PraISE

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

“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

When publishing a book, authors often ask their peers to read the manuscript and consider writing an endorsement. Many thanks to all who helped launch Dear Park Ranger.

Advance praise:

“Muse is a ranger, and these essays range, span, and wander, considering landscape, time and identity as they go. He may be restless, childless, fatherless, but he is not rootless, and this brave book helps to root him, anchor him. As it was for the great writers who are his heroes, essaying is the means by which Muse gathers and ponders the things that make him himself. That make us ourselves.”

- Bob Cowser Jr., coeditor of The Edinburgh Companion to the Essay and author of Green Fields, winner of the Best Memoir Award from the Adirondack Center for Writing

“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. His essays are an attempt to ground truth experience, to present life not in theory but in its messy complexity. Importantly, he follows his own advice to tree huggers—go outside!—and from his ramblings he has brought back this gift for us.”

- David Gessner, author of All the Wild That Remains: Edward Abbey, Wallace Stegner, and the American West, a New York Times Best Seller and a Kirkus Best Book

“Muse has given us a fantastic book—moving, humble, thought-provoking, and humorous. He admits to writing about his own wants and fears but strives for the reader to see herself. He accomplishes just that in Dear Park Ranger by offering exactly what he looks for in an essay: an intimate voice, an honest soul, and, most importantly, ‘a wandering, wondering mind.’ I was swept along with Muse’s interrogation of memories and meanings.”

- Iris Graville, author of Hiking Naked: A Quaker Woman’s Search for Balance, winner of the Nautilus Book Award

“Dear Park Ranger is a testimony, both evocative and comforting. A self-identified ‘tree hugger,’ Muse explores the joys and challenges of not only working as an environmental educator and historical interpreter, but also sustaining his marriage. He likewise investigates manhood—its stereotype versus reality—while navigating the unpredictable pain of being an alcoholic’s son. The title essay, which contemplates the park ranger life, offers one of the most beautiful metaphors for love I’ve ever read.”

- Kip Robinson Greenthal, author of Shoal Water, winner of the Nautilus Book Award

“These essays are deeply resonant and restless, roaming over varied geographies and eras, searching inward and outward to trace Muse’s roots and the threads of their impact on his marriage and identity. He mulls over the nature of change itself, writing, ‘A real man, I know now, stretches.’ Gorgeous sentences add up here to more than the sum of their parts, creating a whole that will linger for lucky readers.”

- Sonya Huber, author of Pain Woman Takes Your Keys, winner of the Independent Voice Award from the Independent Book Publishers Association

“In a marketplace obsessed with writers under thirty, here’s a phenom over fifty. Not the fireweed flashing after the clearcut, not the ephemeral glacier lily, Muse is a sturdy cedar gnarling into aged beauty. In this wondrous book you’ll come upon an old friend—honest and true, not unhurt, hopelessly in love with the land.”

- Ted O’Connell, winner of the Tobias Wolff Award in Fiction and author of K: A Novel

“In these finely crafted essays, Muse braids together two love stories—one, his love for America’s wildlands, the mountains, forests, and rivers not yet devastated by human appetites; the other, his love for his wife, whose career as a park ranger carries them from place to place. With each move, Muse must reinvent himself, reconceiving his identity. Anyone who has searched for meaning in an uprooted life, weathered the storms of a long marriage, or rejoiced in untamed nature, will recognize a kindred soul.”

- Scott Russell Sanders, author of The Way of Imagination and winner of the Lannan Literary Award and John Burroughs Essay Award

“In his heart and on the page, Muse contemplates the widest breadth of passions, eliding divisions too familiar in much traditional nature writing. He artfully and honestly considers 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 and winner of the River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Prize

“Underlying this collection of introspective essays centering on men is the respect and honor Muse bestows upon his single mother. For Muse, loving the land was the easy part of growing up. It was his mother’s steadfast belief in him that gave him the strength to survive the rest, while her love fostered in him the ability to love his dear park ranger so deeply. It is a pleasure to read this quiet tribute to strong women.” 

- Kathryn Wilder, author of Desert Chrome: Water, a Woman, and Wild Horses in the West, winner of the Colorado Book Award in Creative Nonfiction

“To the great list of wondering, wandering, wide- and clear-eyed American writer/naturalists, go ahead and add the name Jeff Darren Muse. 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, winner of the High Plains Book Award

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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.

Read excerpts from the book or a bio for Jeff Darren Muse.