2017 Finalist - Sigurd F. Olson Nature Writing Award
2017 Finalist - Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment Creative Book Award
2017 Finalist - Evans Biography and Handcart Award
Combining natural history, humor, and personal narrative, Raising Wild is an intimate exploration of Nevada's Great Basin Desert, the wild and extreme land of high desert caliche and juniper, of pronghorn antelope and mountain lions, where wildfires and snowstorms threaten in equal measure.
Michael Branch "earned his whiskers" in the Great Basin Desert of northwestern Nevada, in the wild and extreme landscape where he lives off the grid with his wife and two curious little girls. Shifting between pastoral passages on the beauty found in the desert and humorous tales of the humility of being a father, Raising Wild offers an intimate portrait of a landscape where mountain lions and ground squirrels can threaten in equal measure. With Branch's distinct lyricism and wit, this exceedingly barren landscape becomes a place resonant with the rattle of snakes, the plod of pronghorn antelope, and the rustle of juniper trees, a place that is teeming with energy, surprise, and an endless web of connections. Part memoir, part homage to an environment all-to-often brushed aside as inhospitable, Raising Wild offers an intergenerational approach to nature, family, and the forgotten language of wildness.
MIKE BRANCH is the author of more than 200 essays, articles, and reviews, and has given more than 250 public readings and lectures. His creative nonfiction includes pieces that have received Honorable Mention for the Pushcart Prize and been recognized as Notable Essays in The Best American Essays (three times), The Best American Science and Nature Writing, and The Best American Nonrequired Reading. His essays have appeared in magazines including Orion, Ecotone, Slate, Utne Reader, Sunset, Reader's Digest, Hawk and Handsaw, High Country News, Places, and Whole Terrain, and in many essay collections, including Wonder and Other Survival Skills, The Best Creative Nonfiction, and Companions in Wonder: Children and Adults Exploring Nature Together. He is co-founder of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE), and he served for sixteen years as the Book Review Editor of the creative/scholarly journal ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment. Mike is Professor of Literature and Environment in the English Department at the University of Nevada, Reno, where he co-founded the nation's first graduate program in Literature and Environment studies.
Show more2017 Finalist - Sigurd F. Olson Nature Writing Award
2017 Finalist - Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment Creative Book Award
2017 Finalist - Evans Biography and Handcart Award
Combining natural history, humor, and personal narrative, Raising Wild is an intimate exploration of Nevada's Great Basin Desert, the wild and extreme land of high desert caliche and juniper, of pronghorn antelope and mountain lions, where wildfires and snowstorms threaten in equal measure.
Michael Branch "earned his whiskers" in the Great Basin Desert of northwestern Nevada, in the wild and extreme landscape where he lives off the grid with his wife and two curious little girls. Shifting between pastoral passages on the beauty found in the desert and humorous tales of the humility of being a father, Raising Wild offers an intimate portrait of a landscape where mountain lions and ground squirrels can threaten in equal measure. With Branch's distinct lyricism and wit, this exceedingly barren landscape becomes a place resonant with the rattle of snakes, the plod of pronghorn antelope, and the rustle of juniper trees, a place that is teeming with energy, surprise, and an endless web of connections. Part memoir, part homage to an environment all-to-often brushed aside as inhospitable, Raising Wild offers an intergenerational approach to nature, family, and the forgotten language of wildness.
MIKE BRANCH is the author of more than 200 essays, articles, and reviews, and has given more than 250 public readings and lectures. His creative nonfiction includes pieces that have received Honorable Mention for the Pushcart Prize and been recognized as Notable Essays in The Best American Essays (three times), The Best American Science and Nature Writing, and The Best American Nonrequired Reading. His essays have appeared in magazines including Orion, Ecotone, Slate, Utne Reader, Sunset, Reader's Digest, Hawk and Handsaw, High Country News, Places, and Whole Terrain, and in many essay collections, including Wonder and Other Survival Skills, The Best Creative Nonfiction, and Companions in Wonder: Children and Adults Exploring Nature Together. He is co-founder of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE), and he served for sixteen years as the Book Review Editor of the creative/scholarly journal ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment. Mike is Professor of Literature and Environment in the English Department at the University of Nevada, Reno, where he co-founded the nation's first graduate program in Literature and Environment studies.
