The Precarious Walk: Essays from Sand and Sky

by Phyllis Barber

Overview

A 2022 Association of Mormon Letters Awards Finalist

"Probing…thoughtful meditations on the needs of the soul."

—KIRKUS REVIEWS

In wide-ranging personal essays at the crossroads of place and perspective, Phyllis Barber challenges and celebrates her Great Basin roots.

From a backwoods church in Arkansas to the disappeared town of St. Thomas, buried beneath the waters of Lake Mead, award-winning essayist Phyllis Barber travels roads both internal and external, reflecting upon place and perspective, ambition and loss in The Precarious Walk. As a child growing up in the Mojave Desert, she witnesses the massive power of the Hoover Dam and a fiery rip in the sky from the Nevada Test Site. As an adult, Barber searches for meaning through music, movement, and human connection, examining her Mormon upbringing, the profound ways people and landscape impact one another, and the sudden loss of her first child with open-ended honesty.

Barber's distinctly feminine voice expands upon the literature of the West alongside Ellen Meloy and Terry Tempest Williams, with seeking and questioning at the heart of this deeply felt collection. In the spirit of Flannery O'Connor and David James Duncan, Barber adds a deeply generous and—true to her high–desert roots—down-to-earth voice to the illumination of human experience.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781948814591
Publisher:	Torrey House Press
Publication date:	06/21/2022
Pages:	227
Product dimensions:	5.25(w) x 8.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Phyllis Barber is an award–winning author of nine books, including The Desert Between Us, Raw Edges, and How I Got Cultured. Winner of the AWP Prize for Creative Nonfiction, she has published essays and short stories in North American Review, Crazyhorse, and Kenyon Review. She has been cited as Notable in The Best American Essays and The Best American Travel Writing. In 2005, Barber was inducted into the Nevada Writers' Hall of Fame. Barber has taught at the Vermont College of Fine Arts and the University of Utah's Osher Institute. She lives in Park City, Utah.

Table of Contents

Part 1 In the Desert

Oh, Say Can You See? 3

Music in the Mojave 15

Mt. Charleston on My Mind 29

Love Via Johnny 39

Ode to the Mojave 47

Great Basin DNA 61

The Desert, Waiting 77

Part 2 Beyond the Desert

The Knife Handler 89

Dancing With The Sacred 105

The Art of Falling 121

The Precarious Walk Away from Mormonism 127

At the Cannery 141

Sweetgrass 161

Responsibility: The Essential Gesture 179

On Being Quiet 189

The Nested Self 199

The Desert, Again 213

Acknowledgments 221

About the author 223

About the Cover Art 225

Editorial Reviews

"Probing…thoughtful meditations on the needs of the soul."

—KIRKUS REVIEWS

"As shifting and lyrical as a sonata…Barber's book is a witness to the divine that is in nature and in the soul. To journey with her is to discover what's timeless."

—FOREWORD REVIEWS (starred review)

"Essays of both containment and release…Barber's book is a bloom in the sun."

—15 BYTES

"Each essay contains a story written with so much precision and imagery, it feels as though one might be reading a novel, instead of navigating the author's deepest thoughts. The Precarious Walk feels both current and historic, a potential time capsule to understand what it was like to live in the Mojave Desert during such a pivotal time."

—LAS VEGAS WEEKLY

"Barber wields luminous narrative skills to recall her desert childhood and explore her 'precarious' spiritual journey. A latter-day desert-dwelling non-fiction Willa Cather, she roots her loving family stories in vivid landscape. A fine essayist in pursuit of spiritual grounding, she finds God in the 'succulent, generous, breathtaking…frightening, windblown unpredictable desert,' and yet she knows she'll always be 'tangled in Mormon thread.' Her 'yen for the Soul' leads her through a whirl of essential questions. Barber makes a thought-provoking companion as she searches for answers."

—STEPHEN TRIMBLE, author of The Mike File: A Story of Grief and Hope

"Where are you headed, dear one? To a silent retreat? To your roots in the rich dirt? To a faraway place seeking answers? To a drying-up waters? To a reassessment of your faith? Barber has been there, done that, and lived to tell the tale and thank goodness. In this book I find a mapping of the days to come, of what it will mean to grow older, perhaps wiser, to surrender to the earth itself. Wherever you are headed, pick it up and take it with you."

—JOANNA BROOKS, author of The Book of Mormon Girl and Mormonism and White Supremacy

"What an extraordinary book! The essays in Barber's The Precarious Walk chronicle her deeply moving and inspiring lifelong quest to discover both the Divine—whether it be called God, Goddess, Yahweh, Allah, Jesus Christ, Buddha, Mohammed, Krishna, or Spirit—and her essential self, which she compares to the core of a matryoshka, a Russian nesting doll that contains a series of smaller and smaller dolls, each one similar yet different in some important way from the others. Her book is itself a kind of matryoshka, each essay revealing a stage in her quest to comprehend the Divine and her self. Barber's walk may be a precarious one but it's also an essential one, and I urge you to read her book and join her on her journey."

—DAVID JAUSS, author of Glossolalia: New and Selected Stories

"A walk of wisdom that bears the rich fruit of a life lived in forbearance and in careful balance between the push of culture and the pull of the desert. Although Barber rightly insists that proper names and grammar are necessary to capture the unique and brief moment of our lives, her words and stories point us to what only music and the gentleness of a desert wind can teach, that we are one, not only with each other but with a gracious planet."

—GEORGE B. HANDLEY, author of Home Waters: A Year of Recompenses on the Provo River

“Barber is a masterful evocator of landscape—whether it’s the dry, expansive desert landscape in which she was raised, the deep, expansive religious landscape she has tried to escape, or the ever-shifting sands of literature’s landscape. Each landscape, whether geographical, spiritual, or literary (and sometimes all three), calls to her as if they are burrowed in her bones. I found it remarkable to wander with her on her written quest for answers to all kinds of questions in this collection of essays.”

—TANYA MILLS, The Book Bungalow

From the Publisher

2022-02-19
Chronicle of an existential journey.

Essayist and fiction writer Barber was raised to believe that Mormonism was the only true religion, a belief that she began to question as she grew into adulthood. In a probing memoir comprised of 17 essays, most previously published, the author circles around her ongoing spiritual quest, recounting her childhood, her deep affinity for the Mojave Desert in which she spent her early years, her love of music (she is an accomplished pianist), two troubled marriages, and the search in which she is still engaged. At 21, she writes, “I danced myself into a Mormon temple marriage and made promises to help build the Kingdom of God here on earth. I gave birth to four sons whom I dressed each Sunday for church meetings.” After a few years, her husband lost his faith; her oldest son, a hemophiliac, died from a cerebral hemorrhage when he was 3; and her marriage unraveled. Barber was undone by sadness. “After years of dedication and every-meeting, every-church-job devotion to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints,” she writes, “I decided—through a strange, broken-and-knotted-and-broken-and-knotted-again thread of events including a looming divorce and an alienation from all that I once thought was ‘true,’—that it was necessary and compulsory to find my way to God by myself.” Raised in a community that imparted vivid images of the devil, heaven, and hell, she found herself longing for a connection to God that went beyond prayer. The book’s title reflects Barber’s sense of the precariousness of turning away from generations of her Mormon ancestors and leaving the embrace of a community and a religion. Freedom—of choice, of will—“is a lonely place sometimes,” Barber writes. “When there are no walls around you to hold you in place, no walls to keep you in your niche, you have nothing to tether you to the earth.”

Thoughtful meditations on the needs of the soul.

Kirkus Reviews