About Mountain Time: A Field Guide to Astonishment:
In Mountain Time, Renata Golden writes that mountains create a “constant hum” connecting the very core of the earth to our own skin. She interweaves stories from her own life with riveting accounts about the Apache and Irish, yucca and Lehmann’s love grass, kangaroo rats and leopard frogs who have made a home somewhere and sometime in the complex topography of the southwestern borderland she loves. Golden’s gorgeous, instructive collection is the guidebook we need now.
—Camille T. Dungy, author of Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden
"Golden unites nature and humankind into a breathtaking, give-and-take dance, transporting readers from immigrant stories and insightful explorations of displaced Indigenous peoples to considerations of the animals at her doorstep, all connected by threads of love and respect."
—Publishers Weekly
Renata Golden’s Mountain Time: A Field Guide to Astonishment would be at home with Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, or Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire. Or, best, with Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass, for humility and listening and deep awareness of multiple stories and voices. But these gemlike sentences are Golden’s own, and they woo me into an affair with a place I’ve never been. Fierce and beguiling, funny and brave, this is a book about love: how to love a place where you find yourself a visitor, and how to love the life you’ve won for yourself.
—Joni Tevis, author of The World Is On Fire
"With her thought-provoking debut essay collection, Mountain Time: A Field Guide to Astonishment, Renata Golden grounds us in place and explores transformative relationships with the human and nonhuman community of the Chiricahuas. Golden encounters longtime ranchers, prairie dogs, leopard frogs, snakes, bluebirds, ants, and a special greyhound. These transporting essays take us on journeys of thought and emotion, and will give you a new lens to see the world, and you'll be grateful for that."
—Sean Hill, author of Blood Ties & Brown Liquor and Dangerous Goods
In this luminous collection, Renata Golden offers us an un-easy love story: with birds and people, mountains and family, history and place. Elegantly researched and exquisitely crafted, these essays have a depth and range that will delight and, yes, astonish.
—Susan Fox Rogers, author of Learning the Birds, Editor of When Birds Are Near
"Everyone in America should read this book."
—Lynn Cline, Cline's Corner radio show
About Renata Golden:
Renata Golden’s essay collection Mountain Time: A Field Guide to Astonishment was published by CSU Press/UGA Press in March 2024 and is the winner of the 2024 Southwest Book Award. It also was a finalist for the New Mexico/Arizona Book Award and the River Teeth Nonfiction Contest. Individual essays have been finalists for literary awards including the Penelope Niven Creative Nonfiction Award, Annie Dillard Award for Creative Nonfiction, and Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University Award. Renata was awarded residencies at Storyknife in Alaska and Write on, Door County and currently serves as reviews editor and board member for Terrain.org. She earned an MFA in creative writing from the University of Houston. Originally from the South Side of Chicago, she now lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
