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189 Acknowledgments I would like to thank Clair Willcox at the University of Missouri Press for his insightful editing, admirable patience, and for giving this book a second chance; the wonderful writer S. L. Wisenberg read this manuscript with generosity and tremendous acuity and gave me the greatest gift a writer could ask—making my work look smarter for her efforts. I owe special thanks to H. Emerson “Chip” Blake at Orion Magazine, who accepted and improved upon the essay that would become this book; thanks, too, to the editors at Writer’s Digest who saw fit on the basis of that slim piece to name me among their twenty-five nonfiction writers to watch in the new millennium. I am tremendously grateful to everyone at the University of Missouri Press, whose great skill and generous efforts have made this book possible and better: Beth Chandler, Sara Davis, Daren Dean, Jennifer Gravley, and Lyn Smith. My thanks to Kathleen Anderson, for her efforts. I owe a debt of deep gratitude to friends and writers who inspired and generously read this in manuscript, and to the organizations that offered funding and shelter to support it: Lauren Fox, Gretchen Legler, Howard Levy, Virginia Levy, Marge and Sy Levy, Sawnie Morris, Nicholas Delbanco, Lisa Schamess, Cheryl Strayed, and the wonderful writing group in Washington (Katharine Davis, Ann McLaughlin, Carolyn Parkhurst, Leslie Pietrzyk, and Amy Stolls), the Sacatar Foundation, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Millay Colony, the Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation, and the Mellon Foundation. I want to thank Terry Tempest Williams for her inspiration as an artist and activist, and Philip Fearnside, for his efforts to turn the tide. I am grateful to the extraordinary faculty at Ohio State University: Lee K. Abbott, Michelle Herman, Lee Martin, Bill Roorbach, and Melanie Rae Thon. A special thanks to Cleveland Park Coop friends Dierdre Ball and Philip Benson, without whose milagro and faith this book would not have been completed; Susan Bradfield, whose efforts to protect wild birds inspires me daily; and Kyoko Mori and Andrea Way, who literally 190 gave me shelter. I am most grateful to my dearest friend, Maureen Stanton, a fierce advocate for the environment and a brilliant writer of creative nonfiction , whose remarkable memoirs and literary journalism inspired me to try my hand at this, and without whose help this would not have been begun or finished. Finally, my deepest thanks to my family and to Bill, for helping me find the happy ending. acknowledgments ...

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