Philip Connors: A Song for the River

A Song for the River – Philip Connors – 978-1-941026-90-8 – Cinco Puntos Press – Hardcover – 256 pages – $22.95 – September 18, 2018 – ebook versions available at lower prices.

“The river that runs through the wilderness opens his heart: the mountains burn, friends die, and green shoots sprout from the ashes.”

Philip Connors, like some other fine writers of the desert southwest, notably Gary Snyder, Jack Kerouac and Norman Maclean, has been a long time fire lookout. Phil has spent many years in the Gila Wilderness in New Mexico. He began working as a fire lookout in 2002, and wrote about his experience in an earlier book, Fire Season: Field Notes From a Wilderness Lookout.

As it happens, I visited the Gila Wilderness for the first time in 2018, and was completely smitten by its beauty and the magnitude of the mountains, the vistas, and the Gila River. I’m sure I had read about the Gila at some point; it is famous for being the first wilderness area established anywhere in the world (in 1924), principally through the efforts of the great naturalist Aldo Leopold. Leopold was himself one of our best writers about nature; the Forest Service transferred him to Wisconsin, perhaps fortunately for the rest of us, as his Sand County Almanac has inspired so many to a better understanding of the natural world.

The Gila area is not only beautiful, but it is historically important as well. When we were there, we visited the famous Mogollon cliff dwellings, which are simply extraordinary. After that culture disappeared, the Gila was subsequently home to the Apache, and then the American pioneers, outlaws, and miners who displaced them. It’s an area which Connors knows intimately, and this powerful and emotionally gripping book reflects the depth of his knowledge of places and people, of the natural landscape and the depth of both human despair and our equally transcendent spirit.

There is a great deal of pain and sorrow in this book, but the spiritual and emotional power of Connors’ writing and his ability to transform experience into something resonant is important for himself and for his readers. The power of the writing is palpable and strong. It’s a beautiful book that I hope will be read by many.

Wilderness is where the heart grows stronger, or breaks, or both. No matter, we need these places and the writers who, like Connors, bring forth meaning out of pain, beauty out of loss.

Philip Connors was raised on a farm in Minnesota, went to the University of Montana for college, and spent a number of years working as a journalist. But he became disillusioned and made his way west, which clearly has become his true home and emotional center. His first book, Fire Season: Field Notes From a Wilderness Lookout won the National Outdoor Book Award, the Sigurd Olson Nature Writing Award, the Reading the West Award for nonfiction, and the Grand Prize from the Banff Mountain Book Competition. His second book, All the Wrong Places, a memoir of life after his brother’s suicide, was published in 2015.

Talking to Philip after reading this beautifully written, moving narrative of nature and loss was a great experience for me.

“Everything that is absent in the current political crises of this nation is abundantly present in Philip Connors’ A Song for the River: humility, quietude, forgiveness, and gratitude. His writing is pure, exact, compassionate, and often elegaic…I loved this book.”
—Benjamin Alire Sáenz, winner of the PEN/Faulkner for Everything Begins and Ends at the Kentucky Club

Visit Philip Connors’ own website here and his outstanding, El Paso based publisher, Cinco Puntos Press, here.

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Bram Presser: The Book of Dirt (a novel)

The Book of Dirt – Bram Presser –  Text Publishing Company (Australia) – Paperback – 9781925240269 – 325 pages – $15.95 – September 11, 2018 – ebook versions available at lower prices

Personal and family history for most contemporary Jews is frequently fraught. Most of us have relatives who disappeared without a trace, except for scattered entries in German records of extermination. Some fewer of us have had living relatives whose lives were entwined with and defined by the Holocaust, almost always in horrific and devastating ways.

Bram Presser, an Australian punk rocker and practicing attorney who also happens to be a brilliant writer, spent eight years working on this novel, The Book of Dirt. It is a fabulous story that explores the real life story of Presser’s grandfather, Jakub Rand, from the 1920s onward through the Holocaust and beyond. Presser addresses history in all its complexity with the only tool that could possibly make sense of it – imagination.

Presser starts with family stories and personal legends, combined with archival research and interviews to create this novel. Of course it becomes partly fact, partly fiction. Some is memory and much is imagined.

The relatively large number of characters and the movement between places can be confusing for the reader, but Bram Presser’s grandfather, Jakub Rand, and his grandmother, Dasa Roubicek, and their immediate family are the focus of the book, and their story of survival shines through. The pain and suffering was immense and the power of humanity was as well.

You do not need to be Jewish to find this novel compelling and real. All of us can share through this novel what it means to find hope, and for the descendants of survivors of terror and loss to try to understand the stories of their forebears. This is a wonderful and transformative literary work.

The Book of Dirt has won a number of well-deserved awards in Australia. Bram Presser was born in Melbourne in 1976. He has been a punk rocker, an academic and a criminal attorney. He writes the blog Bait For Bookworms and is a founding member of Melbourne Jewish Book Week. His stories have appeared in Vice Magazine, The Sleepers Almanac, Best Australian Stories, Award Winning Australian Writing and Higher Arc. In 2011, Bram won The Age Short Story Award. Presser’s own website is very active and includes a great deal of material related to the stories behind The Book of Dirt; it is worthwhile to explore.

‘Meet Bram Presser, aged five, smoking a cigarette with his grandmother in Prague. Meet Jakub Rand, one of the Jews chosen to assemble the Nazi’s Museum of the Extinct Race. Such details, like lightning flashes, illuminate this audacious work about the author’s search for the grandfather he loved but hardly knew. Working in the wake of writers like Modiano and Safran Foer, Presser brilliantly shows how fresh facts can derail old truths, how fiction can amplify memory. A smart and tender meditation on who we become when we attempt to survive survival.’
Mireille Juchau

I hope you enjoy listening to Bram Presser talk about The Book of Dirt, a book I strongly recommend you seek out and read.

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