Uplake: Restless Essays of Coming and Going

by Ana Maria Spagna

For many years, Ana Maria Spagna has stayed put, mostly, in a small mountain valley at the head of a glacier-carved lake. You're so lucky to live there, people say. She is lucky. But she is also restless. In Uplake she takes road trips, flies to distant cities, fantasizes about other people's lives, and then returns home again to muse on rootedness, yearning, commitment, ambition, wonder, and love. These engaging, reflective essays celebrate the richness of it winter floods and summer fires, the roar of a chainsaw and a fiddle in the wilderness, long hikes and open-water swims, an injured bear, a lost wedding ring, and a tree in the middle of a river. Uplake reminds us to love what we have while encouraging us to still imagine what we want.

Genres: Essays, Nonfiction, Nature, Memoir

240 pages, Paperback

First published February 15, 2018

About the author

Ana Maria Spagna is the author of nine books including PUSHED: Miners, a Merchant and (Maybe) a Massacre forthcoming from Torrey House Press, UPLAKE: Restless Essays of Coming and Going and the poetry chapbook, MILE MARKER SIX, as well as THE LUCKIEST SCAR ON EARTH, a novel about Charlotte, a 14-year old snowboarder. Previous books include RECLAIMERS, stories of indigenous people reclaiming sacred land and water, the memoir/history TEST RIDE ON THE SUNNYLAND BUS: A Daughter’s Civil Rights Journey, winner of the River Teeth literary nonfiction prize, and two previous collections of essays, POTLUCK, finalist for the Washington State Book Award, and NOW GO HOME, a Seattle Times Best Book of 2004.

Reviews

[Robyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you’ve ever felt the itch to pick up and move, to only end up shaking your head, smiling, and staying right where you are, you’ll enjoy this book.

You’re so lucky to live there, people say. I am lucky. But I am also restless. It’s easy to get feeling stuck, oppressed, not just by the close valley walls or the sunless days of winter or even the lack of a grocery store or a library or the chance, ever, for anonymity, but by the stuckness itself. So I fly away. I drive long highway miles. I fantasize about moving. And though my case may be extreme, I suspect I’m not alone in this, p.4.

This collection of nineteen essays, by Ana Maria Spagna, delves into the geography of her rural, North Cascade mountain valley home and its influence on her life.

What Dazzled: Spagna’s rich descriptions will transport you to fallen trees across mountain trails, fighting and preparing for fires in the WUI, to the frigid waters of a mountain lake. Each essay raises thoughtful questions about about home and who we are. In “Post-Strayed” we see Spagna struggle with the idea of authenticity and ambition. In “The Tree in the River” the landscape offers reflection on resilience and in “The Injured Bear” compassion.

What Fizzled: I struggled connecting to Spagna’s style in the first couple of essays. The writing flows in a conversational nature, where tangents and references offer depth, but were distracting. Once I slowed down and got out of my way, it was like walking the trails with nowhere pressing to go. A nice respite from the hustle bustle of my world.

Jots and Thoughts: Whenever I travel out of state to some place with more nature than people, usually a National Park, I make one essential, planned stop. An independent bookstore. I don’t browse the new books or staff picks. I go straight to the “local authors” shelves. There I search for a book of short stories, poems, or essays that will give me an insiders perspective of the area I’m only going to be stepping into for a brief period time. On my recent trip to Olympic National Park in Washington, I stopped off in Seattle and made my way to Elliott Bay Book Company. That’s where I found Uplake. Spagna is talking about eastern Washington instead of my western destination, but Stehekin was as close as I could get from the bookstore. This is one of my travel rituals that I absolutely love. Otherwise, I doubt I would have found Spagna’s and other various authors/locations' words.

[Stephany Wilkes · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a deeply thoughtful, quietly provocative, lovely book. It *is* restless, and I like that. Spagna situates her stories and reflection in the in-between spaces, in zones of movement: trails while hiking or running, airports while flying, water while swimming, the places we inhabit sometimes, but not all of the time - places we cannot inhabit, all of the time. There is magic in that fact, and that magic shines in each and every essay.

And what relief these essays bring.

We readers (or most publishers, at least) reflect and reinforce our industrial cultural tendency toward the specific, peddling a sort of narrative Taylorism: You are, primarily, one thing (usually your job). In terms of place, for example, we see this in memoir formats of "I left the city/starting point and moved to a farm/destination point. Hijinks ensue, but I choose the farm. Here I shall stay." They've found their spot. The End.

And sure, the idea of a singular "right spot" is endlessly appealing. It implies, first, that such even exists and, second of all, that we can find it. The search will be over and, mercifully, the migratory, transitory itch will be scratched. I envy (as Spagna notes) Thoreau, his deep knowledge of a small space, likewise all First Nations people who knew what must have been everything about the place where I now live, for hundreds of years, and Wendell Berry, people so tied to and intimate with one place.

