Staff – Hiraeth Press

March 21, 2017March 21, 2017

Snowy Owls, Egrets, & Unexpected Graces | Finalist in Foreword Review’s Book of the Year Awards

Today, Hiraeth Press is pleased to announce Snowy Owls, Egrets, & Unexpected Graces by Gwendolyn Morgan has been recognized as a finalist in the 19th annual Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Awards.

As part of their mission to discover, review, and share the best books from small, university, and indie publishers (and authors), independent media company Foreword Reviews hosts its annual awards program each year. Finalists represent the best books published in 2016, and submitted to Foreword Reviews for award consideration, and were narrowed down by Foreword’s editors from over 2,200 individual titles spread across 65 categories. A complete list of finalists can be found at:

https://awards.forewordreviews.com/finalists/2016/

“Choosing finalists for the INDIES is always the highlight of our year, but the choice was more difficult this time around due to the high quality of submissions,” said Victoria Sutherland, publisher of Foreword Reviews. “Each new book award season proves again how independent publishers are the real innovators in the industry.”

Snowy Owls, Egrets and Unexpected Graces is a portal to an interior landscape that mirrors the natural world – the majesty of western red cedar and snowy owls, the murmurations of songbirds and the incantations of astral showers. The poet simultaneously reflects on the suffering of those living with cancer and chronic illness as well as the on-going habitat destruction amidst climate change, and the violence of war and poverty. This book invokes hope and gratitude in the midst of sorrow and grief, an invitation to take a breath in the midst of the turning of the wheel of the year, to pause and recalibrate to the music of the cosmos.

INDIES finalists are moved on to final judging by an expert panel of librarians and booksellers curated specifically for each genre and who will determine the books who will be named Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award winners. Winners in each genre—along with Editor’s Choice winners, and Foreword’s INDIE Publisher of the Year—will be announced during the 2017 American Library Association Annual Conference in Chicago on June 24, 2017.

GWENDOLYN MORGAN learned the names of birds and wildflowers and inherited paint brushes and boxes from her grandmothers. With an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Goddard College, and an M.Div. from San Francisco Theological Seminary and the Graduate Theological Union, she has been a recipient of artist and writing residencies at Artsmith, Caldera, Into the Depths of Winter, and Soapstone. Crow Feathers, Red Ochre, Green Tea, her first book of poems, was a winner of the Wild Earth Poetry Prize, Hiraeth Press. Her poems have appeared in: Calyx, Dakotah, Kalliope, Kinesis, Mudfish, Tributaries: A Journal of Nature Writing, Written River as well as The Cancer Poetry Project 2, and other anthologies, blogs and literary journals. Gwendolyn and Judy A. Rose, her spouse, share their home with Abbey Skye, a rescued Pembroke Welsh Corgi.

August 3, 2016

Snowy Owls, Egrets, and Unexpected Graces

Snowy Owls, Egrets, and Unexpected Graces by Gwendolyn Morgan is now available wherever books are sold! Visit our bookstore»

Praise for Snowy Owls, Egrets, and Unexpected Graces
* * *

“This is a book of magic spells, calling on birds, acts of art, blessings, and humble ritual to turn a time of illness to a quest for awareness. Small changes work the mysteries: not ‘shadow of death’ but ‘death of shadow.’ Not first-person predictable, but third-person intimate, a voice filled with surprises inhabiting daily life, life ritual, spoken scripture, ‘the painful juxtaposition of various needs’ converging polarities toward a hawk’s whole vision, a thrush’s solo song. The multiple realms of the awakened mind here (in titles like ‘Sturgeon, Osprey, Gemini New Moon’) give this writer and her readers a place to stand in a complex world, a place to understand, a place to heal, connect, be whole.”
—Kim Stafford, author of Wind on the Waves: Stories of the Oregon Coast

