A Field Guide to the Subterranean

A critically acclaimed author of <A Field Guide to the Subterranean< is about the lessons of hard-won renewal and the ad hoc spiritual rigging we sometimes have to create to overcome existential challenges, Hocking uses various modes--personal narrative, natural history, suspenseful narrative nonfiction, geology--to demonstrate the ways in which the environment, not just our polluted natural surroundings but the façade of the rugged American character, thwart authentic self-knowledge and connection to the world. In particular, Hocking reckons with toxic elements found in Gen X skateboarding, the Outward Bound type of miseducation about the environment, and the Men’s Movement from Robert Bly machismo to proto Incel/Proud Boy cultures which led him to struggle to accept his own individuality. ;Living Frost’s adage that “the only way out is through,” Hocking boldly mines his self, finding footholds in natural wonder, birding, surfing, a generous partner, service, to climb back out and regain his life.

Auteur

JUSTIN HOCKING is the author of The Great Floodgates of the Wonderworld. He served as executive director of Portland’s Independent Publishing Resource Center (IPRC) from 2006 to mid-2014 and is a recipient of the Willamette Writers Humanitarian Award for his work in publishing, writing, and teaching, and was named as one of "Ten Writers Who Made Portland" by Willamette Week. His nonfiction and fiction have appeared in The Rumpus, Orion, The Normal School, Tin House, Poets & Writers Magazine, and elsewhere. He works as an assistant professor in the critical studies MA program at Pacific Northwest College of Art and as a full-time faculty member in nonfiction and publishing in the undergraduate and MFA writing programs at Portland State University. He is the recipient of an Oregon Literary Fellowship for fiction and four Regional Arts and Culture Council Project Grant awards. He lives in Portland, Oregon.

Texte du rabat

A radically inventive excavation of one man’s life by the critically acclaimed author of The Great Floodgates of the Wonderworld

Justin Hocking grew up in a part of Colorado where so many things happened beneath the surface—mining exploits, underground nuclear testing just thirty miles from his family’s home, and geothermal activity that heats one of the world’s largest hot springs pools. His homelife, too, was plagued by an underground pattern of abuse and virulent masculinity. A Field Guide to the Subterranean charts the author’s lifelong process of unearthing the past and reclaiming his own identity and connection to the natural world.

How might we transform our traumas into deeper care for each other and the landscapes that sustain us? How do we transcend the mythos of the rugged American male so rooted in extraction and exploitation? And how far can we move beyond the self in a memoir? Hocking explores these and other vital questions by combining personal narrative with expansions into geology, ecology, gender theory, mining history, labor rights, and even skateboarding.

Abundant with historical research and teeming with birdlife—and ranging in location from remote caves and mountains to secluded surf breaks in Costa Rica—A Field Guide to the Subterranean heralds a boldly original and kaleidoscopic approach to the genre of nature writing.