The Exit is the Entrance: Essays on Escape (part of the Crux series) by Lydia Paar

The Exit is the Entrance is a collection of essays on leaving—going to as well as away from—college, the military, relationships, wrong decisions. It is a series of ruminative journeys written in first, second, and third person long-form essays, in which Paar explores creativity, erasure, our connection to the earth and each other in lyrical prose. Set mostly in the Southwestern United States, Paar also travels back and forth across the country and down to Peru.

The essay “Drive” begins with a short poem:

When I was a teenager, I wished to be a trucker. I should say,
rather, the profession was in my top-ten list of future plans.
I was drawn to open roads.
Delighted at the thought of a distant boss, I ached for new
lands.
Airbrakes excited.

Paar instead follows the traditional path for a high school graduate, taking a bus from Portland, Oregon to northern California with her mother to attend a private college she couldn’t afford, and quickly abandons. Paar is pulled between what society says she should do, and the desire for an extraordinary life. Her longing for travel and solitude is a constant theme in The Exit is the Entrance. And yet, interspersed between these essays of escape, there are stories of staying—in school in the desert; with a father who “…offered me a guest room to land in: a room with a tiny twin bed, tucked into a suburb safe from homelessness…”; at various jobs and in contact with various people. In this way, Paar is not in a constant state of flux, but rather experiences “…years of successive risk and recovery.”

Another theme in The Exit is the Entrance is erasure—losing yourself entirely in an experience so that you are no longer aware of your own self. Erasure to Paar is both a goal and a wound. It was a little hard for me to wrap my head around at first, but as she explains in the essay, “Erasure,”

Living in the desert, you began to feel that if you could erase
yourself enough, your various moods and agendas, needs and
desires, you could simply become a pair of ears to hear, eyes to
see, and hands to translate: purer, uncluttered,
uncompromised. But see, hear, and translate what, and to
whom? You opened your eyes wider, put your ear to the dirt.

[…] Your mind, like this new land, opened out widened, and for
the first time you couldn’t find the ends of it.

In this way, erasure is a subsummation into the essence of being—not a negative annihilation, but instead losing oneself into the flow and connection of the universe, where there is no “I” or “you” but instead only the attachment to humanity and the natural world. But Paar also uses erasure to reckon with our colonial past, writing,

The term “erasure” has been used, in the American West and
around the world, to describe the effects of colonization on
indigenous peoples—you didn’t need the college classes to
know this by now.

I found the use of second person in this essay to be incredibly intimate, allowing the reader to slip effortlessly into her skin. The play between first, second, and third person essays in this collection mimics the movement of the theme, going towards intimacy in first and second, and away from it when she switches to third person. The point of view zooms in and out in the way the essays travel from close relationships to the aloneness of the between times.

The essays are an exploration of liminal spaces, both the physical spaces, such as onboard greyhound buses and other modes of transportation, or the hostel where she lives and works for a time; and more figurative spaces, such as liminal friends and experiences. In the essay, “Osmosis,” Paar writes about attending the music festival Coachella. She surrenders to the music-induced erasure she seeks, but returning to the campground, Paar finds herself longing for connection. She writes,

And I grew restless for the weekend to end, to return to a
community connected with a more common contemporary
reality. This fun was good fun, but it didn’t, couldn’t, extend
beyond itself.

One of the more idiosyncratic spaces she explores is that of funerals and the funeral businesses, truly the epitome of transition. In “Hope for Sale,” Paar passes as a mortuary intern in order to attend a conference where she learns about embalming, reconstruction, and other aspects of “death care.” She ruminates on the juxtaposition of the concern for the grieving alongside the business ramification of the industry, the attention we give at the end of a life versus the care we take with the living.

If human communities put the kind of energy that we put into
grooming and mourning our dead into people still living on the
brink of death, could this life, finally, be less abrasive? Could
we learn to live in peace, not just come to rest at its end?

