Siesta Lane: A Year Unplugged, Or, the Good Intentions of Ten People, Two Cats, One Old Dog, Eight Acres, One Telephone, Three Cars, and Twenty Miles

“Equal parts sweet and serious…will make many folks think about their lives in new ways.”—Bill McKibben

A poet at heart, Amy Minato rejects her life of consumption in Chicago to go back to nature - specifically, to a commune in Oregon, where she rediscovers herself. She also cops occasionally to the pretentiousness of her mission, and laughs along with the reader at her attempts to be both environmentally friendly and sane, considering the fact that she's moved in with a bunch of strangers in a remote locale.

Jan Muir, a relative of the great environmentalist John Muir, lends her beautiful black-and-white illustrations to the book.

Written with a grace and clarity of vision reminiscent of Annie Dillard's prose, Siesta Lane is both a practical case study in living green, and the heartwarming story of a modern idealist who dives headfirst into the fray and discovers just what it takes to live a year unplugged.

This is a must-read for armchair adventurers and a perfect, engaging primer for anyone who wants to stride confidently into the new, environmentally-conscious 21st century.

When the urban bustle of Eugene, Ore., got to be too much, poet Minato (The Wider Lens) moved to a woodsy cabin on a commune and absorbed a year's worth of material for this uneven collection of essays and poems. Simplifying her life in the rustic surroundings, she learned that it is freeing to emerge, even unwillingly, from the clutch of possessions. A decomposing raccoon attuned her to the realities of life and death, chopping wood taught her patience, and snails reminded her to slow down. Minato's lyrical prose tosses off beguiling evocations of the landscape and flora around her (The pheasants come out of the grass like puffs of smoke) in almost every line. Unfortunately, her belletristic pensées can seem precious (What is lost when I deny myself cloud-gazing?) and her denunciations of consumer society sound both strident and shallow (Why must there be 30 kinds of cereal?... Every minuscule decision takes time and energy, takes me that much further away from my writing, the land, the people I love and my connection with everything deeper). There is finely wrought nature writing here, but pat assumptions about rural authenticity and the corruptions of society make Minato's year on the land seem curiously unexamined. Photos. (Jan.)
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