“Gwendolyn Morgan has graced us with a new collection of poems that entreat us to lean into the world, into the vital conversation that awaits all who pay attention. She extends a thread of intimate observations through these poems, inviting us to remember the real world of nuthatches, chickadees, black-tail deer and mergansers. Woven into this vivid landscape, Gwendolyn extends her tender touch to the sorrows and suffering of modernity – cancer, capitalism, greed, violence, suicide – all seen through the heart of compassion and transmuted by the alchemy of her eloquence. We are awakened and healed through her generous offerings.”
—Francis Weller, author of The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief

“Gwendolyn Morgan swept me away in the grace and the magnificence of her writing and her impassioned words. She evokes power and beauty into every aspect of nature and life – both the light and the shadow. Snowy Owls, Egrets, and Unexpected Graces is divinely inspired!”
—Sandra Ingerman, author of Soul Retrieval and Walking in Light

“How do I express the deftness with which Gwendolyn holds the reader – even the most broken of us – in a sacred web of healing? Her splendid sensitivity to the heart of the wild, and the heart of the wounded, come together in a volume of poetry that takes us back to the place where we are forever whole.”
—Joan Borysenko, author of Minding the Body, Mending the Mind

“Gwendolyn talks to birds. They talk back.
The birds write. Calligraphy tracks on the sand.

Gwendolyn takes care of her people.
The fog settles into the chest cavities of those around us.

Gwendolyn reads the mystics. Cares for the sick.
Comforts the dying.

Spend some time with her.
She runs silent, runs deep.”
—Michael Lerner, author of Choices in Healing

May 31, 2016September 7, 2016

American Wild by Michael Engelhard

Forthcoming September 20, 2016 from Hiraeth Press: American Wild: Explorations from the Grand Canyon to the Artic Ocean by Michael Engelhard. Torn between two “soulscapes”—the canyon country and Alaska—the author has roamed both for twenty-five years. En route he suffered snowstorms, boat-flips, heat, injury, bobcat tamales, upset raptors, charging grizzlies, the Park Service, heartbreak, hungry mosquitos, and honeymooners from abroad. Above all, American Wild speaks of one man’s desire to see natural wealth and our stories about it preserved.

An anthropologist by training, Michael Engelhard has worked as a potter, wrangler, army officer, ship’s cook, university teacher, outdoor instructor, and wilderness guide. Among his homes he has counted an oven-hot bunkhouse in Moab, an unheated sauna near the Arctic Circle, a houseboat parked on a ranch in British Columbia, and a blue-tarp hut shaped like a Tootsie Roll on the banks of the Rio Grande. His greatest accomplishment has been a 1,000-mile solo traverse of Alaska’s Arctic, from the Canadian border to the Bering Strait. He is the author of Redrock Almanac and Where the Rain Children Sleep and the editor of four collections of nature writing. His most recent book is Ice Bear, a cultural history of that Arctic icon. Still moving often, he lives in Fairbanks, Alaska again.

Advance Praise for American Wild

Alternately profound, funny, and enlightening, Engelhard manages something rarely even attempted in outdoor literature: stories focused not on the death-defying prowess of the adventurer, but on the wild glory of place.

—Erin McKittrick, author of Small Feet Big Land and A Long Trek Home

Michael Engelhard’s beautifully crafted book, dedicated to opposing lands of extremes, is an intricate weaving of poetic language and luscious imagery, of reverence and outrage, of intellect, humor, and wit. At times a Zen-like docent of the land, at others a curmudgeonly sage in the Abbey tradition, Engelhard doesn’t just show you around the wild places he hopelessly loves, he takes you deep into their souls, sharing the senses they evoke and the ancient stories embedded within.

—Debra McKinney, co-author of Beyond the Bear

As someone who spends her year commuting between these same two regions, I can think of no better ambassador for them than Michael Engelhard. Landscapes like these deserve such prose. Engelhard skillfully examines the threads that bind us to the land and reminds us how important it is that we protect these last wild places.

—Christa Sadler, editor of There’s This River and author of Life in Stone

Michael Engelhard migrates like the thrushes we northerners so envy in autumn. This has given him a perspective of rare insight. Here, he takes us with him and we are richer for the journey.

