What does it mean to deeply love a home place that haunts us still? From Mark Twain to Grant Wood to Garrison Keillor, regionalists from the Gilded Age to the Digital Age have explored the American Gothic and the homegrown fatalism that flourish in many of the nation's most far-flung and forgotten places. The Haunt of Home introduces us to a cast of real-life Midwestern characters grappling with the Gothic in their own lives, from promising young professionals debating the perennial "Should I stay or should I go" dilemma, to recent emigres and entrepreneurs seeking personal reinvention, to faithful boosters determined to keep their communities alive despite the odds. In The Haunt of Home Zachary Michael Jack considers the many ways a region's abiding spirit shapes the ethos of a land and its people, offering portraits of others who, like himself, are determined to live out the unique promise and predicament of the Gothic.

Special Effects: Short Takes on Stylish Prose tackles the dilemma dedicated writers have faced for generations: how to make words on the page as compelling as images on the screen. Perfect for film buffs and TV enthusiasts who want to improve their writing, this innovative handbook reveals how cinematics can transform syntactics. Packed with 40 proven strategies designed to make serious and scholarly texts "read" as seamlessly and enjoyably as great movies, and accompanied by nearly 100 writing prompts perfect for use in college courses, writers' workshops, and workplace conference rooms, this one-of-a-kind guide shows how to make the daring leaps action heroes and dauntless authors make routine. What do James Bond flicks and Dante's Divine Comedy say about the art of attention-getting beginnings? What does a thorough credit roll have in common with effective scholarly citation? How can film set gaffers and film noir writers show us how to "light" our prose? How are passive verbs like guys on the lam in old black-and-white spy thrillers? How do Black Panther films and Wonder Woman comics inspire us to flip our scripts, diversifying the characters, real and imagined, about whom we write? Special Effects addresses writing's most persistent craft questions by boldly going where no prose style guide has gone before: to a front row seat at the movie theater.

"It is not uncommon for fathers and sons to come to blows if the two love one another." So says Dr. Harlan Cragg, an ageless, cantankerous golf pro determined to probe the differences between Robert and Jack Johannes, a loving father and son grown distant. When the pair answer the doctor's summons to the Evalon Island Golf Academy, they sign on to a series of mystical tests of their essential nature, their true mettle. Storm-stayed, the duo must confront golfing angels and demons while unearthing the startling legacies of golfers before them. Soon father and son have passed every exam save one: a final round on the famed Links of Evalon destined to change their partnership forever. A timeless, richly illustrated novel for golfers young and old, The Links of Evalon is as enlightening and mysterious as the game itself.

America's first Green president, Theodore Roosevelt's credentials as both naturalist and writer are as impressive as they are deep, emblematic of the twenty-sixth President's unprecedented breadth and energy. While Roosevelt authored policies that grew the public domain by a remarkable 230 million acres, he likewise penned over thirty-five books and an estimated 150,000 letters, many concerning the natural world. In between drafts both personal and political, scientific and sentimental, he quadrupled existing forest reserves while creating the nation's first fifty wildlife refuges and eighteen national monuments, among them the Grand Canyon, and five national parks, headlined by Yosemite. And Roosevelt was far more than a policy wonk and political do-gooder. John Muir, by his own admission, "fairly fell in love with him." John Burroughs wrote that Roosevelt "probably knew tenfold more natural history than all the presidents who preceded him." And the Smithsonian's Edmund Heller dubbed him the "foremost field naturalist of our time." In addition to creating more than 150,000 new acres of national forest, Roosevelt made a new vogue of sportsmanship, famously refusing to shoot a lame bear in Mississippi and inspiring, thereof, an American icon and ecological fetish all at once: the Teddy Bear. Indeed, Roosevelt's Green undertakings produced a truly living legacy-one whose everlasting qualities he took robust pleasure in. Naturalist William Finley once suggested to TR that the President's environmental prescience would serve as "one of the greatest memorials to his] farsightedness," to which Roosevelt replied, "Bully. I had rather have it than a hundred stone monuments." In fact, Roosevelt would have both-a lasting reputation for environmental protection and timeless stone monuments at Mount Rushmore and elsewhere built to honor his dramatic public policy initiatives. This book will be a critical resource for all those in American history (particularly presidential history), environmental history, environmental studies, nature studies, place studies, Agrarian studies, conservation studies, fish and wildlife biology/management, and ecology.

