Awards

• Commended for Oregon Book Awards (Creative Nonfiction) 2016

Overview

When Barbara Drake and her husband left Portland and moved to a small farm in western Oregon’s Yamhill Valley in the late 1980s, they saw it as a temporary relocation - they would return to the city eventually. But as the couple’s experiences on the farm multiplied - training herding dogs, enlisting a pair of traveling dowsers to help them find a good well, and stargazing in a singular nighttime darkness - they decide to hang on to their rural life as long as possible. Barbara Drake articulates the lessons she’s learned from her long stint of country living in her new book, Morning Light. Replete with records of native wildflowers, an encounter with an elderly man who lived on her farm eighty years ago, and an old family recipe for wild blackberry pudding, Morning Light is an appreciation and exploration of the landscape of western Oregon, and readers will come to know it better through the book. As entertaining and instructive as it is personal and reflective, Drake’s writing will resonate with anyone who has experienced a convergence of family history with natural history, considered their place in the historical continuum, or wondered if their lifestyle can be sustained with age. In a world where even “the country” is becoming increasingly citified, Morning Light reminds us why we should care for our rural landscapes - while we still can.

Full Product Details

9780870717604

Table of Contents

Reviews

Oh my gosh, I love this book so much! Barbara s beguiling voice, her eye for the intimate beauty of country life, her poignant thoughts about the aging of people, of animals, of placesevery part of Morning Light gave me such great pleasure. I ll be pressing this book into everyone's hands for years to come. Molly Gloss, author of Falling From Horses and Jump-Off Creek

Oh my gosh, I love this book so much! Barbara's beguiling voice, her eye for the intimate beauty of country life, her poignant thoughts about the aging of people, of animals, of places--every part of Morning Light gave me such great pleasure. I'll be pressing this book into everyone's hands for years to come. --Molly Gloss, author of Falling From Horses and Jump-Off Creek

As a genius nature writer, Henry David Thoreau made good use of his New England backyard and didn't choose to explore the wild frontier that beckoned to the west in the mid- 1800s. He loved the way nature ceaselessly encroached on civilization: There is something indescribably inspiriting and beautiful in the aspect of the forest skirting and occasionally jutting into the midst of new towns. Barbara Drake can relate. In nearly thirty years of living on a small farm in rural Oregon with a husband and border collies, she has trained her eye on the natural world sharing her beloved place. The lichens and mosses thriving on the forest floor of their large groves of white oak, for example, or the quick work a couple coyotes can make of sheep or chickens, the anxiety accompanying drilling a well for water, her satisfaction in recognizing stars and constellations in a brilliant night sky--this is the stuff of Drake's life. Her many years teaching university-level English brings a sprinkling of Tennyson, Leopold, Eliot, and others, lending a commiserative voice to her warm, restrained, marvelously grown up way with words. --Foreword Reviews To see the world realistically but without grimness, to praise Nature without sentimentality, to enjoy living without recourse to illusion, to be aware of the sacred without needing churchly sanction, and to meet hard times with humor and good humor --that takes a mensch. Barbara Drake is a mensch, and Morning Light is a happy proof of that. --Ursula Le Guin Oh my gosh, I love this book so much! Barbara's beguiling voice, her eye for the intimate beauty of country life, her poignant thoughts about the aging of people, of animals, of places--every part of Morning Light gave me such great pleasure. I'll be pressing this book into everyone's hands for years to come. --Molly Gloss, author of Falling From Horses and Jump-Off Creek

Author Information

Barbara Drake was born in Kansas in 1939, moved to Oregon in 1941, grew up in Coos Bay on the Oregon Coast, and earned BA and MFA degrees from the University of Oregon, USA. After teaching at Michigan State University, she returned to Oregon in 1983 to develop the new creative writing major at Linfield College, where she taught until retiring as Professor Emerita in 2007. Drake has published poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, and a widely used college textbook, Writing Poetry. Her book Peace at Heart: An Oregon Country Life was an Oregon Book Award finalist in 1999.

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