Rants from the Hill

by Michael P. Branch

  I want to offer very special thanks to George F. Thompson of GFT Publishing. It is impossible to imagine the current vitality of the environmental humanities without the quality books George has brought into the world over the past three decades. I first began collaborating with George in 1992, when my friend Dan Philippon and I pitched him a book on nature writing from Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains and Shenandoah Valley. Although Dan and I were still in graduate school at the time, George took a chance on us, and The Height of Our Mountains (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998) became part of George’s legendary Center for American Places publishing program. Now, a quarter century later, George’s insightful feedback on an earlier version of this manuscript was crucial in helping to shape it for publication.

  I want to express my sincere gratitude to the terrific team at Shambhala/Roost Books, whose work on my 2016 book, Raising Wild: Dispatches from a Home in the Wilderness, convinced me that I had found a home with them. Thanks to Julia Gaviria (assistant editor) for seeing the manuscript down the final stretch, and to Daniel Urban-Brown (art director) for making it a thing of beauty. And thanks to the inimitable KJ Grow (sales and marketing manager), Claire Kelly (senior marketing manager), and Jess Townsend (publicist), whose excellent work has helped this book to find its readers. Most important, I offer my deepest and most sincere thanks to Jennifer Urban-Brown (editor). My ongoing collaboration with Jenn continues to be among the most productive and enjoyable of my career, and I can only hope that folks who believe that a writer’s relationship with their editor must be adversarial might be as fortunate as I have been in having such a supportive, patient, insightful collaborator in their work.

  I am blessed with a family that is exceptionally tolerant of my eccentricities and ambitions, my fierce sense of place and idiosyncratic sense of humor. On the other side of the Sierra, thanks to our Central Valley people: O. B. and Deb Hoagland, Sister Kate and Uncle Adam Myers, Troy and Scott Allen, and our brood of cousins: Jenna, Alex, Zev, Ellie, and Quinn. Eternal gratitude goes to my wife, Eryn, who is as loving, patient, smart, creative, funny, generous, and encouraging a partner as any desert rat might dream of having. I often tell our daughters, Hannah and Caroline, that “it takes a family to make a book.” It is for this reason that Raising Wild was dedicated to them. Indeed, the dedication of a book is the most sincere gesture of gratitude available to a writer. I have dedicated Rants from the Hill to my parents, Stu and Sharon Branch, who have directly or indirectly enabled everything I’ve accomplished in life. Without their support, the hill from which I rant would have remained a dream deferred, rather than one realized.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  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 seven 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 (a humor anthology). His work has appeared in many book-length essay collections, and in magazines including Orion, Ecotone, Utne Reader, Slate, Places, Whole Terrain, and Red Rock Review. His recent book, Raising Wild: Dispatches from a Home in the Wilderness, was released in 2016 by Shambhala’s Roost Books imprint and is distributed by Penguin Random House.

  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 on a hilltop 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 harp, 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.

  For more on Mike Branch and his work, please visit his website at http://michaelbranchwriter.com.

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