Home Ground

Debra Gwartney is the author of the memoir Live Through This, which expands the story of her relationship with her daughters that was broadcast on This American Life in 2002. Her short stories, personal narratives, essays, and articles have appeared in numerous magazines and journals. Recent publications include a memoir in Triquarterly, an essay in Modern Bride magazine, and a “Modern Love” essay in the New York Times. She is a former reporter for the Oregonian and was a nonfiction scholar at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Her honors include fellowships from the Oregon Arts Commission, Literary Arts, the Hedgebrook Writers’ Colony, the Wurlitzer Foundation, and the American Antiquarian Society, and the John Eliot Teaching Award at Portland State University. She lives in Western Oregon.

“Home Ground is a treasure house of a book, chocked with gems of the American vernacular. To learn these terms for features of the landscape is like putting on a new pair of glasses—the land comes more vividly into focus. But to call this a reference work is to shortchange it—the entries are written by some of our best writers, and the result is an unexpected page turner.”— Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma“Reading hundreds of pages of alphabetized definitions of landscape terms in one sitting may sound as appealing as spending a long hot day in an Arizona malpais—a desert landscape that is, to quote Cormac McCarthy, “all cracked and reddish black like a pan of dried blood”—but it ends up being a lot of fun.”— New York Times“‘Home Ground’ . . . is a civilized pleasure, in the way great reference books can be.”— San Francisco Chronicle“One can almost hear mountains and hills bursting into song, and trees of the field clapping their hands.”— Christian Century“A group of writers has collected more than 800 fading landscape terms in a new book — Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape. ”— National Public Radio