Falling Up: A Memoir of Second Chances

by Scott Edward Anderson

Falling Up,  which recently received the 1st Literary Award of Letras Lavadas in conjunction with PEN Açores, is a moving personal essay about the struggle to become an authentic, vulnerable, purpose-driven man in the 21st century and, ultimately, about making one's dream a reality. Along the way, award-winning poet, Scott Edward Anderson learns to see the world anew through the eyes of his children, through a deep engagement with the natural world, and through learning―and teaching others―to tell stories in a more personal way. Falling Up is a late bloomer's coming-of-age story as much as it is a book about choice, intention, and commitment.

84 pages, Paperback

Published September 10, 2019

About the author

Scott Edward Anderson is the author of AZOREAN SUITE/SUITE AÇORIANA (2020), FALLING UP: A Memoir of Second Chances (Homebound Publications, 2019), DWELLING: an ecopoem (Shanti Arts, 2018), FALLOW FIELD (Aldrich Press, 2013), and WALKS IN NATURE’S EMPIRE (Countryman Press, 1995). He has been a Concordia Fellow at the Millay Colony for the Arts and received the Nebraska Review Award. His poetry has appeared in The American Poetry Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Cimarron Review, The Cortland Review, The Wayfarer, and two anthologies. His essays and reviews have appeared in basalt, The Bloomsbury Review, Cleaver, the Philadelphia Inquirer, Schuylkill Valley Journal, and elsewhere. For many years, he has worked in conservation, social enterprise, and clean energy consulting with such organizations as The Nature Conservancy, Ashoka, VerdeStrategy, and EY. He lives in Brooklyn, NY, with his wife, Samantha, and their blended family.

Visit him at scottedwardanderson.com

Reviews

[Dan Corrie · Rating 5 out of 5]

As one who is deeply concerned about the planet's current challenges, I loved this book's sharing of the author's search through the decades to find a career that would allow him to make a difference in helping the natural world. Beginning in a role of fundraising for The Nature Conservancy, the author describes the challenges of entering the often mercurial corporate world, all the more unstable for one who continued to remain loyal to his own green goals years before green concerns were taken as seriously as now. Too, this memoir offers a look into one life's unlikely combination of one who works as an executive while also being deeply drawn to being an ecological poet. While the author can be humorously unmerciful with his youthful self's efforts at being an artist, the narrative continues into sharing his personal story of a mature desire to become a writer whose writing would help our imperiled natural world that we depend on. How do we live in what has come to be called the Anthropocene Era? This book belongs among a body of work responding meaningfully to that question.

[Heidi Barr · Rating 5 out of 5]

A book to remind you that there's always another way forward, even if it doesn't look like you thing it should.