The Risk Involved

The Risk Involved is a collection of related, creative nonfiction essays that, when read together, constitute a memoir of sorts. The first few essays were written while Jeffrey Utzinger, in his mid-twenties, was working at a chemical plant in Austin, Texas living with his wife in a tiny apartment. The collection wends its way through twenty-five years of rent houses and starter homes, being broke and chasing dreams, adventures in beekeeping, gardening, eating and drinking in excess, fishing, raising children, chickens and ducks, gambling and discovering ways of belonging in different communities.

Longing for the rural Kentucky of his childhood, Utzinger finds himself always on the fringes of the natural world, never quite making it far enough into the woods or wilderness. He rarely lives anywhere close to where he works, is almost always dissatisfied with his job, the house in which he lives, the people and traffic that crowd his days. Desiring to simply his life, he consistently fails. However, after struggling for several years with a mysterious illness, and then watching an extended family member suffer a debilitating disease, he's reminded of the futility of wishing one's life was other than what it is. Finally embracing his home and plot of land at the crossroads of a busy intersection in Lockhart, Texas, he decides to build a greenhouse, realizing the best way to live is by being attentive to the environment that surrounds you. Regardless the place or predicament, however, these essays also examine what it means to spend decades with a partner and remain maddeningly in love.

Full of humor and hope, Utzinger chronicles the joys and sorrows of growing up and growing old, the risk involved in chasing grand sweeping notions, and finding one's place in the world.

Jeffrey Utzinger spent the first ten years of his life in the woods of Northern Kentucky before his family moved to the suburbs of Fort Worth, Texas. After graduating from high school, he attended college in Austin where he met his future wife. He earned an MFA in Creative Writing from Texas State University while working maintenance at a chemical plant in South Austin. While he and his wife have rarely lived within the Austin city limits, they've never strayed far from the area as they've moved from town to town, job to job. Jeffrey was a college professor, a corporate trainer, and then spent several ill-fated years selling insurance. Eventually he returned to academia, earned a PhD in American Literature from Texas A&M University, and currently serves as a dean and English professor at Concordia University Texas. His creative and scholarly work has appeared in numerous literary and academic journals. Jeffrey and his wife live in Lockhart, Texas where they raised their three children who are in the process of finding their own place in the world. Jeffrey also keeps chickens, a duck, cats and dogs, and a few thousand bees. This is his first published collection of essays.