Steve Edwards
RARE GOOD: ESSAYS
ON ART, AUTISM, AND ASTONISHMENT
"Steve Edwards has written a stunning book of essays that are attentive to the weather, bluebirds, perilous classrooms, pies baking in kitchens, and the fragile negotiations that make up a life lived inside our nervous systems. With the lyricism of a poet and the discernment of a witness, he crafts his essays to consider neurodiversity, art, and work as he shares his keen understanding of what it means to feel the sharp edges of the world, navigating with vigilance and persistence. What emerges from these essays is astonishment. Rare Good reminds us that attention is an act of resistance, and that the smallest, most local gestures—whether it’s sleeping for the first time in a new house, wrestling with Thoreau, or cataloging the drudgery of working third shift—are our truest lives." —Oliver de la Paz, author of The Diaspora Sonnets
"Rare Good is about the natures in which we live—our environments, our bodies, our senses, our minds—and the sunlight and storms that pass through them. It feels like having a beautiful, long conversation with an unusually wise and observant friend." —Blair Braverman, best-selling author of Welcome to the Goddamn Ice Cube
"Rare Good is a book of fascinating stories, inquiry, support, and community building centered on the current moment. In a world that so often values individual output, this read can shed light on the value of everyone and everything." —Jordyn Zimmerman, educator and accessibility advocate
"Rare Good is a beautiful work of heartfelt reflection, in which Steve Edwards invites the reader to rest awhile and pay attention to the world around and within them. There is such generosity at the heart of the book—generosity toward red-winged blackbirds, toward Thoreau, toward his son, toward dairy farms and construction workers and the students in his writing classes. There is room in Edwards’s world for the glorious diversity of our minds, our bodies, and all the ways we can be wrong. He invites us to share in it. A jewel of a book." —Catherine J. Denial, author of A Pedagogy of Kindness
Now I saw that I was more than who I thought I was—more than who I had been told I was. There wasn’t anything the diagnosis didn’t touch. In time, even how I thought about being a writer changed.
Steve Edwards was diagnosed with autism in his mid-thirties, altering his relationship to writing and family. He discovered what he had always known but never said: His compulsion to create was more than just a pursuit of self-expression. Faced with a mix of belief and disbelief from those who knew him, and full of questions himself, he committed to a new sense of wonder and pursuit of revelation.
Rare Good offers insights into Edwards’s experience of the awe that only art, disability, and loved ones can bring. Raising a disabled child and delving into acknowledging his own mindedness, he explores the struggles of communicating and finding care, the joy of gathering as community, and the astonishing gifts that art and education offer us, especially when we acknowledge the contributions of disabled artists past and present. Drawing on times of heartbreak transformed into determination, Edwards describes his ongoing desire to find a way together. A singular work of lyric nonfiction, Rare Good is a reminder and balm for all who might feel different.
BREAKING INTO THE BACKCOUNTRY
"Writing with an elegant simplicity and resilient reverence, Edwards proves to be an astute and passionate observer of both human and Mother Nature." —Carol Haggas, Booklist Online
In 2001 Steve Edwards won a writing contest. The prize was seven months of “unparalleled solitude” as the caretaker of a ninety-two-acre backcountry homestead along the Rogue National Wild and Scenic River in southwestern Oregon. Young, recently divorced, and humbled by the prospect of so much time alone, he left behind his job as a college English teacher in Indiana and headed west for a remote but comfortable cabin in the rugged Klamath Mountains. Well aware of what could go wrong living two hours from town with no electricity and no neighbors, Edwards was surprised by what could go right.
In prose that is by turns lyrical, introspective, and funny, Breaking Into the Backcountry is the story of what he discovered: that alone, in a wild place, each day is a challenge and a gift. Whether chronicling the pleasures of a day-long fishing trip, his first encounter with a black bear, a lightning storm and the threat of fire, the beauty of a steelhead, the attacks of 9/11, or a silence so profound that a black-tailed deer chewing grass outside his window could wake him from sleep, Edwards’s careful evocation of the river canyon and its effect on him testifies to the enduring power of wilderness to transform a life.
WHEN I FIRST HELD YOU
From some of today’s most critically acclaimed writers—including Dennis Lehane, Justin Cronin, Andre Dubus III, and Benjamin Percy—comes a rich collection of essays on what it means to be a dad.
Becoming a father can be one of the most profoundly terrifying, exhilarating, life-changing occasions in a man’s life. Now 22 of today’s masterful writers get straight to the heart of modern fatherhood in this incomparable collection of thought-provoking essays. From making that ultimate decision to have a kid to making it through the birth to tangling with a toddler mid-tantrum, and eventually letting a teen loose in the world, these fathers explore every facet of fatherhood and show how being a father changed the way they saw the world—and themselves.
The anthology includes Steve's essay "To Tell a Happy Story."