Miracle Country: The Fragile Joy of a Family and a Landscape
A memoir forthcoming June 2020 by 2016 Award Winner Kendra Atleework
A memoir published July 14, 2020 from our 2016 award winner
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Kendra writes to us from Bishop, California:
Dear Ellen Meloy fans,
In 2016, I was honored to receive the Ellen Meloy Fund for Desert Writers Award for my book-in-progress. Now I’m so excited to be able to share that book with you: Miracle Country, my debut memoir. (Watch a video interview about the book here.)
I was so looking forward to celebrating this book in person with many of you on tour. Alas, due to Covid-19 the in-person book tour is not happening, but I’m excited to share a virtual tour with everyone, including live video conversations coming up in July and August with writers Luis Alberto Urrea, Julie Schumacher, Patricia Hampl, Victoria Blanco, and Caitlin Myer. Find out more and sign up for very occasional updates on my website.
Miracle Country is a book about loss and also hope. My parents raised me to love the desert, but when I was 16 my mom died and our home at the base of the Eastern Sierra Nevada mountains became empty. I left for ten years and was constantly homesick.
In 2015, a freak winter wildfire during the California drought burned my home neighborhood. I flew back from where I was living in Minnesota to sift ash with the neighbors, and it became clear to me that I needed to come home. Miracle Country is about that return, merging the story of my family and our personal joys and losses with the story of our beloved landscape. It’s a book about coming home with hope in the face of danger. It’s about the realities of a harsh and changing climate and a harsh history, about scarcity and colonization and the complexities of sharing a place.
The title Miracle Country is a bit ironic. The landscape I write about—the Eastern Sierra Nevada—has been ravaged by settlement, industry, and distant municipal interests. It’s a damaged place, at times ugly, where miracles may be promised but never arrive. Our water is piped 230 miles south to Los Angeles, and we’re visited often by fire, drought, blizzards, and extreme winds. Residents of the Eastern Sierra Nevada region must work to balance the impacts of millions of recreational visitors. We constantly fight to claim the water we need for our towns and ecosystems in the face of the great thirst of Los Angeles.
These days I’m watching my book transition from idea to object. In November of 2018, my agent started sending Miracle Country to publishers. In the middle of the night while waiting to hear back I bought a round-trip ticket to Europe to distract myself from the possibility that perhaps no one wanted to read about my love for sagebrush and the time my dad tried to house-break a cat by peeing on it in the shower. (That didn’t work.) As it turned out these stories had some traction, and with my agent I chose Algonquin Books as a publisher.
I immediately cavorted off to Europe—where I signed my official contract over email in the middle of a party in the flat of a couchsurfing host in Berlin. After that came months of back-and-forth between myself and my editor. I finished fact checking, revising, and getting permission from my siblings to share some of their less flattering adolescent moments. Next came copyediting, typesetting, rounds and rounds of cover possibilities, asking kind souls for blurbs, trying not to look too uncomfortable in my author photo, etc.
It’s cool to think that already, Miracle Country is making its way across the country. It is my hope that readers nationally will come to know and care for the Eastern Sierra as a complex place that is more than a vacation spot. I hope they’ll be inspired to think deeply about how they live in their own homes, too.
Thus closes more than six years of work on a manuscript. I’m thankful to the supporters of desert literature for a book’s worth of inspiration.
Kendra Atleework is the recipient of the Ellen Meloy Desert Writers Award and was selected for The Best American Essays, edited by Ariel Levy. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Minnesota and now lives in Bishop, California. Follow her desert and writing adventures here.