Dear Park Ranger

Program Type:

Reading, Talk

Age Group:

Tweens, Teens, Adults
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Event Details

 

DEAR PARK RANGER

Essays on Manhood, Restlessness, and the Geography of Hope

 

By Jeff Darren Muse 

 

Available from Homebound Publications Release date: May 9, 2023.

 

Jeff Darren Muse is a fatherless, childless Hoosier who wouldn’t and couldn’t stay put. Part Generation X travelogue, part love letter, part reflection on White male identity, Dear Park Ranger searches for purpose, companionship, a lost father, and home. Muse must break trail to find his way. From the farms and football fields of central Indiana, to snowy West Coast wildlands, from desert canyons, to meandering rivers, to a city built by slavery, he interrogates his younger years shaped by insecurity and wanderlust, as well as later choices such as marrying “Ranger Paula” and pursuing a tree hugger’s career. At turns humorous and self-deprecating, redemptive and resolute, this is one man’s stirring gut check through inner and outer terrain.

 

JDM

Jeff Darren Muse 

Jeff Darren Muse is an environmental educator, historical interpreter, and park ranger who lives with his wife in Santa Fe. Learn more at https://jeffdarrenmuse.com.

 

 

 

Praise for Dear Park Ranger:

 

“Muse is my kind of writer. A wanderer, a searcher, a Southern Western Hoosier, a son of a difficult father, and a displaced man with a deep sense of place. His essays are an attempt to ground truth experience, to present life not in theory but in its messy complexity. Importantly, he follows his own advice to tree huggers—go outside!—and from his ramblings he has brought back this gift for us.”

- David Gessner, All the Wild That Remains

 

“In these finely crafted essays, Muse braids together two love stories—one, his love for America’s wildlands, the mountains, forests, and rivers not yet devastated by human appetites; the other, his love for his wife, whose career as a park ranger carries them from place to place. With each move, Muse must reinvent himself, reconceiving his identity. Anyone who has searched for meaning in an uprooted life, weathered the storms of a long marriage, or rejoiced in untamed nature, will recognize a kindred soul.”

- Scott Russell Sanders, author of The Way of Imagination

 

“In his heart and on the page, Muse contemplates the widest breadth of passions, eliding divisions too familiar in much traditional nature writing. He artfully and honestly considers place and race, wildness and domesticity, depression and elation. These essays are graceful and full of grace, pure pleasure to read.”

- Ana Maria Spagna, author of Uplake: Restless Essays of Coming and Going

 

“To the great list of wondering, wandering, wide- and clear-eyed American writer/naturalists, go ahead and add the name Jeff Darren Muse. Love, loss, landscape, regret, forgiveness, and the vagaries of time—Muse reckons with it all here, in essays that make you want to hit the trail with someone you cherish.”

- Joe Wilkins, author of Fall Back Down When I Die