For fourteen years during the golden age of sports, Paul Gallico was one of America's ace sportswriters. He saw them all--the stars and the hams, the immortals and the phonies in boxing, wrestling, baseball, football, golf, tennis, and every other field of muscular endeavor in which men and women try to break hearts and necks for cash or glory. Then in 1937, at the height of his game (and the height of the payroll), Gallico suddenly and famously called it quits and left the "New York Daily News." But before he departed the world of sports, he left his legions of fans one last hurrah: a collection of his best sports essays called, appropriately, "Farewell to Sport."
Here, in twenty-six chapters, every major and minor sport is covered. Included are sketches of Babe Ruth, Jack Dempsey, Gene Tunney, Tex Rickard, and Jack Sharkey, written in an accessible, conversational style. Often credited with creating "participatory journalism," Gallico would play golf with Bobby Jones, catch Major League pitcher Dizzy Dean's fastball, swim with Johnny Weissmuller, play tennis with Helen Wills, catch passes from quarterback Benny Friedman, and box with Jack Dempsey (he lasted one minute, thirty-seven seconds).

Sometime love interests, confidants, and intellectual sparring partners, Professor of Leisure Studies Jay Golding and Professor of Anthropology Betsy McPherson have their secure, tenured worlds turned upside down by a visiting professor and an unlikely murder on the pastoral grounds of the thoroughly Scottish, utterly midwestern Forestland College. Thrust into the role of gumshoes in the weeks before graduation, Golding and McPherson race against Assistant Sheriff's Deputy Doreen Simon and Texas private investigator T. W. Polk to crack the case as murders mount and year-end ceremonies loom. The wonderfully twisted mystery that ensues pits professor against professor and student against student, exposing the wooded Forestland campus to the harsh light of the violent world around it.

Editor Zachary Michael Jack joins Agatha Award-nominated mystery writers Shirley Damsgaard and Denise Swanson with a host of North Central College notables including Jane Barnes, Rene? Smith Besel, Judith Brodhead, Thomas Cavenagh, Julia Cianci, Jean Clifton, Kendra Hunter, Gary Ireland, Ann Keating, Herb Nadelhoffer, Francine Navakas, Jim Owczarski, Richard Paine, Jonathan Pickering, Jana Tropper, and Ryan Williams in "Student Body," a mayhem-filled, charity-designated collaborative mystery for all who ever whistled past the hallowed, haunted grounds of campus.

Love of the Land: Essential Farm and Conservation Readings from an American Golden Age, 1880-1920 features an unprecedented collection of historical, interdisciplinary essays that reconstruct for the contemporary reader the dynamic dialogue between agriculturist and ecologist. Reflecting the contemporary convergence of agricultural and environmental histories into a larger, land-centered narrative, the highly readable essays in this nearly five-hundred-page anthology present the pioneering words of the academics and agriculturalists, capitalists and conservationists, ecologists and environmentalists, and policymakers and politicos who labored to bring the disparate fields of conservation and agriculture into organic whole. Love of the Land offers a comprehensive, groundbreaking treatment of ecological themes ideal for students and researchers of agricultural and environmental thought. "Zachary Jack's Love of the Land fills a need. It provides a wide-angle view of early U.S. agricultural and conservation thought, which were major influences on both the economy and ethic of this developing country. Especially impressive are the encompassing array of writers - farm, conservation, political, and literary figures; the selected excerpts - each with a message that resounds; and finally the book's preface - worth reading again after finishing the book's last page." Duane Acker, former Assistant Secretary for science and education, U.S. Department of Agriculture and President Emeritus, Kansas State University "This anthology ambitiously takes you on a mind-stretching adventure into our national past, and our future. It offers, actually, an interdisciplinary short course - a compact curriculum - about the dynamics and varied dimensions of rural development and conservation in America... You may appreciate knowing from the start that you have not been dumped on your own into a loose collection of readings. You realize you are led by a compiler who cares and knows much about this subject, ranged widely and thoughtfully in choosing the readings, adds much to them and is leading you helpfully through them." James F. Evans, Professor Emeritus, Agricultural Communications and Journalism, University of Illinois

