Dear Park Ranger

“An evocative consideration of the dualities of beauty and pain found in both nature and ourselves.”

Kirkus Review

“These essays are deeply resonant and restless, roaming over varied geographies and eras, searching inward and outward to trace Muse’s roots and the threads of their impact on his marriage and identity. He mulls over the nature of change itself, writing, ‘A real man, I know now, stretches.’ Gorgeous sentences add up here to more than the sum of their parts, creating a whole that will linger for lucky readers.”

Sonya Huber, author of Pain Woman Takes Your Keys

“Muse is my kind of writer. A wanderer, a searcher, a Southern Western Hoosier, a son of a difficult father, and a displaced man with a deep sense of place. His essays are an attempt to ground truth experience, to present life not in theory but in its messy complexity. Importantly, he follows his own advice to tree huggers—go outside!—and from his ramblings he has brought back this gift for us.”“An evocative consideration of the dualities of beauty and pain found in both nature and ourselves.”

David Gessner, author of All the Wild That Remains: Edward Abbey, Wallace Stegner, and the American West

“Muse has given us a fantastic book—moving, humble, thought-provoking, and humorous. He admits to writing about his own wants and fears but strives for the reader to see herself. He accomplishes just that in Dear Park Ranger by offering exactly what he looks for in an essay: an intimate voice, an honest soul, and, most importantly, ‘a wandering, wondering mind.’ I was swept along with Muse’s interrogation of memories and meanings.”

Iris Graville, author of Hiking Naked: A Quaker Woman’s Search for Balance

“In his heart and on the page, Muse contemplates the widest breadth of passions, eliding divisions too familiar in much traditional nature writing. He artfully and honestly considers place and race, wildness and domesticity, depression and elation. These essays are graceful and full of grace, pure pleasure to read.”

Ana Maria Spagna, author of Uplake: Restless Essays of Coming and Going

In a marketplace obsessed with writers under thirty, here’s a phenom over fifty. Not the fireweed flashing after the clearcut, not the ephemeral glacier lily, Muse is a sturdy cedar gnarling into aged beauty. In this wondrous book you’ll come upon an old friend—honest and true, not unhurt, hopelessly in love with the land.”

Ted O’Connell, winner of the Tobias Wolff Award in Fiction and author of K: A Novel

“In these finely crafted essays, Muse braids together two love stories—one, his love for America’s wildlands, the mountains, forests, and rivers not yet devastated by human appetites; the other, his love for his wife, whose career as a park ranger carries them from place to place. With each move, Muse must reinvent himself, reconceiving his identity. Anyone who has searched for meaning in an uprooted life, weathered the storms of a long marriage, or rejoiced in untamed nature, will recognize a kindred soul.”

Scott Russell Sanders, author of The Way of Imagination

“Underlying this collection of introspective essays centering on men is the respect and honor Muse bestows upon his single mother. For Muse, loving the land was the easy part of growing up. It was his mother’s steadfast belief in him that gave him the strength to survive the rest, while her love fostered in him the ability to love his dear park ranger so deeply. It is a pleasure to read this quiet tribute to strong women.”

Kathryn Wilder, author of Desert Chrome: Water, a Woman, and Wild Horses in the West

“To the great list of wondering, wandering, wide- and clear-eyed American writer/naturalists, go ahead and add the name Jeff Darren Muse. Love, loss, landscape, regret, forgiveness, and the vagaries of time—Muse reckons with it all here, in essays that make you want to hit the trail with someone you cherish.”

Joe Wilkins, author of Fall Back Down When I Die