Yet, this essay is not just concerned with the global discussion of mourning; rather, Paar artfully braids the story of her friendship with (and eventual loss of) Kate, a recently divorced woman struggling with bipolar disorder, taking the universal discussion to the personal, intimate level. This telescoping out and in of a subject is a hallmark of the collection. Even the essays on traveling and escaping are also rooted in something bigger, more important that the current moment.

These lands mirror the oceans once contained in them,
reminding you how even seeming stability (like rock) and flux
(sea salt water) interchange over time, which reminds you (yet
again) just how connected all earthscapes and the creatures
within them are.

Throughout this collection, Paar, while in a perpetual journey towards and away from situations, places, and people, finds herself drawn to the universal experience.

Attachments: Essays on Fatherhood and Other Performances by Lucas Mann

Lucas Mann’s essay collection Attachments: Essays on Fatherhood and Other Performances interrogates fatherhood tropes, both challenging them and recognizing their role in describing and creating the cultural landscape of Mann’s own early fatherhood.

He writes in “On the Fantasies of Various Apocalypses” that fatherhood stories are hard to separate from those of leaving adolescence, each of them a story of becoming, after which a man has become, permanently, himself. They’re wrong about that; there’s nothing singular or finished about becoming, but these stories mark the world we’re growing from. Adopt, adapt, or reject them, they’re still our reference points. These essays consider what to do with that.

The all-speculative first essay, which the book’s running header helpfully shortens to “Tiny, Spectacular Futures,” is a list of fantasies—hopes and fears for the little person the expectant parents have yet to meet and for the world she will inhabit.

In a mimetic skid from the imaginings of pre-parenthood to the grinding realities of daily and nightly childcare (the essays often return to the trauma of sleep training), the second essay uses a 24-section structural conceit: “An Approximate Hourly Record of Thought and Feelings During a Time of Intense Sleep Deprivation.” A collection of fragments, their common connection is the anxiety of influence as a writer and reader, as a product of and participant in a broader culture, and as a son and a father. Mann puzzles over separating communities from doctrine, and whether he’d be capable of that duality: “…if I was raised by racists, I’m pretty sure I’d be a racist” (22). And the anxiety of being influenced is inextricable from the anxiety of the influence a father casts on his child, even if you’re hyper aware of it as it’s happening.

Mann and I have a lot common. There’s our approximate ages. Our daughters. Entering fatherhood in our thirties. Our writer-teacher-academic careers. The beautifully collaborative parenting partnership with wives whose own professional accomplishments are demanding, and which we support and admire. (His wife is very present in the essays, but his apology in the acknowledgments hints he doesn’t want to exploit her for content or claim her separate experiences as his own in these essays, either.) There are the privileges these lives offer us, being able to be at home enough to do necessary and tedious and heartmelting and burnout-level caregiving in ways that other jobs wouldn’t allow.

Relatability is weak criticism, but I recognize a lot. You should have seen me (and I’m about to make you) the way my wife did coming back into the darkened hotel room after a rigorous on-site job interview, our bottle-refusing daughter finally surrendered to exhaustion, me shirtless and covered in what used to be bottled breast milk, and me feral-eyed at her with the so-help-me-if-you-wake-up-this-goddamn-baby look. And like with Mann’s essays, when my wife and I tell this story now, everybody knows it’s a love story.

These aren’t stories of incompetent fathers being sweet idiots at caregiving, as in many popular narratives. The messy realities of parenting your own child can make anybody look clumsy, but here it’s never that Mann feels like he’s doing a job—labors practical, emotional, and intellectual—that isn’t his to do. To paraphrase a famous t-shirt: dad’s not babysitting.

More commonalities: the debilitating self-awareness recognizable across much Gen-X and Millennial literature, and the perpetual uncertainty of whether anything one does is a sincere choice or a performance of not wanting to be seen and judged. But there’s also the way that the ongoing, concrete demands of care and the humility of nurturing an increasingly autonomous, defiant, and endearingly weird little being can mercifully crowd out all of that. There’s the existential creation of meaning in the doing of the things.

And so, there’s the paradox of seeing a community of dads (or dad bloggers), and responding by turning not toward an all-father community, but back inward to himself and his family (like me to myself and mine; totally get that).  That question of performing actual fatherhood in context of actors and writers and bloggers and other parents rhetorically performing fatherhood is a central concern across the collection.

