Now Go Home: Wilderness, Belonging, and the Crosscut Saw
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By Ana Maria Spagna
2004. 5-1/2 x 8-1/2 inches. 176 pages.
ISBN 0-87071-009-5. Paperback, $17.95.
Table of Contents
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Now Go Home tells the story of how a quintessential California girl ended up earning her living in the Pacific Northwest with a crosscut saw. Ana Maria Spagna came of age in southern California in the "hot-pink eighties." By the time she turned nineteen, she had visited Disneyland thirty-seven times and was ready to hit the road. In these finely edged essays, she takes her readers along.
With candor, wit, and hard-earned wisdom, Spagna reflects on the journey that took her from a childhood in the suburbs of LA to a trail crew in the North Cascades, where she falls in love with a place and, unexpectedly, with a woman. With days spent laboring as the only woman on a trail crew and evenings in a cabin no larger than Thoreau's, she has world enough and time to wrestle with the compromises and contradictions of making "a life in the woods." From the work she does and the people she meets, she comes to see the nuances, and occasionally the humor, of big ideas like wilderness and environmentalism. And she decides this is the place she must call home.
"Spagna's wonderful new book of essays . . . transports readers into a world
of physical labor without removing the romance or hard-won rewards of such
work. Even to readers for whom a day of manual labor in cold, mud and rain
sounds like the least appealing activity on Earth, the scope and sincerity
of these 18 essays will make you laugh, think and appreciate your heated
home as they lead you to a fine and quiet place."
-The Seattle Times
"Ana Maria Spagna's essays are as stubborn, compact, and densely grained as a whitebarked pine at timberline. Each achieves its wholeness honestly, earning every twig and needle. No excess growth, no easy resolutions. The best will firmly root themselves in the literature of the Pacific Northwest."
-John Daniel, author of Winter Creek: One Writer's Natural History
About the Author
Author photograph by Mike Barnhart
Ana Maria Spagna lives in Stehekin, Washington, where she works on a National Park Service trail crew. Her essays have appeared in
Orion, Utne Reader, Open Spaces, Backpacker, and
Best Essays NW. Now Go Home is her first book.
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