Rock, Water, Wild

Nancy Lord is a former Alaska Writer Laureate and a Pushcart Prize–winning author. Her previous acclaimed books include Fishcamp, Green Alaska, The Man Who Swam with Beavers, and Beluga Days.

"[Nancy Lord] brings an impressive awareness to this collection of essays . . . . The author patiently waits for the landscape and its many stories to reveal themselves to her. Lord is also politically adept and sensitive. . . . She closes with an ample display of her writing chops, allowing readers to take her measure as a well-rounded person—a baseball fan, the daughter of a father with Alzheimer's, and a believer in the elusive ivory-billed woodpecker, confided in a lovely staccato piece as jumpy as the bird's alleged sighting. A protective love story of a place of vast, otherworldly beauty."—Kirkus Reviews"These essays connect like the webs of a fishing net, linked by the writer's belief in a 'right place,' a place where lives can find their true shapes. Luckily, Lord has found hers."—Michael Engelhard, High Country News "In Rock, Water, Wild, Lord takes readers along as she journeys among salmon, sea lions, geese, moose, bears, glaciers, and indigenous languages and ultimately into a new understanding, beyond geographic borders, of our intricate and intimate connections to the natural world."—Sandy Amazeen, MonstersAndCritics.com "Throughout this collection, Lord brings to each image, each sentence, the sharpness of seeing with love, as did Muir and Burroughs before her. . . . How we live our lives matters—to us, to our community, to wild creatures and to the world. This book matters too—for its vision, its fascinating perspectives, its good sense, its powerful and evocative prose."—Peggy Shumaker, author of Just Breathe Normally "Nancy Lord says that for her, living and writing are stones that she turns over and over in her hands, all through her thinking life. For me, her books have been bright reflections from those well-polished stones—clear messages from a life lived well, out of doors, in the North. . . . . You will read this book with pleasure and wonder—and afterward, the world will be a larger, better place."—Robert Michael Pyle, author of Sky Time in Gray's River: Living for Keeps in a Forgotten Place"Rock, Water, Wild is the perfect book for anyone (resident, government official, historian, or tourist) who wishes to be carried into the heart of Alaska's perpetual struggle with itself."—Ray Hudson, Alaska History

• PrefaceAcknowledgmentsOn the Way      Being Peter      On Rereading Siddhartha      In the Giant's HandIn the Country      Words Honor Place      Zen Moose      Honk       Quiet Time      The Hidden Half       How to Bear Witness      Report from the Rookeries      The Farthest Island      A Border Runs Through It      The Conservationist as Wood Chopper      The Experiment      My Apologia      In Our TimeOut and Beyond      Magadan Luck      The Rings      Encounters with the Old Naturalist      A Bigger World      The Nature of Fakery      From an Old World Sea      Hope Is the Thing in Spring      I Met a Man Who Has Seen the Ivory-billed Woodpecker, and This Is What He Told Me      Enough