Show moreCombining natural history, humour, and personal narrative, Raising Wild is an intimate exploration of Nevada's Great Basin Desert, the wild and extreme land of high desert caliche and juniper, of pronghorn antelope and mountain lions, where wildfires and snowstorms threaten in equal measure.
MICHAEL P. BRANCH is a professor of literature and environment at the University of Nevada, Reno, where he teaches creative nonfiction, American literature, environmental studies, and film studies. He has published five books, including Raising Wild and How to Cuss in Western, and more than two hundred essays, articles, and reviews. Mike lives with his wife, Eryn, and daughters, Hannah Virginia and Caroline Emerson, in a passive solar home of their own design at 6,000 feet in the remote high desert of northwestern Nevada, in the ecotone where the Great Basin Desert and Sierra Nevada Mountains meet. There he writes, plays blues harmonica, drinks sour mash, curses at baseball on the radio, cuts stove wood, and walks at least 1,200 miles each year in the surrounding hills, canyons, ridges, arroyos, and playas.
"Michael Branch has been an essential figure in western letters for
years. Now, in Raising Wild, he brings us an intimate look
into one remarkable family's life situated deeply in their place.
Whether writing of antelope or antelope squirrels, scorpions or
daughters, Branch sweeps smoothly between downright mordant humor
and stilling insight, through depths of fresh thought all along the
way. His essays mean so much, I could enjoy reading them even
upside down, or back to front."—Robert Michael Pyle, author
of Sky Time in Gray's River: Living for Keeps in a Forgotten
Place
“This book is not exactly about wild landscapes but the life of a
house-holding family placed out there with two verge-of-puberty
daughters. It is about our daily reality, not our fantasy
possibilities, and who knows today what these girls will have to
say later? So it is remarkably interesting, lively,
non-theoretical, and hopeful. The wild might be wildfire or
bushy-tailed woodrats under the floor—not just to live with but to
know them. Michael Branch’s book points forward, not back.”—Gary
Snyder
"With Raising Wild, Michael Branch turns his sharp mind and big
heart to the subject of domestic wildness—life with his wife and
daughters in the high desert. Reading Branch’s prose is like
attending a great and raucous party. A party held around a campfire
in a secret corner of the wilderness full of intense talk, laughs,
liquor, and deep insights. That the kids are invited this time
makes it even better. A profound and moving book that just
might change some lives."—David Gessner, author of All the Wild
that Remains
“At last! A home for Michael Branch’s joyous dispatches from the
high desert, which I have long followed with delight. If you’re
unfamiliar with Branch, prepare for your first encounter with a
singular sensibility, bracing yet affable. In part a memoir of
building a unique home in an extraordinary place, in part a
treatise on cultivating, protecting, and loving the wild, and each
other therein, Raising Wild is a wholly defiant, tender book
bristling with spirit, intelligence, and mountains of laughs.”
—Claire Vaye Watkins, author of Battleborn and Gold Fame Citrus
“I have long considered Michael Branch one of the true visionaries
of western American literature--and here is further proof.
This beautiful, often raucous account of fatherhood and (wild)
faith takes us even deeper into his remarkable kinship with
northwestern Nevada. A place where, through the “daily practices of
love, humility, and humor,” we can all learn to be at home in this
world.”—John T. Price, author of Daddy Long Legs: The Natural
Education of a Father
“Not since Rachel Carson’s The Sense of Wonder has there been such
a lively and evocative account of intergenerational experiences in
nature. Michael Branch’s Raising Wild offers breathtaking
lyricism, sage wisdom, and big belly laughs in equal measure. Most
importantly, this collection is a testament to the value of
marrying memory and place—especially while in the company of those
we love.”—Kathryn Miles, author of Adventures with Ari, All
Standing, and Superstorm: Nine Days Inside Hurricane Sandy
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