Because We're All Forever Earthbound
 

"...snippets of wisdom, sprinkled with facts."—Jerry Apps

"Tennessen's folksy prose provides critical insight. This volume belongs in the home of every Wisconsinite."—Ross Astoria, Citizens' Climate Lobby National Board Chair

"A powerful statement about humankind's intimate relationship with the world around us."—Sharon Dunwoody, UW Evjue-Bascom Professor Emeritus

What a lovely coincidence that Chuck Tennessen's new book is being published close to Earth Day. "Because We're Forever Earthbound" (Little Creek Press) is a compilation of stories that have appeared in Chuck's bi-weekly "Earthbound" column for the Dodgeville Chronicle and is illustrated with art from students in the Dodgeville and Mineral Point schools.
 

Chuck promotes environmental education in area schools, is the group leader of the Iowa County chapter of the Citizens’ Climate Lobby, and works for the Driftless Area Land Conservancy as its Community Organizer.
 

An educator and conservationist at heart, Chuck spent the first twenty-two years of his professional career teaching in Alaska village schools with this wife Karen. Returning to Wisconsin, he continued teaching and helped establish the Green & Healthy Schools program in the Dodgeville School District and the grassroots environmental group, Sustain Iowa County.
 

Chuck and Karen reside in their passive solar home in rural Iowa County. Their three children and three delightful granddaughters are a constant source of joy and the motivation to help build a livable world.

"Who as a child (or a restless adult) hasn't dreamed of working in one of our spectacular national parks? If you've ever longed for natural beauty, wildness, or a more expansive life, here's your chance to see what happens to those who follow that dream. As one of the writers puts it, 'Wild places are infused with magic, and they attract the most crazy-wonderful people."---Nancy Lord, former Alaska Writer Laureate and author of Fishcamp, Green Alaska, and Early Warming

Millions of people visit our national parks each year, and some never leave. Permanent Vacation Volume 2 explores the stories from people who have a deep connection to our national parks. Join eighteen authors as they kayak through the Everglades with incognito alligators, demonstrate the practice of the ancient Hawaiian tribes at Pu uhonua o Honaunau, and search for the endangered spotted owl in the forests of the Olympic. This collection of essays will grab you by your hiking boots and lead you through some of our nations most treasured places--including Wisconsin's Apostle Islands--beautifully rendered in Catherine Young's essay.

Catherine Young has worked as a naturalist for the National Park Service, a cultural interpreter, an educator, and farmer. She completed her MFA in Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia, and her writing has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best American Essays. Her essays and poems have been published nationally and internationally in numerous literary journals and in anthologies including Permanent Vacation II: Eighteen Writers on Work and Life in Our National Parks and The Driftless Reader. 

Rooted in farm life, Catherine lives with her family in Wisconsin's Driftless Area. Her writings and podcasts are available at http://catherineyoungwriter.weebly.com/

The isolated small town where Billy and Margaret live is suddenly thrust into the brutal reality of World War II when German POWs are brought in to help with crop harvesting. The face-to-face contact with the killers of their sons is not only beyond the capacities of Gold Star mothers, but twists the thinking of everyone, including Margaret, who is determined to challenge fate. That challenge gets Margaret, Billy, and his outrageous older friend and mentor Cy immersed in a women-empowering scheme to turn war on its historical head.

The issues of war veterans as stooges, the fall of racist innocence, and God's role in war are among the things that Margaret, Billy, and Cy must step around as they go for broke with a plan that tries to enlist the help of Eleanor Roosevelt.
 

What finally happens is as unpredictable as to where Billy's beloved dog Toby will next mark his territory.

Bill Stokes was a newspaper columnist/feature writer for 35 years, the last ten with The Chicago Tribune. His writing garnered numerous awards including the Scripps-Howard Ernie Pyle Award and Best NonFiction by a Wisconsin Writer. Arcadia Books is one stop on Bill's road to visit the 38 Wisconsin communities that had POW camps during WW II. The nearest of these to Spring Green would have been in Cobb with prisoners working at facilities in Dodgeville and elsewhere in this area. Bill resides in Mazomanie, Wisconsin.

Read Bill's Blog

        
"How do we become who we are in the world? We ask the world to teach us."

On her 120-acre homestead high in the Colorado Rockies, beloved writer Pam Houston learns what it means to care for a piece of land and the creatures on it. Elk calves and bluebirds mark the changing seasons, winter temperatures drop to 35 below, and lightning sparks a 110,000-acre wildfire, threatening her century-old barn and all its inhabitants. Through her travels from the Gulf of Mexico to Alaska, she explores what ties her to the earth, the ranch most of all. Alongside her devoted Irish wolfhounds and a spirited troupe of horses, donkeys, and Icelandic sheep, the ranch becomes Houston’s sanctuary, a place where she discovers how the natural world has mothered and healed her after a childhood of horrific parental abuse and neglect.
 

In essays as lucid and invigorating as mountain air, Deep Creek delivers Houston’s most profound meditations yet on how "to live simultaneously inside the wonder and the grief…to love the damaged world and do what I can to help it thrive."