—Ned Rozell, author of Finding Mars and Alaska Tracks

With its exquisitely tough elegance and accordion range, Engelhard’s prose growls and sings, appropriate for a writer whose twin poles of geographic passion are the Arctic and Southwest. Read him slowly, at the speed you would appreciate any array of delights, so as not to miss one fluting wren, deftly sketched fellow traveler, or diving grebe leaving “haiku pond-ripples.” You will come away more ready to observe deeply and joyfully, more apt to draw thoughtful connections between your experiences and the natural world, and with a more nuanced insight into the dangers we pose to the places we love.

—Carol Haralson, editor of Sojourns (Peaks, Plateaus & Canyons Association)

American Wild is a treasure—both for its agile and heartfelt prose and for the wild places, adventures, and people chronicled. Engelhard channels the soul of a philosopher through the heart of an untamed beast. He is an adventurer at home in diverse environs and respectful of gifts given, whether his hands grip paddle or pen, ice axe or potsherd.

—Steve Kahn, author of The Hard Way Home

With the assurance of one who is at home in wilderness, Engelhard weaves together his inner, emotional landscape and the outer, natural world. What emerges is the portrait of a man comforted and enlivened by what some would call the most harsh and inhospitable of places.

—Laurie Hoyle, co-author of Arctic Sanctuary

The wilderness needs a voice like Michael Engelhard—one that hums with honesty, lyricism, and sheer daring. In American Wild, he takes the reader on journeys where the gritty meets the ethereal. His spiritual reverence for the natural world radiates underneath careful language, and wonder flourishes with each turn of the page. It’s a title fit for fans of nature writing that is at turns sharp, humorous, and moving.

—Seth Muller, editor of Northern Arizona’s Mountain Living Magazine

November 13, 2015

…It’s Enough by Elizabeth Cunningham

An excerpt from So Ecstasy Can Find You

it is all poetry, even a dark morning
at the end of fall, twisting oak branches revealed,
small birds and the last lacy leaves still holding fast

rivers and rivulets in the dirt after rain
also branch and curve like trees and hieroglyphic
trails of mice and birds and bees make more metaphor

a cloudy sky is only dull when you don’t look
into all the layered meanings of grey and white
and catch the subtle motion of this dense, high mist

the rainbow rises and roots in forests of gold,
we the lucky ones who find the shining treasure
no need for pockets or sacks to carry it home

a white bird with wide wings flying from wood to field
huge and silent, not a hawk, could it be an owl?
everything in me quiets to watch and wonder.

Elizabeth, what do you need to do but witness?
why do you trouble yourself with judging your worth?
climb the mountains, stand in your backyard, it’s enough.

In her third collection of poems, novelist Elizabeth Cunningham leads us on an intimate journey into forest and mountain, garden and dream, along a hidden stream bed and beside a friend’s deathbed. She also explores poetic form, drawing inspiration from ghazal, haiku, tanka, and song lyric. Eye and ear are equally important to Cunningham; her images are rich, her rhythms, sure. By turns wry and tender, awed and amused, the collection displays the emotional range of a writer whose questions have led her on a quest, whether it is following blue trail markers along a cliff or confronting her own aging and death. These poems are grounded (literally and figuratively) in Cunningham’s ecstatic connection with the earth in all its strength, fragility and mystery.

October 5, 2015

A Day in the Mountains by Elizabeth Cunningham

An excerpt from So Ecstasy Can Find You

went to the mountain range
called Dawn Snake
sinuous ridges running
south-north, cliffs facing east

I lay down on a rock
not long after noontide,
cool air, fierce sun’s heat,
everywhere water wearing

away stone with drip and
rush. The mountain said,
I hold time in my bones
I remember my shaping

I remember all the life
that’s blown over my surface
burrowed into my hollows,
young fleeting one, rest

September 24, 2015

Still by Elizabeth Cunningham

An excerpt from So Ecstasy Can Find You

I walk on a back road
under a still grey sky,
the same light all day,
no cars, no lights, horses standing
still in mud, even the birds
try to be quiet, their sounds the bird
equivalent of whispering.
Three geese fly silently
over a striated hill. My red-
booted footfall is the loudest sound,
my walk the most determined motion.
My life stands still
and wonders where I am going.