“An Essay about Watching Brad Pitt Eat That Is Really about My Own Shit” smartly examines Pitt’s unselfconscious masculinity, with that affect and Pitt’s body contrasting Mann’s very different self on both counts, and, more importantly, raising how he and his wife don’t want to pass their own childhood body insecurities to their daughter. But the sharp analysis outward is cut with recognition of what he’s also projecting onto the icons he’s reading:

All I want to do is talk about his body and how noticeable it is to me, how noticeable every body is—that’s the problem—and how insulting to think that nobody makes him account for himself. This is the greatest privilege afforded in my fantasy of thinness: that it eventually might allow you to disappear—to other people, sure, but most of all to yourself (55).

Interrogating media, narrative, literature, how we talk about stuff, is central to the book (and to all the writer and reader types I know), but these essays always come back to a reality, feet on the ground, that all our analysis of media and culture and self can unmoor us from. One essay takes on the distraction of the phone and the life that also happens on it, which is exponentially complicated by parenting and the performance of parenting on social media. He shows the very real value of documenting moments for ourselves. The life online and off still happens, no matter how we intellectualize it.

In “Dads Being Dudes Making Jokes,” he interviews some dad bloggers and contemplates dad joke tropes, the laziest jokes, the anti-intimate puns, the jokes that disclaim responsibility for emotional labor. But the buffoon father of those jokes is at least safe, he says, not a monster: “Part of the joke is you can screw up in all these ways and still be lovable, still be good, but then the line between good and bad gets pretty thin, and then the joke becomes unforgivable” (169).

Mann recognizes how ubiquitously and how unfairly “parenthood” has often just been “motherhood,” and how motherhood literature (and mom bloggers) by necessity have been at it much longer than the just-arrived father-writers looking to do more with their stories and their lives than just repeat their inherited tropes, even if they’re still our reference points.

In an essay appearing later in the collection, a respected elder fiction writer laments from a public stage “kids these days” shying away from the wartime shoot-em-ups he saw as the substance of highest literature. But when, over dinner, he told an honest story about being helpless trying to wrangle his sick and hungry twins, Mann was struck that the famous writer shied away from thinking that could also be the stuff of serious story.

The fathers of wars and apocalypses and high adventure dramas aren’t going anywhere (Mann sees the dad in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road as endearingly sincere amid the horror). But more honest domestic father stories are emerging, and these essays are part of that new tradition. Individually, such stories won’t make a smoldering cultural crater the way a good ol’ post-apocalyptic horror show might. So, to crack the too-simple, too-evasive tropes that have dominated father stories for so long, we’re going to need a lot more of these, a lot more often, and for a long time.

Brown Women Have Everything: Essays on (Dis)comfort and Delight by Sayantani Dasgupta

With this collection of gorgeous new essays, Sayantani Dasgupta designs for her readers a magical craft that transports us to unexpected places. Alongside her, we fly from Moscow, Idaho, to Florence, Italy and from Kolkata, India (population: four and half million) to a cemetery in Beaufort, North Carolina (population: four and half thousand).

Dasgupta possesses an unparalleled eye for seemingly mundane details that unlock whole worlds of experience—the hemlock, old oaks, and Spanish moss of the southeastern U.S., and her grandfather’s diary, his beautiful hand. The book’s salient delight, though, is the way Dasgupta describes food, both the curious treats of her U.S. encounters, “muscadine jelly, strawberry and walnut jam, a bottle of spicy blueberry glaze, tomatillo salsa, a sample pack of grits, a one-pound bag of the prettiest beans I have ever seen,” as well as the chutneys she presents as a symbol of home. Chutneys engage all our senses when Dasgupta describes them, for they are not just flavorful but also gorgeous, as it can be plain but also decadent, “studded with dates, raisins, cashews, and a sweet mango leather called aam shotto.” Mustard oil, Dasgupta tells us, “pungent at room temperature, spiky when it hits a hot pan,” underpin the whole thing; absent its “anchoring quality” a tomato chutney “just will not sing.”

