The Walk

by William deBuys

Overview

In The Walk, William deBuys writes about personal loss and the power of the landscape to nurture the recovery of hope. The book consists of three interrelated essays that move from a period of strife in the author’s life to a kind of limbo and eventually to a place of peace. The setting is deBuys’ small farm in New Mexico’s Sangre de Cristo Mountains. Each morning, he takes the same walk through the woods, arriving, as he describes in the first essay, at a clarity that comes from looking at the same vantage point for years. The middle essay, “Geranium,” takes its name from a mare deBuys had to put down, and whose remains become one with the forest. In the final essay, deBuys reflects on drought, the loss of a friend, and the resurgence of land and hope. Contemplative, compassionate, and quietly humorous, The Walk is nature writing at its finest.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781595341013
Publisher:	Trinity University Press
Publication date:	01/02/2016
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	176
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

William deBuys is a writer and conservationist based in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He is a professor of documentary studies at the College of Santa Fe and the author of Enchantment and Exploitation (University of New Mexico Press, 1985) and River of Traps: A New Mexico Mountain Life (Trinity University Press, paperback edition 2007; University of New Mexico Press, 1990), coauthored with Alex Harris, which was a finalist for the 1991 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction and a New York Times Notable Book of the Year in 1990.

DeBuys’s other books are Salt Dreams: Land and Water in Low-Down California (University of New Mexico Press, 1999), which received a Western States Book Award, and Seeing Things Whole: The Essential John Wesley Powell (Shearwater/Island Press, 2001). His shorter work has appeared in many publications, including Story, Northern Lights, and the New York Times Book Review.

Editorial Reviews

DeBuys’ pensive and quiet book offers a way out of despair and toward hope.” — San Francisco Chronicle

"William deBuys’ extended prose-poetic, meditative ramble through the fields and woods of his northern New Mexico home is a rare work of such quiet, lyrical beauty that it needs to be savored.”— Albuquerque Journal

From the Publisher