In his eagerly awaited poetic debut, Zachary Michael Jack takes his readers on mind-bending, mytho-poetic travels from modern-day rural Mexico to the American Great Plains of the early century and back again. Employing an unlikely list of dramatis personae ranging from Tom Selleck to Nikita Krushchev, Jack's many-voiced story-in-poems follows his narrator's solitary stay in a Mexican mission and the heart-rending dialogue with Bird-an anthropomorphized alter-ego and trickster figure-that ensues. By turns, sad, funny, and wise, The Inanity of Music and Wings is both inimitable and delightfully uncanny-a wonderbeast of a collection part American Gothic, part Don Quixote, and wholly original. ~~~~~~Bio: Zachary Michael Jack is the author of the fine arts poetry chapbook The Story of Grief and the editor of two previous essay collections: Black Earth and Ivory Tower: New American Essays from Farm and Classroom and The Furrow and Us. His poetry has earned him the Prentice Hall Poetry Prize, a nomination for a Pushcart (Best of the Small Presses) Prize, and writing residencies at New York's prestigious Blue Mountain Center and Ireland's Tyrone Guthrie Centre, among others. A native of Iowa, where his family has farmed since before the Civil War, Jack is an assistant professor of English at North Central College in Naperville, Illinois and the director-founder of Iowa School of Lost Arts for children.

In February 1913, firebrand activist "General" Rosalie Gardiner Jones mustered an army of equal rights activists and women demanding the right to vote and marched 250 miles from Manhattan to Washington, DC, in what was believed to be the longest dedicated women's rights march in American history. Along the way, Rosalie's army overcame violence and intimidation, its every step documented by a national press corps. The story of this indomitable woman shows a forgotten piece of the early women's rights movement in the United States. This first-ever book-length biography of Jones follows her march and the many obstacles she and her compatriots overcame in their campaign for women's right to vote. In the years after her famous hike, Jones continued to advocate for women's rights and nonviolent protest, authored an important book on economics and international peace, and ran for Congress. Sheearned a law degree, a PhD, and a reputation as a fierce defender of the dispossessed and the downtrodden.

Long before journalist George Plimpton donned shoulder pads for Paper Lion, sportswriters were stepping onto the field, arena, track and ring. This first-of-its-kind anthology of participatory sports writing collects 38 essays from the Gilded and Golden Age greats. Charles Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson, Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, Frances Elizabeth Willard, John Muir, Jack London, Zane Grey, Ernest Hemingway, Ring Lardner, Bill Tilden, Bobby Jones, Helen Mills, Paul Gallico, and many more prowled America's sporting grounds with pen in hand in a time when, as Grantland Rice put it, 'a flame...lit up the sporting skies and covered the world'.

"Nature-study not only educates, but it educates nature-ward; and nature is ever our companion, whether we will or no. Even though we are determined to shut ourselves in an office, nature sends her messengers. The light, the dark, the moon, the cloud, the rain, the wind, the falling leaf, the fly, the bouquet, the bird, the cockroach-they are all ours. If one is to be happy, he must be in sympathy with common things. He must live in harmony with his environment. One cannot be happy yonder nor tomorrow: he is happy here and now, or never. Our stock of knowledge of common things should be great. Few of us can travel. We must know the things at home."-from "The Meaning of the Nature-study Movement" "To feel that one is a useful and cooperating part in nature is to give one kinship, and to open the mind to the great resources and the high enthusiasms. Here arise the fundamental common relations. Here arise also the great emotions and conceptions of sublimity and grandeur, of majesty and awe, the uplift of vast desires-when one contemplates the earth and the universe and desires to take them into the soul and to express oneself in their terms; and here also the responsible practices of life take root."-from "The Holy Earth" Before Wendell Berry and Aldo Leopold, there was the horticulturalist and botanist Liberty Hyde Bailey (1858-1954). For Wendell Berry, Bailey was a revelation, a symbol of the nature-minded agrarianism Berry himself popularized. For Aldo Leopold, Bailey offered a model of the scholar-essayist-naturalist. In his revolutionary work of eco-theology, The Holy Earth, Bailey challenged the anthropomorphism-the people-centeredness-of a vulnerable world. A trained scientist writing in the lyrical tradition of Emerson, Burroughs, and Muir, Bailey offered the twentieth century its first exquisitely interdisciplinary biocentric worldview; this Michigan farmer's son defined the intellectual and spiritual foundations of what would become the environmental movement. For nearly a half century, Bailey dominated matters agricultural, environmental, and scientific in the United States. He worked both to improve the lives of rural folk and to preserve the land from which they earned their livelihood. Along the way, he popularized nature study in U.S. classrooms, lobbied successfully for women's rights on and off the farm, and bulwarked Teddy Roosevelt's pioneering conservationism. Here for the first time is an anthology of Bailey's most important writings suitable for the general and scholarly reader alike. Carefully selected and annotated by Zachary Michael Jack, this book offers a comprehensive introduction to Bailey's celebrated and revolutionary thinking on the urgent environmental, agrarian, educational, and ecospiritual dilemmas of his day and our own. Culled from ten of Bailey's most influential works, these lyrical selections highlight Bailey's contributions to the nature-study and the Country Life movements. Published on the one-hundredth anniversary of Bailey's groundbreaking report on behalf of the Country Life Commission, Liberty Hyde Bailey: Essential Agrarian and Environmental Writings will inspire a new generation of nature writers, environmentalists, and those who share with Bailey a profound understanding of the elegance and power of the natural world and humanity's place within it.