While vibrant flavors unfamiliar to the American palate are a staple of this kind of literature, Dasgupta brings to U.S.-based readers an immigrant experience we don’t often see. Rather than the typical tale of an immigrant liberated from destitution by the U.S., and offered a menial wage as a blue collar worker, Sayantani Dasgupta gives us, instead, a story of coming to America to write.

In making her art, Dasgupta naturally holds up a mirror for members of the white majority to see themselves. Her time as a graduate student and instructor gives her occasion to show us college culture through her eyes—in that mirror we see “Ugg boots, man buns,” and how to distinguish “hipster from a hippie, an emo from a goth, a nerd from a dork.” We see the sadness and loneliness, too, of kids who were perhaps never taught how to find pleasure in books. And we see the U.S. as a place of promise, yes, where a young woman can realize her dreams of becoming a writer trained at a university, but also of disappointments and contradictions, where the group that has handed down power from generation to generation finds itself threatened by a twenty-first century culture that has asked for a tiny bit more fairness. The collection’s title, Brown Women Have Everything, arose in a conversation between the essayist and a white woman whose envy bubbles through. The woman covets this author’s success, and attributes that success to Dasgupta’s skin color rather than to her abilities. Envy is longing that has turned bitter, brittle, these essays show, and readers witness in Dasgupta’s pages what they’ve seen too many times before: an entitled dominant group that insists on seeing other people as the reason for their unhappiness.

The tragedy of the woman who says brown women have everything is that she really believes it. Her entitlement blinds her to her own privilege, to the spoils of whiteness for which she never had to fight. By dramatizing this moment of envy made explicit, and then planting echoes throughout the book, Dasgupta makes the essay collection in part a meditation on scarcity, resourcefulness, and pleasure, and what it takes to really feel our pleasures and rather than envy feel, instead, I have enough.

Offering a counterpoint to envy, these essays portray the author’s Indian family in moments of delight. We realize, as readers, that to delight in what one already has is to possess a superpower—and that perhaps we should try to acquire that power, rather than every last trophy or token of achievement. The blessings of Bengal—plentiful fish, the soft textures of homespun fabrics, a chorus of life in the bustling streets—are riches that belong to us all. The book offers a sense of magic and of the delightful good luck forfeited by white Americans who want to believe that every good thing they possess results from their own goodness or good works—that they earned what they have, and they deserve it.

The microaggressions Dasgupta endures puncture her sense of connection and belonging. We all share the author’s longing to belong, to be accepted and respected, and yet also be distinctly ourselves. The essay “Mane Story,” centering on the author’s fantastic yet foreign-to-white-American-stylists hair, brings this predicament to life in all its complexity. The form of the essay is perfectly suited to raising such unanswerable cultural questions. Why do white people feel so tethered to deservingness, and at what cost? Is there any amount of civil rights and social justice work that could free Americans from the bean counting impulse to measure who has what, and believe that other people “have everything”? Does white envy do more damage to the envied or the envier?

Without romanticizing the past, Dasgupta presents us a history that lies hidden in plain sight. In an essay about her new home in coastal North Carolina, Dasgupta visits confederate monuments and presents U.S. history in nuanced ways that serve as an antidote to the simplistic debates about race, class, and immigration that plague so much of our discourse. That essay about her coastal home, “Girl in the Rum Barrel,” exhibits what I have admired about Sayantani Dasgupta’s writing since I first read it several books ago. It is her perfect endings—the way she can give us the sense of an ending without wrapping up all the themes and conflicts in a conspicuous bow. That essay’s last paragraph ties it to the collection’s larger themes by mentioning the “rewards” of her outings, the counterpoint of horror and beauty she discovered on her trips near home, and concludes by saying “I grabbed my husband’s hand, and together we went off in search of food.”