Spagna could have given us that book: She left So Cal and moved to the deep woods and high mountains of the Pacific Northwest, and...that's where the story ends right? No, not for her, at least, so that's not the book she wrote, lucky for us. This book is a siren song for folks who may feel a bit guilty about not having found just one spot, who feel that most any spot could be "our" spot, for a time, who have insatiable curiosity and fall at least a little bit in love with every place and people, and all the places and people in between.

But not just those places, either. Spagna also captures the sense of instability and movement about our chosen and "at least for now" places: floods, wildfires, institutions, jobs and our own interests. The very idea of any forever place is, now more than ever, a chimera. So how do we think and talk about that? We start with this book.

And finally: "spine walnut."

[Claire · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very few people these days live in communities inaccessible by roads, but such is the case with the author of this fascinating collection of essays. In these pages, the North Cascade Mountains and the Stehekin community that clings tentatively to its wilderness margins play starring roles. Ana Maria Spagna's unique vantage point, dipping in and out of mainstream America as she travels between civilization and her remote Stehekin home, brings into keen focus the complications and abundance in our everyday lives. She guides the reader deftly beside the realities and travails of forest fires and raging rivers. Through the tricky terrain of civil rights, gay marriage, and climate change. Past injured bears, intrepid housecats, and a newborn pack of coyote pups. Over intractable illness, plenty and poverty, and the indomitable spirits of record-breakers and explorers. Beautifully written, in the tradition of Barbara Kingsolver, Scott Russell Sanders and Brian Doyle but with a voice all her own, Spagna has created a kind of modern American ballad. Each individual piece stands on its own, but as a whole, these essays expand to the nth power, navigating wilderness and civilization, earth and sky, and cynicism and the creative muse, all with exceptional humanity and grace.

[Tory · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow! I loved this book. Spagna has an easily relatable writing style. Truth be told, however, I never have read a collection of essays before this one. This collection focuses on the juxtaposition of loving where you are (home, for her in Stehekin, North Cascades National Park, Washington), while at the same time being restless and wanting to explore and experience elsewhere. Spagna grapples with some of the current issues of our times without sounding preachy or judgmental. I want to sit by the fire with her and a group of friends, with a bottle of wine, to discuss the issues she touches on.

[Lea · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don’t know what I was expecting but it wasn’t to love it so much. I savored it and didn’t want it to end. The essays are so relatable, “that’s right, that’s right, I’ve been there , too”.
She describes a place, an experience so well that I felt there. Her experiences were relatable to my own, I felt connected that way.

[Shari · Rating 5 out of 5]

I bought this essay collection as a birthday present to myself months ago when I saw Brian Doyle had written a blurb for it. I read it slowly, picking it up and reading an essay here and there over the course of several months. Each time I returned to it, I felt the deep pleasure of sinking into a familiar place -- at the hands of a writer who writes beautifully about place and what it means to be alive in the world, even as it changes.

[Chris LaTray · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’ve yet to read a book by Ana Maria Spagna that I didn’t absolutely love. Uplake is no exception. I aspire to the clarity and depth of thought in my work that she achieves in hers, in all her sharing of love and contradictions. So inspiring, and so wonderful.

[Emma Struebing]

This was made extra special because I was gifted this by a dear friend, and I also had a good time with her meditations on a corner of the world I hold dear and the tensions of living in the world we do.

[Carol Ann · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful, meditative essays worth reading.

[Eldan Goldenberg · Rating 4 out of 5]

I appreciated this window into a lifestyle I sometimes fantasize about but don't really think is for me. It's a very wide-ranging collection of essays, in a nice steady voice.

[Tara · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love Ana Maria Spagna's writing. Clear-eyed and lyrical, she addresses difficult issues with respect for their complexity, in prose that's never tangled up in itself and never talks down. Uplake is a joy to read - start to finish, or pack it with you and savor individual essays in those 20-minute stretches I like to think of as free reading time: waiting for an appointment, waiting for the bus, that half an hour between finishing a project and heading out the door, etc.

Many of these essays address painful topics - wildfires, climate change, colonization, homophobia - but this isn't a doom-and-gloom book. It celebrates resilience and joy; it acknowledges fears and doubts and uncertainties with grace. It's a truly fine companion for the journey we're all on.

