Where Yet the Sweet Birds Sing is a chronicle in the tradition of the nature essay and the spiritual journey. Over the course of a year, Richard Quinney kept a journal and took photographs of the passing seasons on his family farm in Walworth County, Wisconsin. Quinney, recently retired from a lifetime of university teaching, was being treated for chronic lymphocytic leukemia, and by year’s end was moving from one place to another. The family farm provided peace and solace, a reminder of times past, and a revelation of the wonders of the present. 

Where Yet the Sweet Birds Sing

Politics & Social Sciences

Quinney, Richard

Philosophy

Borderland Books

Over the course of a decade at century’s end, Richard Quinney kept close watch and recorded in his journal the events of daily living. Any sense of the universal and the extraordinary was necessarily grounded in ordinary experience. The author lived in a prairie town in northern Illinois, within easy driving distance of his family farm, as he made the observations and wrote these personal essays exploring the experience of the sublime in everyday life.

Once Again the Wonder

Religion & Spirituality

The place is the middle border, the Midwest borderland remembered in the writings of Hamlin Garland. Richard Quinney’s autobiographical essays begin with his birth and early years on the family farm in southern Wisconsin, continue through a lifetime of movement away from the farm, and document a return to the farm. Along the way, there are the tales of the years of living and writing in a prairie town across the border. In the most recent telling, Quinney is still moving between town and country. But it is always to the farm on the middle border that he returns. Autobiographical reflection allows the narrator to move in time and space across a geographical landscape. The impulse to write autobiographically is to know the present and, at the same time, to apprehend what is yet to be. Lives are saved and renewed in the telling of these tales. Such is the good fortune of the storyteller.

Tales from the Middle Border

Biographies & Memoirs

Professionals & Academics

This retrospective of photographs spans a period of forty years. Each photograph, each act of photographing, has been an attempt to stop time, to capture what is happening in the moment, and to preserve the moment for posterity. The photographer frames the subject and gives witness to an order in the universe. But the photographer knows that, as Henri Cartier-Bresson has reminded us, nothing can really bring back the moment of things fixed in the photograph. And nothing can bring back that moment in the life of the photographer. In the wisdom of Buddhism, “all things are impermanent.” Photographs are a reminder of the impermanence of all things. But what the photographer once saw and caught on film may be given another life when others see the photographs. For the photographer, the act of photographing has been an intimate part of the process of living a life. This body of work, accompanied by journal notes, is a record of what the photographer once saw, and is a window to the life once lived.

Things Once Seen

Arts & Photography

Individual Artists

“Proverbs are true / but not quite / true enough.”—from the poem "The Surprises.”All of the poems in this book seek to say what is true enough, what is truer even than proverbs are. Singer’s proverbial insight, like Kafka’s, describes the reality behind things, in a spare and stark place that is not for us. Reality, like a poem, is a corridor between dark and dark that leads at last to a “true recess,” emptiness and void, “not a soul in sight.” But still in the darkness there are circles of lamplight, places of rest. “What but a desire to stay here would have made me come to this desolate place?” asks Kafka. We too want to stay for a while, learn for a while, in the desolate places Singer shows us and of which she somehow manages to make a sojourn—a true enough home, even in the corridor.

Corridor

Literature & Fiction

Singer, Josephine

Poetry

Rural Wisconsin was still a wilderness in these early 1920s stories by Glenway Wescott. The distances between farms and small towns seemed great in those days. So, too, was the struggle of social order and religion against poverty, nature, and a stubborn streak of lawlessness. But the real adventure in these stories is in Wescott’s deep understanding of human nature. His characters may be tragic, heroic, comic, or inspiring but, if there is one theme here, it is the search for personal freedom.

Goodbye, Wisconsin

Wescott, Glenway

Short Stories & Anthologies

Under a Lucky Star

Under a Lucky Star is the autobiography—the lifetime of adventure—of the explorer and archaeologist Roy Chapman Andrews. Adored by the public and pursued by the press, Andrews came as close to superstar status in the 1920s as any explorer of the twentieth century. Much of Under a Lucky Star focuses on his grandest adventure, the Central Asiatic Expeditions, a series of five daring journeys into uncharted expanses of the Gobi Desert that produced a previously unknown treasure-trove of dinosaur remains. The Gobi region explored by Andrews and his team of scientists proved to be one of the most fruitful sites on earth for late dinosaurs and it continues to yield extraordinary paleontological discoveries.

ANDREWS, ROY CHAPMAN

After the presidential campaign and election in 2004, Judith Strasser set out to investigate the nature of fear and its widespread use as a political campaign strategy. After flying to Seattle to conduct research for her study of political fear, Strasser returned home to a diagnosis of stomach cancer. Facing Fear traces Strasser’s attempt to understand the nature of fear and anxiety and to regain control of a life threatened by a fatal disease. Part memoir, part journalism, and all heart, her book explores our biological and psychological responses to fearful events, examines the culture of fear in which we live, and suggests ways in which we, both as individuals and as members of a community, can overcome our anxieties and face our fears with courage and hope.

Facing Fear: Cancer and Politics, Courage and Hope

Strasser, Judith

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Hidden Agenda documents Carol Chase Bjerke’s large-scale multifaceted art project about living with an ostomy after treatment for colorectal cancer. An ostomy is a surgical reconfiguration of the intestine to create an opening in the abdominal wall through which body wastes pass. Addressing quality-of-life issues ranging from questions of identity and privacy to specifics of management and self-care, this book is about relentlessness and repetition and time measured in medical supplies. Bjerke conveys vast amounts of information and provides an entree into long-overdue discussions about what many would designate as a crude and outdated medical procedure that is still used as state-of-the-art treatment for a variety of gastrointestinal diseases. Intensely personal yet tastefully, thoughtfully, and beautifully wrought, Bjerke’s artwork not only provides one woman’s story about living with an ostomy but also serves as inspiration, affirmation, and support for patients, family members, artists, and everyone interested in the healing power of creativity. Finalist, MIPA Midwest Book Award for Health, Midwest Independent Publishers Association

Hidden Agenda

Bjerke, Carol Chase

History & Criticism

Leaving Norway: A Family Story

Schavland, Solveig Astrid

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