Over two dozen essays from established writers as well as newcomers on the relationship between landscape and the ways of life in New York's "North Country" - the Adirondacks and surrounding valleys. Between these covers are open spaces, small towns, skeletons in the closets, blue skies, big storms and more, all in a region that has never been quite sure how to define itself.
Natalia Rachel Singer is the author of Scraping by in the Big Eighties, (2004) a memoir in the American Lives series edited by Tobias Wolff at University of Nebraska Press, and is the coeditor with Neal Burdick of Living North Country: Essays on Life and Landscapes in Northern New York (2001). Her nonfiction and fiction have been published in magazines and literary journals such as Ms., Harper's, The American Scholar, Creative Nonfiction, Redbook, O: The Oprah Magazine, The Writer's Chronicle, Another Chicago Magazine, The Bellingham Review, Prairie Schooner, The Seneca Review, The North American Review (where she is a contributing editor), Shenandoah, The Iowa Review, Alternet.org, and numerous others. Her work has been anthologized in a number of books, among them Microfiction, Collateral Language, Rooted in Rock, The Mammoth Book of Short Short Stories, The Best Writing on Writing, and Reading Seattle: The City in Prose. She has won several national awards for her writing, including first prize in the Best Short Short Story contest and second prize in the Annie Dillard Award for Nonfiction, and has been a recipient of a grant from the New York Foundation for the Arts for nonfiction literature. An English professor at St. Lawrence University in upstate New York, Singer has traveled widely, and her work was cited for excellence in the Best American Travel Essays of 2004. Her memoir, Scraping by in the Big Eighties, is set in Washington State, Oregon, Mexico, California, Massachusetts, and France. She is currently completing a novel set in the Languedoc region of France,The Inventions of Love. Neal Burdick grew up in Plattsburgh, New York. After graduating from St. Lawrence University, he went on to earn a master's degree and Ph. D. from Case Western Reserve University. Since 1977, Neal has been a publications writer and editor, as well as a writing instructor, at St. Lawrence University. He is also a freelance writer and editor, having published works in various genres. He is editor of the Adirondack Mountain Club's magazine, Adirondac, and a frequent contributor to Adirondack Life and Adirondack Explorer.
