Siesta Lane: A Year Unplugged, or, The Good Intentions of Ten People, Two Cats, One Old Dog, Eight Acres, One Telephone, Three Cars, and Twenty Miles to the Nearest Town - Hardcover

Minato, Amy

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1602393281 ISBN 13: 9781602393288

Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing, 2009

Synopsis

“Equal parts sweet and serious…will make many folks think about their lives in new ways.”—Bill McKibben

A poet at heart, Amy Minato rejects her life of consumption in Chicago to go back to nature - specifically, to a commune in Oregon, where she rediscovers herself. She also cops occasionally to the pretentiousness of her mission, and laughs along with the reader at her attempts to be both environmentally friendly and sane, considering the fact that she's moved in with a bunch of strangers in a remote locale.

Jan Muir, a relative of the great environmentalist John Muir, lends her beautiful black-and-white illustrations to the book.

Written with a grace and clarity of vision reminiscent of Annie Dillard's prose, Siesta Lane is both a practical case study in living green, and the heartwarming story of a modern idealist who dives headfirst into the fray and discovers just what it takes to live a year unplugged.

This is a must-read for armchair adventurers and a perfect, engaging primer for anyone who wants to stride confidently into the new, environmentally-conscious 21st century.

About this title

Review

A restless city poet recounts her experiment with country living.

The idea to swim against the consumptive current and move west came to Minato (The Wider Lens, 2004) during a Chicago traffic jam. Increasingly bothered by the global impact her metropolitan existence was having on the environment, the poet packed up and headed to Oregon for graduate school. But after eight years, even Eugene proved too urban for her, and she moved again, this time to a ten-square-foot cabin that was part of an eight-acre commune on Siesta Lane in the relative wilds of Rainbow Valley, Ore. Her memoir, a veritable menagerie of thoughts, observations, photos, poems and lovely pen-and-ink drawings by Muir, is the result of Minato s year or so away, where she discovered as much about herself as the wonders of nature. Not so simple simple living, she realized early on. Characterizing each of her fellow Siesta Lane residents, the author doesn t neglect herself, saying she s a single woman with ninety-eight part-time jobs trying to figure out how she connects to the greater forces of the universe and to the tiny earwigs that hide in the curled-up seed heads of Queen Anne s lace. Part of this volume s charm lies in its somewhat fractured composition, which mirrors the author s state of mind during this transitional period. Short chapters hop from Incubation to Freaks to July to The Garden, while loosely conveying the sense of time s passage as Minato adjusted to her rustic domestic situation. Living without many modern conveniences for example, only the commune s main building had a kitchen and running water led her to provocative conclusions: For us it appears to primarily be the mind that evolves, and we then cater our surroundings to our weakening bodies. She took some radical actions as well, such as getting rid of her cat after he brought home one too many birds.

An evocative record of a year in the woods and an interesting study in enacting one s beliefs. "

Edition details

• Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
• Publication date: 2009
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1602393281
• ISBN 13: 9781602393288
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 240