Dear Park Ranger

Essays on Manhood, Restlessness, and the Geography of Hope

2024 Indiana Authors Awards, Debut Shortlist

2024 Nautilus Book Awards, Silver Winner, Memoir & Personal Journey / Essays

2023 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Awards, Finalist, Travel and Essays

Jeff Darren Muse is a fatherless, childless Hoosier who wouldn’t and couldn’t stay put. Part Generation X travelogue, part love letter, part reflection on White male identity, Dear Park Ranger searches for purpose, companionship, a lost father, and home. Muse must break trail to find his way. From the farms and football fields of central Indiana, to snowy West Coast wildlands, from desert canyons, to meandering rivers, to a city built by slavery, he interrogates his younger years shaped by insecurity and wanderlust, as well as later choices such as marrying “Ranger Paula” and pursuing a tree hugger’s career. At turns humorous and self-deprecating, redemptive and resolute, this is one man’s stirring gut check through inner and outer terrain.

“An evocative consideration of the dualities of beauty and pain found both in nature and ourselves.” - Kirkus Reviews

“[T]his whole book is a lesson in leaning in—into the natural world, yes, but also into what’s going on in our own hearts as we figure out who we want to be in this world, how we want to love, and what we want to leave behind.” - River Teeth: A Journal of Nonfiction Narrative

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Dear Park Ranger is now available through independent booksellers! Check out Bookshop.org to purchase it online through your favorite store or to locate one close to you.

Likewise, visit Wayfarer Books, Dear Park Ranger’s independent publisher, which explores “the intersection of the natural landscape and the interior landscape.”

And don’t forget Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Goodreads, which offer numerous ratings and written reviews in addition to what appears on Kirkus Reviews and River Teeth.

Trade Paperback 978-1-956368-52-9

eBook 978-1-956368-36-9

Advance praise:

“Muse is my kind of writer. A wanderer, a searcher, a Southern Western Hoosier, a son of a difficult father, and a displaced man with a deep sense of place.”

- David Gessner, author of All the Wild That Remains

“Muse contemplates the widest breadth of passions … place and race, wildness and domesticity, depression and elation. These essays are graceful and full of grace, pure pleasure to read.”

- Ana Maria Spagna, author of Uplake: Restless Essays of Coming and Going

“Love, loss, landscape, regret, forgiveness, and the vagaries of time—Muse reckons with it all here, in essays that make you want to hit the trail with someone you cherish.”

- Joe Wilkins, author of Fall Back Down When I Die

Read more praise for Dear Park Ranger, excerpts, or a bio for Jeff Darren Muse.