This collection covers eight years of unrest, personal and communal, beginning with stubborn patriotic certainty, a faith in neighborliness and American ideals, and ending with something broader: an alliance with the matriarch, Mother Nature, and the ways she elides ideology or definition. The essays shift perspective to focus on subjects too often overlooked: unwritten histories of xenophobia in the American West, the rights of rivers everywhere, queerness in middle age, troubled human kin, and our more-than-human kin--snakes, fish, bears, sea lions, and a beloved robotic cat. These essays balance wonder at the world around us and urgency at the threats to it, but they add one more imperative: to focus on kinship--on the people we care for and those who care for us, and the more-than-human too.
Ana Maria Spagna is the author of Test Ride on the Sunnyland Bus: A Daughter's Civil Rights Journey (Bison Books, 2010) as well as several other books about nature, work, community, and history including, most recently, Pushed: Miners, a Merchant, and (Maybe) a Massacre. She is a professor of English at Wenatchee Valley College and MFA Faculty in Nature Writing in the Graduate Program in Creative Writing at Western Colorado University.
"Coiled is a page-turner. Life doesn't come with plot, but Ana Maria Spagna writes with the kind of energy that has me on the edge of my seat, wondering what will happen next--with the rattlesnakes, sure, but also with her students, neighbors, grief, politics, motels, and onward. Spagna is both vulnerable and generous in her invitation to the reader, and a journey through the mind of a writer like Spagna is one wild and lucky ride."--Jill Christman, author of The Heart Folds Early: A Memoir "Coiled is a sharp and urgent and deeply empathetic collection of essays calling its readers to see the indivisibility of the natural and the social, the physical, and the political--all of it one seamless home we live in. For Ana Maria Spagna, this is family and memory; the Inland Empire and the Cascades and the North Country; skiing and trail building and teaching; life amid ice and fire and sun. Through stories drawn from her own life over the past ten years from November 2016 to now, she gives voice to the human and more-than-human joys and to the darker anxieties that are the trails all of us are walking these days. As she puts it, 'Sometimes, in the woods, you want to see a sign to know someone came this way before you, to know you're in it together.' Coiled is that sign and Spagna is calling us to join in its coils, for warmth, for preparation, for defense against dark days."--Marco Wilkinson, author of Madder: A Memoir in Weeds "Ana Maria Spagna has written more than a book--this is a compass for our disorienting times. With the eye of a naturalist and soul of a poet, Spagna leads us through landscapes of grief, political turmoil, and ecological wonder, ultimately leading us to what really matters: kinship. Whether witnessing the release of a wild fisher or navigating difficult waters of loss, Spagna writes with the kind of vulnerability that at once wrecks and heals. This collection is a howl. It is a prayer. Coiled is a warm hand on the shoulder reminding us that even on the 'hairline fringe' we are never alone."--CMarie Fuhrman, author of Salmon Weather: Writing From the Land of No Return