What lingers is a sense that we are all still searching, and that we would be better off if we’d just pursue our desires, and appreciate what we find, however short it falls of our aspirations. Westerners, especially bootstrapping Americans raised on a Protestant Work Ethic, could benefit by studying the ability of a south Asian to face the world’s blessings and hardships with gratitude and wonder. These essays show that there’s dignity not just in pursuing your dreams in new places, but also in making mistakes, in being homesick, in the quotidian suffering of bland food and pedestrian conversations. Ultimately, what Sayantani Dasgupta realizes is that her greatest gift is something all of us have as our human birthright: an imagination. And to enjoy its pleasures, all we have to do is put it to use.

Nola Face: A Latina’s Life in the Big Easy by Brooke Champagne

In the opening essay of this witty and incisive debut collection, Brooke Champagne says that “telling and listening to stories” is her “singular affinity,” and the essays that follow are, in part, an attempt to both explain the origins of this affinity and an exploration of how such stories shape our lives. As far as origins go, Champagne comes from a family of larger-than-life characters who aren’t afraid to sprinkle a little fiction into their tales, which is perhaps one reason Champagne clings so fiercely to the truth. There’s her Ecuadorian grandmother, Lala, equal parts mystical and profane, who teaches her granddaughter how to navigate a world rigged to minimize the contributions of Latina women, particularly free spirits such as herself. Lala “sticks it to the man” by shoplifting cheap toys—justifying her habit by only taking items that lack price tags—and punishes her philandering husband by shoving a hot pepper where the sun don’t shine. 

On the other side of the family there is Champagne’s French-Sicilian father, a hard-drinking, yarn-spinning roughneck who “disappears from her life for months, then years, at a time,” only to pop back into the picture when he has a story that’s too good to keep to himself. Perhaps he wants to chat about the irony of getting shot at the Friendly Inn or his encounters with the “Chicken Lady” who gave him an amulet (made of moth wings, navel lint, and crack cocaine) that was so good at attracting women he had to throw it down the sewer just to get some peace. Rounding out the family are a mother whose idea of humor is to lock a young Brooke out of the house, then pretend not to recognize her when she comes knocking, and a sister who calls on Brooke for a ride to a job interview at a strip club named Lipstixx.

Nola Face falls into the tradition of colorful family memoirs like Mary Karr’s The Liars’ Club—or Danielle Trussoni’s less well-known but equally compelling Falling Through the Earth—and like those books it both exposes hard truths about her family and makes clear that it is at least in part this unusual upbringing that gives Champagne the tenacity, humor, and imagination that make her writing so compelling. Another trait essential to Champagne’s story is one she inherited from both her family and New Orleans, the city she credits with raising her—this she calls “bugginess,” a word which “represents…the best of humanity: dogged, crazy optimism in times of darkness, an earned, post-Katrina perspective, a flood-took-my-house-but-I’ve-got-a-full-flask mentality.”

One of Champagne’s many gifts is illuminating big ideas through the lens of personal experience, as in “Nice Lady,” where she recounts the night she was carjacked by two young Black men, and investigates how her repeated retellings illuminate the complex racial dynamics of the story. “Because making meaning of it,” she writes, “involved projecting onto myself not just brownness or whiteness, wokeness or brokeness, wrongness or rightness, but some muddled, middle version that makes any self-narrative more challenging to share.”

Another of the book’s best essays, “Bobbitt,” is a level-headed reconsideration of the oft-sensationalized case of Lorena Bobbitt, reframing it as an immigrant story (Bobbitt is also of Ecuadorian descent) and examining more nuanced and complex renderings of her life, particularly in the recent documentary, Lorena. Champagne connects the story to Lala and the infamous hot pepper, but also to her own development as a writer and her philosophy of nonfiction:

The writer, like the documentarian, constructs, repackages, misjudges, and concludes, in the midst of fleeting action, no matter how powerful or terrifying, whatever gets pushed in or sliced off in any discreet moment in human history.

All puns aside, this passage is a succinct rendering of Champagne’s project, which is to think hard about complicated characters and incidents so that she might get to something like the truth. And in Champagne’s hands the truth is often complicated, even traumatic, but never without the doses of humanity and humor that make her writing so compelling.