Spice and herb plants do not require large land areas for profitable cultivation and can also be gathered from the wild. In the case of cultivation, growing can be achieved without excessive investments as many spice and herb plants can be produced with minimal inputs of cash, labor and land. They are often an ideal crop to be integrated into small-scale farming systems and are suitable for smaller garden production.

This publication aims to create awareness about the potential opportunities and advantages for spices and herbs as a viable diversification enterprise to enhance the livelihoods of small-scale farmers. The focus is on spice and herb enterprises being integrated into small-scale farming systems, alongside traditional crops and livestock, and/or harvested from wild plants. Opportunities for value addition are also highlighted.

"Nature-study not only educates, but it educates nature-ward; and nature is ever our companion, whether we will or no. Even though we are determined to shut ourselves in an office, nature sends her messengers. The light, the dark, the moon, the cloud, the rain, the wind, the falling leaf, the fly, the bouquet, the bird, the cockroach-they are all ours. If one is to be happy, he must be in sympathy with common things. He must live in harmony with his environment. One cannot be happy yonder nor tomorrow: he is happy here and now, or never. Our stock of knowledge of common things should be great. Few of us can travel. We must know the things at home." from "The Meaning of the Nature-study Movement"

"To feel that one is a useful and cooperating part in nature is to give one kinship, and to open the mind to the great resources and the high enthusiasms. Here arise the fundamental common relations. Here arise also the great emotions and conceptions of sublimity and grandeur, of majesty and awe, the uplift of vast desires when one contemplates the earth and the universe and desires to take them into the soul and to express oneself in their terms; and here also the responsible practices of life take root." from "The Holy Earth"

Before Wendell Berry and Aldo Leopold, there was the horticulturalist and botanist Liberty Hyde Bailey (1858 1954). For Wendell Berry, Bailey was a revelation, a symbol of the nature-minded agrarianism Berry himself popularized. For Aldo Leopold, Bailey offered a model of the scholar-essayist-naturalist. In his revolutionary work of eco-theology, The Holy Earth, Bailey challenged the anthropomorphism the people-centeredness of a vulnerable world.

A trained scientist writing in the lyrical tradition of Emerson, Burroughs, and Muir, Bailey offered the twentieth century its first exquisitely interdisciplinary biocentric worldview; this Michigan farmer's son defined the intellectual and spiritual foundations of what would become the environmental movement. For nearly a half century, Bailey dominated matters agricultural, environmental, and scientific in the United States. He worked both to improve the lives of rural folk and to preserve the land from which they earned their livelihood. Along the way, he popularized nature study in U.S. classrooms, lobbied successfully for women's rights on and off the farm, and bulwarked Teddy Roosevelt's pioneering conservationism.

Here for the first time is an anthology of Bailey's most important writings suitable for the general and scholarly reader alike. Carefully selected and annotated by Zachary Michael Jack, this book offers a comprehensive introduction to Bailey's celebrated and revolutionary thinking on the urgent environmental, agrarian, educational, and ecospiritual dilemmas of his day and our own. Culled from ten of Bailey's most influential works, these lyrical selections highlight Bailey's contributions to the nature-study and the Country Life movements.

Published on the one-hundredth anniversary of Bailey's groundbreaking report on behalf of the Country Life Commission, Liberty Hyde Bailey: Essential Agrarian and Environmental Writings will inspire a new generation of nature writers, environmentalists, and those who share with Bailey a profound understanding of the elegance and power of the natural world and humanity's place within it."

