Narrative Wilderness: Being in Time and Place To pay by check please use this order form. We are pleased to take orders from retailers. Email us with details about your order or call us at 207-837-5760. Narrative Wilderness: Being in Time and Place, is a memoir about seeing and loving, set in a particular moment in time, characterized by a particular condition of grief-in-advance-of-loss, and lifted by the healing power in nature. It is, in essence, a spiritual journey which began at a similar point that Dante describes as a “dark wood,” that place on the road, in early midlife, when one is lost. Guided by the command in Rilke’s famous poem, “You must change your life,” the writer left a complicated life on the East Coast, moved to a remote, coastal village in California, fell in love with the place and a man and a house. There, together, they made a home for writing, art, and photography. The book opens when circumstances threaten the viability of their idyl. The house is put up for sale. The urgent questions revolve around how to hold on, what to let go, how would the couple live without what they’d built together? Gradually, by paying attention to the insights that come from living intimately with nature, by the quiet witnessing of some of the people of the place, who were all, in their way, working out their own creative fates, the writer opens to a new sort of peace and acceptance. Through the quiet and lovely teachings of the place, she learns about love, about her own fear of loss, and about how to accept and to love everything on her plate, in her life, and in the joy of the given moment, as it is. BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Women ISBN: 978-1-962082-50-1 (print; softcover; perfect bound; 13 black-and-white images) Released April 15, 2025 | Copyright 2025 166 pages |
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Bonnie Durrance, born and brought up in Washington D. C., has made it her mission to live and work in places that called to her soul: on the western shore of the Chesapeake Bay, as a teacher; on the Coast of Maine, as a photographer; back to the cities, Washington, D. C. and New York, as a producer of multi-media installations for museums and corporate clients; then on to the coast of West Marin, California, where she returned to her love of writing and fine art photography. Now, she works and makes her home beside the Napa River in the Napa Valley with her husband, Robert, six chickens, numerous coyotes, and other wild things. |
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“Narrative Wilderness is a love story, a hymn to nature's plants and creatures, and a quest to adapt to life's vicissitudes. Each chapter opens with one of Durrance's drawings; she writes as she draws, paints, and photographs, with an eye for the small, telling quirk that lifts a story or an image above the ordinary.” “Bonnie Durrance is an exquisite writer and artist, and Narrative Wilderness is a gem. Her sentences sparkle, her drawings beguile, and her observations ring true.” “Narrative Wilderness is a delight from start to finish. Bonnie Durrance's visual gifts as an illustrator and photographer beautifully inform her dazzling, vivid prose. Whether she's describing human nature, or the stunning nature of the flora and fauna surrounding her slice of California paradise, her keen observation skills invite the reader to slow down and look closely along with her as she zooms in on so many details that are easy to miss in our ever-dizzying world of distractions. An utterly compelling read.” |
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