“The Wild within Our Walls.” Originally published as “Nothing Says Trash Like Packrats: Nature Boy Meets Bushy Tail.” In Trash Animals: The Cultural Perceptions, Biology, and Ecology of Animals in Conflict with Humans, edited by Phillip David Johnson and Kelsi Nagy, 139–49. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013.
“Playing with the Stick.” Originally published as “Sticking with the Stick.” Hawk & Handsaw: The Journal of Creative Sustainability 5 (2012): 68–73.
“Freebirds.” Originally published as “Freebirds: A Thanksgiving Lesson in Forgiveness.” Orion 30, no. 6 (November/December 2011): 44–49.
“Finding the Future Forest.” Some passages in this chapter are derived from the following two sources: “Lifeblood of the Desert,” Tahoe Quarterly (Fall 2007): 55–57; “Finding the Forest,” Orion Afield 3, no. 4 (Autumn 1999): 10–14.
“My Children’s First Garden.” Originally published as “My Child’s First Garden.” Hawk & Handsaw: The Journal of Creative Sustainability 1 (2008): 56–65.
“The Hills Are Alive.” Places Journal, January 2012. https://places-journal.org/article/the-hills-are-alive.
“The V.E.C.T.O.R.L.O.S.S. Project.” Isotope: A Journal of Literary Nature and Science Writing 5, no. 2 (Fall/Winter 2007): 2–9.
About the Author
Michael P. Branch is professor of literature and enviornment at the University of Nevada, Reno, where he teaches creative nonfiction, American literature, environmental studies, and film studies. He has published five books and more than two hundred essays, articles, and reviews, and 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 work has appeared in many magazines, including Orion, Ecotone, Utne Reader, Slate, Places Journal, Whole Terrain, and Red Rock Review. His widely read monthly essay series, “Rants from the Hill,” has received more than one hundred thousand page views at High Country News online (hcn.org); a book-length collection of those essays is forthcoming from Roost Books.
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.
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