Sleep, Creep, Leap: The First Three Years of a Nebraska Garden
Peeling off sheets of skin from a sunburned back. Spending $1,000 at five nurseries in an afternoon. Raising 200 monarch butterflies. Hearing the wing beats of geese thirty feet overhead at sunset. How one piece of mulch can make all the difference. These are the stories of Benjamin Vogt’s 1,500 foot native prairie garden over the course of three years. After a small patio garden at his last home teases him into avid tinkering, the blank canvas of his new marriage and quarter acre lot prove to be a rich place full of delight, anguish, and rapture in all four seasons.
Full of lyrical, humorous, and botanical short essays, Sleep, Creep, Leap will leave you inspired to sit a while with your plants, noticing how the smallest events become the largest—and how the garden brings us down to earth so that we can come home to our lives.
112p + photographs
ISBN 9781463666590
Available in paperback from Amazon -- $5.99
and as an ebook for Kindle, Apple, Nook, Sony Reader -- $2.99
Read an excerpt or hear Benjamin talk about his garden and writing (scroll down to 10/10/12)
"Beautifully and thoughtfully crafted." -- Amy Stewart, Kirkus Reviews (link here for the full Q&A on Garden Rant)
"This is what a garden memoir should be. Vogt's vivid, detailed descriptions of the plants, insects, and birds that call his garden home are second only to his ability to show how transcendent gardening can be. Beautifully written, full of information about native plants and what it takes to create a thriving ecosystem amidst modern tract homes. Highly, highly recommended." -- Colleen Vanderlinden, author of Edible Gardening for the Midwest
"Excellent as far as it goes and I couldn't help wishing it went further. It sketches the history of making the garden and is very evocative about the garden itself--the author is a poet as well and it shows. Lively, engaging, personal and entertaining." -- Anne Wareham, author of The Bad Tempered Gardener
"Be careful if you're sipping anything while reading. My keyboard was a little endangered several times because I came close to spewing my tea all over it from laughing... Vogt can make even digging out a rock, a task which took several hours, into a wonderful story... His garden is a magical place full of wonder, and he will transport you to take his journey right by his side." -- Carole Brown, author of Ecosystem Gardening
Full of lyrical, humorous, and botanical short essays, Sleep, Creep, Leap will leave you inspired to sit a while with your plants, noticing how the smallest events become the largest—and how the garden brings us down to earth so that we can come home to our lives.
112p + photographs
ISBN 9781463666590
Available in paperback from Amazon -- $5.99
and as an ebook for Kindle, Apple, Nook, Sony Reader -- $2.99
Read an excerpt or hear Benjamin talk about his garden and writing (scroll down to 10/10/12)
"Beautifully and thoughtfully crafted." -- Amy Stewart, Kirkus Reviews (link here for the full Q&A on Garden Rant)
"This is what a garden memoir should be. Vogt's vivid, detailed descriptions of the plants, insects, and birds that call his garden home are second only to his ability to show how transcendent gardening can be. Beautifully written, full of information about native plants and what it takes to create a thriving ecosystem amidst modern tract homes. Highly, highly recommended." -- Colleen Vanderlinden, author of Edible Gardening for the Midwest
"Excellent as far as it goes and I couldn't help wishing it went further. It sketches the history of making the garden and is very evocative about the garden itself--the author is a poet as well and it shows. Lively, engaging, personal and entertaining." -- Anne Wareham, author of The Bad Tempered Gardener
"Be careful if you're sipping anything while reading. My keyboard was a little endangered several times because I came close to spewing my tea all over it from laughing... Vogt can make even digging out a rock, a task which took several hours, into a wonderful story... His garden is a magical place full of wonder, and he will transport you to take his journey right by his side." -- Carole Brown, author of Ecosystem Gardening
Morning Glory: A Story of Family & Culture in the Garden
When a quiet relationship between mother and son
meets in the garden, her past confronts his future.
247mp
75,000 words
unpublished
Read an excerpt
Read the essay "Across the Flats"
Turkey Red: Memoirs of Oklahoma
An estranged son of Oklahoma traces his Mennonite roots through the echo of his grandmother's diaries. The culture and history of Plains Indians, German settlers, and prairie wildlife lead the author into America’s frontier legacy—a wound left unhealed until family is discovered again through the vanishing landscapes around us.
75,000-90,000 words
manuscript in progress
Read an excerpt
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"When
we cleaned out my grandmother's house many years ago, she had labeled
all sorts of stuff--belt buckles, souvenir spoons, vases,
nicknacks--letting us know who gave them to her and when or
where. But reading a book today that she owned, she scribbled in a
margin where she was baptized, on the Washita River near Corn, where Cheyenne
chief Big Jake camped after allotment in 1892. This is also the same
river, further upstream, where Black Kettle's body was found after
Custer massacred that Cheyenne peace chief's village in 1868. My
grandmother was washed clean of her sins in a river filled with them."
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"Bison and bluestem are not the ghosts, but we today are the ghosts, searching for our place in the world, our meaning, still as hungry to conquer our fears and feed our desires in the landscapes around us. We are the mirages, the translucent apparitions longing for something we lost or never had, something we made vanish. We wander the earth condemned to find our souls in places that can no longer hold them. This is America on the Great Plains."
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