Bicycling beyond the Divide: Two Journeys into the West (Outdoor Lives)

On a journey begun twenty years earlier, Daryl Farmer, a twenty-year-old two-time college dropout, did what lost men have so often done in this country: he headed west. Twenty years later and seventy pounds heavier, with the yellowing journals from that transformative five-thousand-mile bicycle trek in his pack, Farmer set out to retrace his path. This is his story of pursuing that distant summer and that distant dream of home, where home is endless space, a roof of big sky, and a bed of dry earth. Just as the years altered the man, so, too, have they altered the West, and Farmer’s second journey affords a unique perspective on these changes—as well as on what lasts. Whether caught in a Colorado snowstorm or braving a Yellowstone herd of bison, kayaking with orcas in Puget Sound, trading Ninja moves with a homeless man in San Francisco, or getting the lowdown on aliens on Nevada’s Extraterrestrial Highway, Farmer charts a moving landscape of people and places. This is the West where the natural world and personal character are inextricably linked, and where one man’s ride into the past and present takes us to the heart of that ever-evolving connection.

Literature & Fiction

Farmer, Daryl

Essays & Correspondence

University Of Nebraska Press

Bison Books

Daryl Farmer writes about parts of the country where dreams go to be born or to die, places where the most unforgiving landscape is the human heart. Set in the western United States and in the far reaches of Alaska, the stories of WHERE WE LAND give us characters trying hard to negotiate external and internal boundaries. They find themselves far beyond the edge of where and what they've been, and they're working hard either to find their way home or to break new ground inside themselves.--from the publisher "In the tradition of Jack London, Richard Ford and Annie Proulx, Daryl Farmer writes sublime western landscapes, rural and wild, that illuminate, threaten and redeem (sometimes all in the same lyric moment) the characters who inhabit them. Farmer's people are beset with hard luck and big dreams involving grizzly bears and frozen places; their hearts are shuttered, but not silenced, and they look to wild things to tell them how to grow up, grow old, move on. Above all else, these twelve compelling and complex stories remind us that we come from the wilderness, and suggest it might behoove us to return."--Pam Houston, author of CONTENTS MAY HAVE SHIFTED "Daryl Farmer writes with brutal elegance and loving wonder about the misfits of Alaska, the stony, tree-studded, snowbound, diesel- and whiskey-soaked stage for the excellent stories in WHERE WE LAND."--Ben Percy, author of THE DEAD LANDS, RED MOON, and THE WILDING "The world often brutal and cold, Daryl Farmer's stories act as a beautiful and potent study in survival. With elegant prose and indelible characters, these stories prove again and again, with a deep cry for warmth, that we are not alone as we struggle through the wilderness that is life. I found WHERE WE LAND wholly entertaining, masterfully crafted, moving and profound, and I admire this collection as much as any I've read in many years."--Alan Heathcock, author of VOLT DARYL FARMER is the author of BICYCLING BEYOND THE DIVIDE, which received a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers Award and was a Colorado Book Award finalist. Farmer's work has appeared in several journals including Whitefish Review, Grist, Hayden's Ferry Review, South Dakota Review, and Quarter After Eight. He received his M.A. and Ph.D. in creative writing from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and has taught at Georgia Tech and Stephen F. Austin State University in Texas. Currently, he is an assistant professor and director of the MFA program at the University of Alaska-Fairbanks.

Where We Land: Stories

Literary

Brighthorse Books

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