Books

All my writing pivots on the environmental humanities, that place where culture and ecology meet. See the covers of my ten books below.

From those books I dedicate my meager royalties to nonprofit causes. One beneficiary is the Seattle-based HistoryLink, the encyclopedia of Washington state history where I have contributed historiography since 2012. Other recipients of proceeds have included student scholarships, the Spokane Riverkeeper, the Lands Council, and Friends of the Clearwater.

My first book, John Josselyn, Colonial Traveler, concerns an early natural historian in New England. My ecological memoir In Earshot of Water, reviewed here, won a Washington State Book Award (formerly the Governor’s Writers Award), adding to previous recognition from the Academy of American Poets and the Society of Professional Journalists. My foremost scholarly book is Explorations in Ecocriticism: Advocacy, Bioregionalism, and Visual Design (2015). Here is a review of that book of Explorations by a Frenchwoman writing for a journal in Spain.

Much of my writing has been theoretical, including this article on rivers in Green Theory and Praxis, and this one in Southern Review based on archival research I did at the Smithsonian. Interrogating Travel: Guidance from a Reluctant Tourist appeared in June 2023 from Louisiana State, a university press that was founded in 1935. Here is a link to a review of that 2023 in Publishers Weekly, and here a link to reviews of it on Amazon.

Interrogating Travel Book Cover
Making Landfall
The Spokane River
Explorations in Ecocriticism
Earshot of Water
The Canoe and the Saddle
Holding Common Ground
History and Folklore of the Cowicha Indians
Cascadia Wild
Clonial Traveler