September 7, 2015September 7, 2015

Ecstasy by Elizabeth Cunningham

An excerpt from So Ecstasy Can Find You

Ecstasy takes time, even if it lasts moments,
you have to slow down so ecstasy can find you
the way the light finds each plant in the sweep of a day
or the tide finds its secret way between dark rocks.
Stand still in the wood, on the shore, in your life.
Ecstasy will come, touch you, fill you, leave you changed.

September 4, 2015October 14, 2015

This Moment by Elizabeth Cunningham

An excerpt from So Ecstasy Can Find You

this moment when
a dead leaf falls so faded
it almost isn’t there, only
enough for a new green blade
to pierce its veined
translucence

September 1, 2015September 1, 2015

Secret Place by Elizabeth Cunningham

An excerpt from So Ecstasy Can Find You

Beyond the field into a wood, deeper,
the stream winds green and black under
ice, bend after bend, while pine and oak
grow on and on and under the snow
the undergrowth rests awhile. Wearing
snowshoes, I can make a path where I will
through the wood, along or above the stream,
deeper, till I come to a place where
there is no sound but the wind in the pines
the creak of cold trees, the groan of the ice
and the stream now frozen, now broken free
singing on and on. There are no other human
tracks but mine in this beautiful water-carved
bowl of wood and rock and earth and shine.

The posted signs I passed say this wood
belongs to a developer. Then I must love it
all the more fiercely in this moment, love it
as I love all passing things, my own life,
my friend’s life. She died almost a year ago.
For two months we knew she was dying
and so we spent all the time we could
sitting beside her, catching last words and looks.
When my husband says, “we are doomed,
the tar sands oil is already being sucked out,
we have irrevocably fouled the nest, life
as we know it on this planet is ending,” I can only say
hush, let me love let me love let me love
this place, let me love this life as long as I can.

August 20, 2015

Mountain Thoughts | An Excerpt from Lungs of My Earth by William Henry Searle

In the words of Sir Andrew Motion (UK Poet Laureate, 1999-2009, President of the Campaign to Protect Rural England) “Lungs of My Earth evokes particular places dear to the author, sweeping them into our imaginations with a rush of delighted language to create ‘a luminous map of the sacred’. Part field-work and part sky-dreaming, it is at once exact and exultant—a vibrant song to the earth and echo chamber of the earth’s own singing.”

Look for Lungs of My Earth by William Henry Searle in paperback and ebook on Amazon, B&N, the Hiraeth Press bookstore or ask for it in your local indie bookstore. | Visit our bookstore>>

Hail clinks against an iron latch-gate. Sheep bow to buckets of winter feed. An owl pursues a stoat down a crag. Stars bud the tips of bare branches. The half-moon nests amongst pine tops. Twelve rivers bleed into one black lake. A cold wind blows across the road. Sleepless walkers like I wield head-torches at this unearthly hour as though to gather in the lost, finding nothing but a strange, frost- frail beam of thin light weaving to and fro as slowly as the growth of bone, that stops at each thing to stitch up each thing’s heart, leaving behind traces of quiet that amount to the sound of everything breathing, and working.

—Excerpt from Lungs of My Earth

William Henry Searle, Ph.D., born 1987, in Dorset, UK, is a spiritual ecologist whose work draws on the world’s diverse spiritual traditions, philosophy, ecology, and personal lived experience in the outdoors to revive the sense of the natural world as inherently wild and sacred. He holds a doctorate in creative writing and environmental philosophy for which he was awarded a three year studentship to study at the Royal Holloway University of London. Lungs of My Earth is his first book.