[Riley · Rating 3 out of 5]

While I enjoyed the essays because of her writing and the setting, it didn't fulfill the promise of the struggle between restlessness and contentment that read me to pick up the book in the first place. Really, I probably just had false expectations coming into this collection. She seems fairly well settled in the valley and while there are dalliances off to other places and other lives, they aren't as numerous as the daily examinations close to home. Despite not getting what I expected, there were a few essays where I had to stop where I was, close the book, and reflect on the words or my life or the play between nature and civilization. That's really all one can ask for.

[Sandra · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ana Maria's voice speaks to me so clearly. I feel inspired, comforted, amused, and heard when I read her essays in this book. Stehekin is a place that feels like home to me, though I've only had one visit (so far). Each essay speaks to some different part of me and helps to identify that restlessness and help to just allow it, even celebrate it. And, I just can't seem to stop buying copies for the different, disparate people in my life because one essay or another seems to speak to them, too.

Now, one to the rest of her books because I've obviously been missing out.

[Connie Connally · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a beautifully written set of essays. The author lives in a remote mountainous area, so when I opened the book I expected a focus on nature. Certainly there was some of that, but the essays were actually very personal, dealing with inner growth, frustration, pain and love. The prose style is strong and lean, even humorous in places, and above all, warm and human. Reflections on chain saws, asthma, death of a soldier . . . This book gets you thinking about our limitations and gifts.

[Mariah · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautifully-written, musical collection of little windows into the life a wonderfully stubborn person. Spagna writes about relatable and extraordinary aspects of living in a rural area, and the dreams/responsibilities that keep her there. While deeply personal, the essays in this book don’t drown the reader in pastoral musings or bury them in the author’s emotions. A beautiful collage to read in snippets or all at once, as life allows.

[Judy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am always intrigued by Spagna's writing. She is cryptic and realistic, always willing to question her observations and admit her own failings. She has spent her adult life in Stehekin, at the dead-end of Lake Chelan, but at the same time a often reluctant traveler. These essays cover considerable territory; most published previously in other media.

[Laura Pritchett · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love all Ana Maria Spagna's work ... and this is no exception. This new collection is fantastic. Frankly, I love what Brian Doyle has to say about Spagna on the back cover: "Rarely can you say with a shard of truth that you remember the first time a writer's work hit you in the head and the heart with a nearly audible slap, but I remember the first time I read a passage from Ana Maria..." Yup.

[Kaila · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautiful book written by a most beautiful person. Ana Maria Spagna is the kind of human you want as a friend, guide, sister, and teacher. This book shares really interesting and unique life experiences and braids her insights and knowledge. All written in a lovely narrative. Highly, highly recommend.

[Caroline Stephens · Rating 5 out of 5]

Such honest, clear, and smart writing about so many things -- chainsaws, 70s folk music, open water swimming, history, all the complicated feelings about what it means to be human in this world, in this moment.

[Jane · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this collection of essays, dipping in to read a few at a time. They evoked a great sense of the wild, but with an observer very present, sort of reminiscent of Annie Dillard. Worth the read.

[Erin · Rating 4 out of 5]

If I rated more books as 5-stars, then this one might rate. What a lovely little collection of essays.

[Leslie · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fabulous collection of essays about place and home in the remote town of Stehekin, Wa. The author does a beautiful job of capturing the natural setting and her connection to it.

[Josie · Rating 3 out of 5]

I definitely like her nature-focused essays the best, but there's lots of food for thought here.

[Walkandread · Rating 3 out of 5]

Like meandering in a meadow - calming. This novel did not bring me any new insights or epiphanies. I am a bit envious of her escape to Stehekin.

[Ann · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love Ana Maria Spagna's voice: such a wonderful mixture of colloquial and poetic. And I love the way her ruminations go deep, deeper and deeper still.

[Bryanna Plog · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fun and thoughtful collection of essay.

[Jacqueline Haskins · Rating 5 out of 5]

Intriguing, thoughtful, poignant, powerful!

[Mari S.H. · Rating 4 out of 5]

not what I thought it would be, but I still enjoyed reading this for the glimpses of life in Stehekin and the North Cascades - a really special place.

[Claire Carlson]

This is a lovely, lovely collection of essays

[Heather Durham · Rating 5 out of 5]

Conversations began in her first essay collection, Now Go Home: Wilderness, Belonging, and the Crosscut Saw and continued in Potluck: Community on the Edge of Wilderness, mature now with new inquiries, insights, and the refined craft of a veteran essayist. Not that Spagna has all the answers, now, but instead she goes deeper with the questions. Questions not just of personal journeys, of travel, home, and restlessness, but with the broadened perspective and full gravity of the long view. And though she may be restless, her essays are always firmly grounded in place – eyes and mind open, looking back, ahead, and all around at the complexities of natural and human landscapes, and the myriad ways those collide.