Roughly twenty years ago I tripped over this book on the floor of Bunch of Grapes; a shop on the vineyard. Later that night I succumbed to the most nurturing, nourishingly magical idea of moving to the farthest corner of the country, getting lost in a forest dripping with moss and being adopted by the most emotionally intelligent, nonverbal furry primates man has yet to prove the existence of: Bigfoot.

Ten years ago I did move out west. The high desert doesn’t drip with moss but is instead marked by wildfires, lodgepole pine, tumbleweeds, try-hard obscurity and one of the highest suicide rates in the country. It’s pretty, on the surface. Ridiculously beautiful in fact. It’s so seductively gorgeous it’s easy to forget just how isolated you are, especially if you can’t afford tire chains or self-abandonment.

How many times must we reclaim and reinvent ourselves in a lifetime until we arrive at whoever or wherever we’re meant to be? Why must the lessons come to us through fairy tales we stumble over and through, repeatedly, until we finally decode the seemingly endless riddles from the universe? Why aren’t we simply born with a single page of double spaced, times new Roman font telling us the exact steps we each need to personally take to hasten humanity towards collective peace, instead of being given free and disastrous will?

I have no idea but I’m glad Molly wrote this book and I’ve gotten to live on the border between sanity and wilderness, staring into the faces of countless real and imagined beasts, discovering again and again, who we are. ~