Do you know what Terry Tempest Williams, Robert Redford, Nora Gallagher, Gary Ferguson and others are saying about Amy Irvine? See Trespass: Living at the Edge of the Promised Land at Amazon.com.
Related Links:
- Listen to Amy Irvine and Doug Fabrizio discussing Trespass.
- Listen to Amy Irvine Reading From Trespass: Living at the Edge of the Promised Land.
- Listen to Peter Matthiessen reading from Shadow Country.
- Listen to Bill Mckibben discussing literature, climate change and the 350 Movement.
- Seed Schedule ~ 2009
Publisher (North Point Press):
Trespass is the story of one woman’s struggle to gain footing in inhospitable territory. A wilderness activist and apostate Mormon, Amy Irvine sought respite in the desert outback of southern Utah’s red-rock country after her father’s suicide, only to find out just how much of an interloper she was among her own people. But more than simply an exploration of personal loss, Trespass is an elegy for a dying world, for the ruin of one of our most beloved and unique desert landscapes and for our vanishing connection to it. Fearing what her father’s fate might somehow portend for her, Irvine retreated into the remote recesses of the Colorado Plateau—home not only to the world’s most renowned national parks but also to a rugged brand of cowboy Mormonism that stands in defiant contrast to the world at large. Her story is one of ruin and restoration, of learning to live among people who fear the wilderness the way they fear the devil and how that fear fuels an antagonism toward environmental concerns that pervades the region. At the same time, Irvine mourns her own loss of wildness and disconnection from spirituality, while ultimately discovering that the provinces of nature and faith are not as distinct as she once might have believed.
Praise for Trespass: Living at the Edge of the Promised Land.
“Trespass is the story of one woman’s escape: from the Mormon Church, from her father’s demons, from her own self-sabotage. Irvine’s take on early Native Americans in the Southwest and hunter gathering as a way of life is extraordinary and original, as is the way she uses these thoughts to better understand her own place in the world. Trespass is also a tangled, fevered, ambivalent love story—the true kind.” —Nora Gallagher, author of Changing Light and Things Seen and Unseen
“Trespass is a flare shot up amid troubling forces and asks us not to imagine a new West, but instead to re-envision ourselves as its inhabitants.” —Robert Redford
“Trespass is a book full of transgressions because Amy Irvine has dared to examine the nature of orthodoxy, be it religion, environmentalism, or marriage. What saves this book from simply becoming an indulgence is her fidelity and love for all things beautiful and broken, especially the redrock desert of southern Utah. If erosion is the face of a changing landscape, Amy Irving has written erosional prose. This is a transformative memoir that dances between shadow and light.”—Terry Tempest Williams, author of Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place and Red: Passion and Patience in the Desert
“The most lingering, destructive myth to come out of the American West has been the notion that sense of place is somehow derived from fierce independence. Amy Irvine knows better. Her beautiful prose, infused with the staggering breadth and texture of the Southwestern landscape, reminds us that home is a hunger. It is the hope for a life re-imagined, for relationships that stretch across centuries, full of tangle and sweat and heartbreaking possibility.”—Gary Ferguson, author of Hawks Rest: A Season in the Remote Heart of Yellowstone and The Great Divide: A Biography of the American West
“Amy’s writing is designed in the image of a landscape: desert writing, writing about bones and wind and stone. Some people try to write about this country, but their words are only dry and austere, as if that is all that is here. Amy’s words truly dwell here. They deal as poetically with her father’s suicide as they deal with facets of weather, with the myriad details of archaeology, geology, botany. This is not a natural history book in any common sense. It has the rhythm of arid writing: passing steadily from place to place, quick and then slow, here and then there. And it has the personal richness of a land where the rocks are made of blood.” —Craig Childs, author of Secret Knowledge of Water
“Amy Irvine’s Trespass is a harrowing and angry book, which ultimately wins us over by sheer, naked honesty. It is accurate to think of much of life in terms of damage control and Irvine eloquently presents her defense of the western landscape and the integrality of her own life.” —Jim Harrison, author of Legends of the Fall
“There is heartbreak and there is love. The land can do that. There are the canyons gouged between the people who share the land. And there is writing as warm and harsh as the ground that birthed it. Amy Irvine has written a brilliant book about a place beyond our reach but within our dreams.” —Charles Bowden, author of Blood Orchid
See Trespass: Living at the Edge of the Promised Land at Amazon.com.
Related Links:
- Listen to Amy Irvine and Doug Fabrizio discussing Trespass.
- Listen to Amy Irvine Reading From Trespass: Living at the Edge of the Promised Land.
- Listen to Peter Matthiessen reading from Shadow Country.
- Listen to Bill Mckibben discussing literature, climate change and the 350 Movement.
- Seed Schedule ~ 2009