Jay G. Sigmund stands as America's most forgotten Regionalist writers of the Jazz Age. Championed by Carl Sandburg, Sherwood Anderson, and Grant Wood, the Iowa writer/insurance man helped make his home state the epicenter of a national Regionalist Movement. The literary stir Sigmund created caused even popular Boston-based critic E. J. O'Brien to declare Iowa as America's new literary center and to choose six of Sigmund's short stories among the best of 1930. From 1921 to 1937, the late-blooming, dark-horse Sigmund shocked East Coast literati with glowing New York Times reviews while delighting tens of thousands of readers each week with down-to-earth verse in the biggest and best Midwestern dailies. The man Ilya Tolstoy hailed as "an American Chekhov and Maupassant," published over 1200 poems, 125 short stories, and over 25 plays while simultaneously working full-time as an insurance executive. Editor Zachary Michael Jack, himself a celebrated Iowa poet, reintroduces contemporary agrarian writers, poets of place, and eco-critics to Sigmund's essential oeuvre in a jam-packed collection featuring eight Sigmund short stories, more than fifty poems, and a complete one-act play.

First published in 1946, Walter Thomas Jack's classic book of agricultural essays, The Furrow and Us, intensified the till versus no-till debate, called by Time magazine "the hottest farming argument since the tractor first challenged the horse." Hailed as "the answer" to Edward Faulkner's Plowman's Folly, Jack's cautionary memoir of agricultural progress between world wars treats the soil's intimate needs, its "hidden hungers," with the lyricism and love characteristic of an Iowa Quaker, schoolteacher, and conservation farmer. Released here in a sixtieth anniversary edition and updated and introduced by Walter Jack's great-grandson Zachary, this new edition serves as a timely call to steward the good soils that sustain us.

It was "scary," Jack Nicklaus said of Pebble Beach, and gave him nightmares so acute he famously woke his wife on the eve of his 1972 U.S. Open victory totally spooked. "It's not a golf course," sportswriter Jim Murray wrote, "it's a hellship." Golf writer Dan Jenkins once joked that the famed venue of the Bing Crosby National Pro-Am should be dubbed "Double Bogey-by-the-Sea." A one-time failed Division One golf walk-on, Zachary Michael Jack opts to stare down an early midlife crisis by chronicling a U.S. Open year spent at Pebble Beach, object of his ailing father's fantasies and site of the nation's number one public course and its fairy-tale host town, Carmel-by-the-Sea, California. There, along the blue Pacific, he traces the colorful, capricious, and comical world of golf on the Monterey Peninsula as never before via interviews with legends of the game Johnny Miller, Gary Player, and Tom Watson; with today's brightest stars-Padraig Harrington, Phil Mickelson, and Bubba Watson; and with some of its most famous celebrity linksters-actor Bill Murray, Olympic soccer star Brandi Chastain, and billionaire entrepreneur Charles Schwab. Conducting more than one hundred interviews, Jack ranges far and wide to get the scoop, talking golfing haunts with bestselling golf novelist Michael Murphy; teeing up with members of a Carmel-based worldwide golfing society devoted to mystical play; learning to play Pebble at the knee of one of the Top 50 Golf Teachers in America and with a Carmel-based journeyman pro described as "a golf savant"; and raising a cup with a lifelong Pebble Beach resident and caddy who, unbeknownst to the hackers he shepherds, is a Hall of Fame golfer. By turns hilarious, haunting, and historic, Let There Be Pebble reveals the utter uniqueness-the people, the rich history, the unforgettable setting and sporting culture-of this one-of-a-kind golfing cathedral.

Back in print for the first time in over a century, the real heart and soul of the eldest Henry Wallace is revealed in his open letters to America's farm families. These homespun, secular epistles show that Wallace never lost sight of his roots even as he hobnobbed with U.S. Presidents from Teddy Roosevelt to Woodrow Wilson, anchored the prestigious Country Life Commission, and edited the most famous agricultural magazine of its day, Wallaces' Farmer. Who better to yoke the sacred, agrarian arts of stewardship, husbandry, and parenting than writer-philosopher-farmer-conservationist-minister-educator-public benefactor extraordinaire Uncle Henry Wallace, the man who planted the seeds of honorable public service in his own world-famous son and grandson, Secretary of Agriculture Henry C. Wallace and Vice President and Presidential candidate Henry A. Wallace, respectively. Culled from more than a half dozen volumes of Wallace's writing for farm families, Uncle Henry Wallace: Letters to Farm Families captures the spirit of a man journalist Ray Stannard Baker called "a sort of oracle for advice on everything from the best ways of feeding calves to bringing up boys." Compiled and introduced by fourth-generation Iowa farmer's son Zachary Michael Jack, himself the great-grandson of famed agricultural writer Walter Thomas Jack, these timeless, down-to-earth missives that are meant to be shared, then as now, between farm-loving grandparents and grandchildren, parents and children, and teachers and students of all ages.