These essays include meditations and arguments on becoming a writer; on old-growth forest and the practice of clear-cutting; on the fluid dynamics and biotic diversity and mythic resonance of rivers; on the writers Ken Kesey and Wallace Stegner; on the literary genre of creative nonfiction; on death and dying and the consolations of mortality; on the al-Qaeda attacks of September 11, 2001; and on my allegiances to the places and region and country I call home. So writes John Daniel in the introduction to his latest book of essays, The Far Corner, Daniel writes from the ground he walks on and the landscape he inhabits, spinning narratives that seek to define how he belongs to the land and to life itself. He takes his readers to beaches, old-growth forests, and deep river canyons--wild places, and places scarred by human exploitation--and leads us also through inner landscapes where he explores mortality, creativity, and spirituality. This collection extends John Daniel's earlier work in the personal essay form that Richard Nelson has called wise, deep, passionate, meticulously informed. An important contribution to the legacy of insight, beauty, and hope shaped by a new generation of American nature writers.
These essays include meditations and arguments on becoming a writer; on old-growth forest and the practice of clear-cutting; on the fluid dynamics and biotic diversity and mythic resonance of rivers; on the writers Ken Kesey and Wallace Stegner; on the literary genre of creative nonfiction; on death and dying and the consolations of mortality; on the al-Qaeda attacks of September 11, 2001; and on my allegiances to the places and region and country I call home. So writes John Daniel in the introduction to his latest book of essays, The Far Corner, Daniel writes from the ground he walks on and the landscape he inhabits, spinning narratives that seek to define how he belongs to the land and to life itself. He takes his readers to beaches, old-growth forests, and deep river canyons--wild places, and places scarred by human exploitation--and leads us also through inner landscapes where he explores mortality, creativity, and spirituality. This collection extends John Daniel's earlier work in the personal essay form that Richard Nelson has called wise, deep, passionate, meticulously informed. An important contribution to the legacy of insight, beauty, and hope shaped by a new generation of American nature writers.
John Daniel's books of prose, including Rogue River Journal and The Far Corner, have won three Oregon Book Awards for Literary Nonfiction, a Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award, and have been supported by a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts among other grants and awards. His essays and poems have appeared in Wilderness Magazine, Orion, Sierra, Terrain.org, The North American Review, Poetry, The Southern Review, and other journals and anthologies. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow and Jones Lecturer at Stanford University, he has taught as a writer-in-residence at colleges and universities across the country. Earlier in life he was a logger, hod carrier, railroader, and rock-climbing instructor. Daniel lives with his wife, Marilyn Daniel, in the Coast Range foothills west of Eugene, Oregon.
Praise for John Daniel
"The Far Corner makes such good company because the writing is
patient with what it wants to discuss. It thinks, recognizes nuance
and includes it rather than dismissing it. The result is a view (of
rivers, logging, Wallace Stegner, nonfiction prose) that's layered
rather than simplistic and accurate rather than glib. John Daniel's
essays sound a voice that wants to tell the truth and that finds
outand makes clearhow complicated and mysterious an effort this
can be." —Lex Runciman, Professor of English, Linfield College
"As beautifully wrought as it is truthful, Rogue River Journal is a
Walden for our time." —Pacific Northwest Booksellers Awards
Committee
"John Daniel has quietly established himself over the past decade
as one of the premier writers on the West Coast." —The Bloomsbury
Review
"John Daniel loves wilderness of all kinds, and gets out into it
every chance, but it is more than scenery he is after. He has a
streak of mysticism, some generalized religious sense, that is
stimulated by the natural world, by physical effort, as in
climbing, and by participation in the sounds and smells and seasons
of nature . . . his essays will win him devoted readers." —Wallace
Stegner
"Daniel's writing is known for its clarity." —The Oregonian
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