American Bloomsbury 
• Wisconsin's wild areas become the world in extraordinary debut by Amy Lou Jenkins'. Every Natural Fact is nothing less than sensational. -By Pamela Miller, Minneapolis Star Tribune.
• If you combined the lyricism of Annie Dillard, the vision of Aldo Leopold, and the gentle but tough-minded optimism of Frank McCourt, you might come close to Amy Lou Jenkins, a writer who obliterates the distinction between regional writing and actual, honest-to-god writing. I, for one, would follow her anywhere.-Tom Bissell, author of The Father of All Things 
• "Sentence by sentence, a joy to read."- Phillip Lopate author of The Art of The Personal Essay and To Show and Tell: The Craft of Literary Nonfiction