When I was a boy my father had horses, over a hundred of them, some of them rank, and I sat them well. He believed that horses were to use and that boys were nothing if not used.
Where Rivers Change Direction
A memoir of childhood spent on the oldest dude ranch in Wyoming—with a family struggling against the elements and against themselves, and with the wry and wise cowboy who taught him life's most important lessons.
University of Utah Hardcover, 304 pages, 1999
Riverhead Paperback, 304 pages, 2000
ISBN 978-1-5732-2825-1
BookSense Top Ten (March/April 2000)
Library Journal Books of 1999
Publishing News (UK) Books of the Year
Mountains and Plains Book Award (nonfiction)
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A rare accomplishment in 'sense of place' literature, this deftly evokes life in the wide-open of Wyoming's Continental Divide...His direct, spacious, tangible prose vibrates with the fragile crisis and joy of a man face to face with nature and himself.
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A piercing voice from the heartland, this resonant autobiography weds the venerable Western tradition of frontier exploration of self and nature with the masculine school of writing stretching from Hemingway to Mailer.
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Everything is approached with a boy's generous and unwearied heart... The essays have an urgent feel about them and a sense of weightiness.
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Beautiful and poetic… a moving, lyrical, sensuous elegy to (Spragg’s) Wyoming childhood and manhood.
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The cruel, punishing sound of wind; the rich, earthy smell of horses; the bitter joy of boy becoming man – Spragg’s spare but sensual essays will resonate not only with males and horse lovers, but also with anyone who treasures an examined life.
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Spragg paints a vivid portrait of life in the American Outback... an evocative snapshot of a severe, unforgiving landscape... Spragg's finely wrought essays are easily equal to much of the beautiful fiction beginning to define the region.
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Here is a book for women to read to learn the hearts of men. Here is a book for men to read to curse what they have lost. This soulful book walks us to a place of restoration through the wide open of Wyoming. Mark Spragg is a trustworthy guide on the page and in the world. His words, his stories are a fine example of blood-writing, every sentence alive.
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Mark Spragg’s essays exhibit a fine sensitivity. This is a book that deserves many readers.
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Spragg’s essays delve more fully and truly into relationships with land, with animals - both domestic and wild - with humans, and with the self than anything else I have read in the broadening literature of the rural West.
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Stirring, evocative, finely nuanced, gritty-marvelous!
ASA, Portugal
Jonathan Cape, England
Tammi, Finland
Albin Michel, France
Schneekluth, Germany
Guanda, Italy
Tusquets, Spain