Search results for ""Author Annick Smith""

Dogs, like humans, have memories, instincts, fears, and loyalties. But, as far as we know, dogs do not get swept up in nostalgia, speculation, or self-analysis. Although they have hopes, they are not driven by regrets. In Crossing the Plains with Bruno, Annick Smith weaves together a memoir of travel and relationship, western history and family history, human love and animal love centering around a two week road trip across the Great Plains she and her 95 pound chocolate lab, Bruno, took in the summer of 2003. It is a chain of linked meditations, often triggered by place, about how the past impinges on the present and how the present can exist seemingly sans past. Traveling from her rural homestead in Montana to pick up her nearly 100-year-old mother from her senior residence on Chicago's North Side and bring her to the family's beach house on a dune overlooking Lake Michigan, Smith often gets lost in memory and rambling contemplation. Bruno's constant companionship and ever present needs force her to return to the actual, reminding her that she, too, is an animal whose existence depends on being alert to the scents, sights, hungers, and emotions of the moment. Passing through wide open spaces, dying ranch towns, green cornfields, and Midwestern hamlets, Annick is immersed in memories of her immigrant Hungarian Jewish family, her childhood days in Chicago, her early marriage, and ultimate immigration west. Triggered by random encounters along the way, she's taken back to life as a young mother, her career as a writer and filmmaker who produced the classic A River Runs Through It, the death of her husband, and the thrill of a late romance. A lifetime of reflection played out one mile at a time. Crossing the Plains with Bruno is a story narrated by a woman beset by the processes of aging, living with the imminent reality of a parent's death, but it is the dog that rides shotgun, like Sancho Panza to Don Quixote, that becomes the reminder of the physical realities outside our own imaginations.

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This book is an anthology of some of the greatest stories and storytellers of the American West. Through eight chapters and over 800 pages, 150 writers present scores of myths, stories, poems, essays, and journals that document Montana's significant literary tradition. The selections range from pre-white Indian days to the present, and, taken as a whole, they offer a powerful microcosm of the entire western experience. The chapters, each prefaced by an original essay, progress chronologically from myths and tales of the Indian people to accounts of exploration and the fur trade, followed by the mining and stockmen's frontiers, the agricultural and small town experience, as well as a special chapter on Butte--the richest hill on earth. Contemporary chapters take up the emergence of the modern West in the middle years of the twentieth century as well as the renaissance of western literature in contemporary fiction and poetry. These chapters include many authors who have earned national reputations in fiction, poetry, and criticism, but they also include many younger writers whose careers are just beginning.

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A multicultural anthology, edited by Susan O’Connor and Annick Smith, about the enduring importance and shifting associations of the hearth in our world.A hearth is many things: a place for solitude; a source of identity; something we make and share with others; a history of ourselves and our homes. It is the fixed center we return to. It is just as intrinsically portable. It is, in short, the perfect metaphor for what we seek in these complex and contradictory times—set in flux by climate change, mass immigration, the refugee crisis, and the dislocating effects of technology.Featuring original contributions from some of our most cherished voices—including Terry Tempest Williams, Bill McKibben, Pico Iyer, Natasha Trethewey, Luis Alberto Urrea, and Chigozie Obioma—Hearth suggests that empathy and storytelling hold the power to unite us when we have wandered alone for too long. This is an essential anthology that challenges us to redefine home and hearth: as a place to welcome strangers, to be generous, to care for the world beyond one’s own experience.

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