For many years, Ana Maria Spagna has stayed put, mostly, in a small mountain valley at the head of a glacier-carved lake. You’re so lucky to live there, people say. She is lucky. But she is also restless. In Uplake she takes road trips, flies to distant cities, fantasizes about other people’s lives, and then returns home again to muse on rootedness, yearning, commitment, ambition, wonder, and love. These engaging, reflective essays celebrate the richness of it all: winter floods and summer fires, the roar of a chainsaw and a fiddle in the wilderness, long hikes and open-water swims, an injured bear, a lost wedding ring, and a tree in the middle of a river. Uplake reminds us to love what we have while encouraging us to still imagine what we want.
"Rarely can you say with a shard of truth that you remember the first time a writer's work hit you in the head and the heart with a nearly audible slap, but I remember the first time I read a passage from Ana Maria-it was in a magazine in which all the other stuff was careful and remote and only news, and her essay was sharp and blunt and had mud and sawdust in it. I remember that. I learned from
Brian Doyle
"Like her stories of swimming, hiking, flying, running, and driving, this collection is a moving-in more than one sense of the word-meditation. In her exploration, and ours, of how to find the way through. On how, in the long days but short years of living, to have a life of wonder."