The book’s title comes from Champagne’s dog, Nola, and the comic and envious face she makes in the presence of other female dogs, those privileged purebreds who flaunt their perfect features and meticulous grooming. Champagne sees parallels in her own moments of envy, particularly to those “pedigreed” writers who seem born into a certain level of privilege and comfort, where she has had to fight and struggle to make a life as an artist. In this struggle, she embodies the spirit of both the dog and the city she was named for, and announces herself as a writer the rest of us will surely find ourselves enjoying (and envying) for years to come.

The University of Georgia Press
$24.95 Paperback | Buy Here

Dear Park Ranger: Essays on Manhood, Restlessness, and the Geography of Hope by Jeff Darren Muse

In the interest of full disclosure—which, as an essayist, serial memoirist, and River Teeth editor, is always my interest—I need to tell you that I knew Jeff Muse and Dear Park Ranger when. Many years ago, when I was a faculty member in the low-residency MFA program at Ashland University, Jeff Muse was my student. (“Muse?” we all said, one after another. “What a great writer name!”) Along with the enduring impression that Jeff Muse is a terrifically nice guy—and can write the heck out of a sentence—is my memory that he served as a Hoosier ambassador, deepening this Oregon girl’s appreciation for both the people and the landscape of Indiana where I had landed—and, shockingly, that he wasn’t a fan of Annie Dillard.

During Jeff’s time in the program, we had many conversations about what he wanted to achieve in his own essays, and I remember with unusual specificity both because Jeff was so clear in his goals and because these goals were interesting to me. For example, since his expertise, love, and life as a park ranger, environmental educator, and husband of a park ranger was rooted so firmly in the natural world, he knew he would write essays that might be classified as “nature writing,” but he told me what he did not want those essays to be: he did not want his essays to be boring. He wanted to write page turners. Also? Jeff wanted his essays to be funny. He wanted to bring humor in to light up the foggiest landscapes—and he wanted these essays to make a difference. Jeff wanted his essays to get us outside for a nice long walk.

Fast forward a dozen years, I’ve just finished my journey through the intimate, beautiful, inspiring, funny essays in Dear Park Ranger, and I know I need to stay here in this chair and write this review, but what I really want to do is lace up my shoes, grab a water bottle, and hit the trail with Muse’s prose still humming in my mind. In other words: Jeff Muse did the thing. He set his compass for the peak he wanted to reach, as a writer and a man, and—with us along for both the flower-gathering wanderings and the steep stretches where the sweat dripped down our backs—he got us there. Together.

In “Ground Truthing,” the introductory essay, Muse makes good on the title’s promise and lays a foundation for this collection—which I do recommend reading in order because although we could wander down a side trail or sprint forward, choosing our own adventure within and across the nineteen essays of varying lengths and terrains that make up Dear Park Ranger, it’s clear Muse has done the hard work of mapping a thoughtful trail. It’s also clear from the trailhead that we can trust Muse not only as an expert of woods and stream, but also as a passionate reader and student of the essay—all tools he uses to make sense of himself as a son, husband, and man on this lifelong journey: 

I write, you’ll see, to self-interrogate, to ground truth inner terrain. Or to paraphrase Joan Didion, I write to figure out what I think. “What I want and what I fear,” she said.

Jeff Muse has lived all over the U.S. working as a park ranger, environmental educator, and historical interpreter. Muse knows things—and when he doesn’t know? He tries to find out. And the deepest, truest question of all, as the child of divorce, the son of an alcoholic who died too soon, a wounded kid who morphed into an insecure teen who grew into a “fatherless, childless Hoosier who wouldn’t and couldn’t stay put”—is Who am I and how do I want to live? 

Throughout my life, no matter where I’ve lived, manhood has been a kind of topographic map. Yet it’s peer pressure or social norms telling me which route to follow: Smile, Jeff, have a beer. Make babies. Make lots of money. Buy yourself a leaf blower. Hang out at parties. Lighten up. . . . The word [essai] is also a journey—to seek out, examine, prove. But prove what to whom, I wonder, and why does it matter anyway? 

Muse even questions the questions themselves. As patient and as serious-minded as these essays can be—taking on tough subjects like masculinity and aging, racism and white fragility—Muse’s meticulously written scenes can also be hilarious. In “Trail Blazers,” an essay that takes on a particularly intense period of searching for Muse, he joins a group of friends to participate in a ritual sweat, and the young Navajo man preparing the white men to enter the sweat lodge hands them a scrap of cloth from which they’re each to tear a thin strip and says, “Tie that around your foreskin to seal your penis. . . . You can’t drip any semen in the sweat lodge. It’s a sacred place.” Young Jeff is flummoxed, standing there naked and mortified, fiddling with his string, so his friend Kurt tries to help:

“Just wrap it like a present,” Kurt said, revealing the progress he’s made. The fabric dangled against his pubic hair and the pale skin of his gangly legs . . . His penis indeed looked like a gift, topped off with a bright white bow. 

I laughed out loud, but in a Muse essay there’s always a forward pull, and as the heat, the rhythm of the chanting, and his own panic continues to rise in the lodge, Jeff is nose down and crawling—hunting for air, driven by this singular need, stripped absolutely bare in a collection in which everyone is always searching for something—identity, purpose, air.

The titular essay, “Dear Park Ranger,” a love letter to Muse’s wife, Paula, appears at the end of the book. In this essay, Muse makes a confession: after weighing backpacks and finding that Paula’s is heavier, he surreptitiously rebalanced the weight because he “wanted to be the man”—and even as he does this, knowing she’s fully capable of bearing more weight, he’s hyperaware of his own insecurity—and ashamed. Here we find the center of this collection—love. Muse remembers their first date, a hike through the snow, him following behind, admiring the view, when Paula shouts, “Look, glacier lilies!”

You plucked a petal gently, tore it in half, and handed me a piece. “Try it,” you said. “Tastes like sweet corn.”

I placed the creamy sliver on my tongue, chewing slowly, timidly at first. You were right: a taste from a summertime garden, something I’d known countless times back in Indiana.

“Reminds me of home,” I said, though in that moment, I wanted nothing of cornfields and flat farmland, and certainly nothing of football. I wanted the mountains. I wanted to hike. I wanted to find every wildflower. I wanted you.

There are so many great stories here. In Muse’s “An Ark of the Heart,” a twenty-something Jeff reads the book jacket that tells him that his literary and environmental hero Gary Snyder teaches “literature and wilderness thought” at UC Davis—and so Jeff gets in his car and drives. He shows up at Snyder’s office, gets in line with the other students, and I’m nervous for him: “He was my literary and environmental hero. Could I simply walk up and chat?” But—spoiler alert!—when Jeff’s the last one standing at the office door, Snyder invites him in, asks him first what plants are blooming in Western Washington where Muse began his drive. They talked about bioregionalism—“the notion of defining our lives by ecological zones”— and Muse tells us he’s been studying Snyder’s idea of “a sense of place” ever since. We shouldn’t always meet our heroes, but for Jeff, on that day, his days-long drive ended in a conversation that would guide the rest of his life.

“Subject: Advice for Tree Huggers” is one of the formally playful essays in this collection, a letter to the students in Muse’s ENV 303 to prepare them for a short field trip— “a mile-long ramble up a slushy trail”:  

You’ll never regret a hike. If there’s anything I would prioritize for a sustainable life, a life devoted to the environment, to caring for it, it’s time out of doors. Out of walls. Out of ceilings. It’s time to get muddy, slushy, sweaty. You will not care for what you do not know. Start now. Start knowing it.

And I am trying. I will try. Reading the extraordinary essays in Dear Park Ranger makes me happy. As we wander these geographies with Muse, he shows us the world with curiosity and attention buzzing. For me, this whole book is a lesson in leaning in—into the natural world, yes, but also into what looking outward can tell us about what’s going on in our own hearts as we figure out who we want to be in this world, how we want to love, and what we want to leave behind. 

[Travel tip: I hope you’ll visit Jeff Muse’s author site, learn more about the most recent chapter of his life that has brought him home to Indiana to battle cancer, and chart a course to one of his book events this summer. You’ll be so glad you did.]