We're opening a brick-and-mortar bookshop this spring in partnership with Dancing the Land Farm!
Come meet us, say hello, and pick up a good book!
Come meet us, say hello, and pick up a good book!
Welcome to our Online Bookstore!
The Canyon Wren, Stories of My Horses Vol. III
$24.00
The Canyon Wren is the continuation and beautiful punchline of the full tale of Martin Prechtel's Trilogy: The Story of My Horses, and picks up right where The Wild Rose leaves off.
The Wild Rose ends with the dramatic Barn Fire Incident in which the author and his steady new young Barb stallion, Punk, pull a flame stunned mare out of a burning barn just seconds before the whole burning structure collapses, then together they both drive straight out of that book into a new life in the next book.
This third book in the trilogy brings the story far away from all those troubled times, ins and outs, hardships and betrayals, involved in the author's effort to gather up again those old style Indian Ponies of his youth, and heads us back out into the wild land and the beauty of ranchito New Mexico, where as an integral part of the lives of his new family, their family herd of rare Spanish/Native New Mexico horses play out a series of unexpected peculiarities and surprising horse antics that push the envelope of what mainstream culture has come to assume defines horses and the people that have them.
If the first book, The Mare and the Mouse, is like finding a closed treasure chest, and the second book The Wild Rose is the retrieval of the lost keys to that chest, then The Canyon Wren is the treasure itself.
"If this book doesn't make you want to ride, talk to animals, eat well, and close the angry, slack-jaw and shamelessly jump up and try to kiss the sky, then I've failed, but I will always try again. Everyone wants life to be simple, but a simple life cannot be lived in a simple way: it takes a lot of simple skills. To see the humor and beauty in the world is one of those skills."
The vision in this book is simply beautiful.
The Wild Rose
$22.00
Martín Prechtel
Available for preorder now! The book will be released on April 5th.
“Carrying on from The Mare and the Mouse, this series, The Stories of My Horses, is not just a compendium of imaginative romantic narratives written to casually entertain the horse loving public.
As romantically remembered as they might seem to be, they are actually straightforward historical accounts of what happens when a life-loving fool like me, a native of that beautiful land-locked, cultural island called Northern New Mexico, who in the latter half of the 20th century, decides he must live his everyday life in direct defiance of the soul-shrinking threat of modernity’s earth-wrecking ugliness and mediocre existence, by keeping some modicum of the bright shine and outrageous living passion of our real souls alive by flying free and beautiful on the backs of flesh and blood horses over a live unpeopled, unmanicured land…
I’ll admit I’m a romantic and heroic. But to be honest, it’s not my fault: it’s the fault of all the horses I’ve ever known. For horses since forever, real horses I mean, have always been romantic, noble and heroic by definition of their very existence, and to be with them well, you too have to develop a soul that corresponds!
In my romantic struggle for beauty in an unromantic mechanical age, my horses, simply by how they were, and how we looked, and how we were together, although no more than a tiny broadside against the ghost ship of mediocrity of this crazy age was some kind of victory just by the fact that we still existed. Horses inspire courage against hopeless odds just by their courage and beauty.”
–from the Introduction to The Wild Rose
The Mare and the Mouse
$22.00
The first volume in the Stories of My Horses trilogy.
Beautiful and hilarious, tearful and rambunctious, very real, ironic and magic-filled, Martín Prechtel’s new book The Mare and the Mouse is a series of lyrical sagas in tribute to each of the native New Mexican horses that carried him through his youth on the reservation, and then again during the difficult times following his return home after over a decade in the Mayan Highlands of Guatemala.
Meant to be read aloud to crowds around campfires, especially to people who are mistaken that only rich people or rednecks ride horses, Prechtel credits both his own physical and spiritual survival in “modernity’s mad rush to nowhere” with the sanity of riding and living with his natural-born Southwestern horses. Not raised for show, performance, status, or money, these little horses allowed a way of living that took him flying over ravines into deep-mountain Holy places, backwards over streams, and in general keeping alive a sparkier, older spirit in an age where horses have been grossly de-natured and sadly removed from our own everyday lives after three millennia as the closest companions of our ancestors’ dreams and mythologies.
But, Prechtel says, he wrote this book “specially for people to be inspired to live magically and in depth with animals, and to give people to understand that it’s never too late to start living in a more tangible, dusty way—maybe even flying over the ground on the back of a big furry animal—in a way that inspires life. If you want to have good memory, you have to do things that are worth remembering. Time to get busy!”
“On the Res none of us were horse trainers and nobody I knew really whispered to their horses, some people yelled at them, but we did know that neither whispering nor yelling did much good, unless you could keep a peaceful image in your head that you wanted the horse to absorb into theirs. In any case what horses fear the most is human cowardice, so we had to have the courage to think a thought beyond what we wanted the horse to do, we had to think a thought a horse would think, which mostly has to do with looking really cool in a herd of other magnificent horses, then in a trance grazing beautiful, short wild grasses on the sides of magnificent, mica-covered, red ochre hills, and then being scared of nothing and running like hell to the next equivalent grazing heaven. If you could keep that in your heart, your knees, your hands, your eyes, keeping all the human noise out of your head, then whether you whispered or croaked like a toad, the horse would follow that thought to whatever you thought the two of you should do! Of course you had to be able to laugh at yourself if it didn’t work, because good horses also respect a person who is courageous enough to fail and who can laugh at himself for even thinking a horse should do a person’s will.”
--from The Mare and the Mouse
Nightwatchers
$16.00
Vincent Wyckoff
The small town of Black Otter Bay, on Minnesota's North Shore, is being haunted by a sinister presence lurking in the forest behind town. When the body of a hiker shows up, Sheriff Marlon Fastwater is called in to investigate and soon finds himself involved with the Native American legend of the Manitou—the Trickster—and the mystique of a half Native Canadian/half French man who lives in the woods and holds true the ancient mystical beliefs of his elders. When the much-anticipated night of the Halloween Dance finally arrives, most of the major characters in town, including Gitch, the sheriff's faithful dog, become involved in the night of terror. A fast-paced pursuit leads to a chilling ending set against the immensity of Lake Superior.
Also by Vincent Wyckoff:
Black Otter Bay
The small town of Black Otter Bay, on Minnesota's North Shore, is being haunted by a sinister presence lurking in the forest behind town. When the body of a hiker shows up, Sheriff Marlon Fastwater is called in to investigate and soon finds himself involved with the Native American legend of the Manitou—the Trickster—and the mystique of a half Native Canadian/half French man who lives in the woods and holds true the ancient mystical beliefs of his elders. When the much-anticipated night of the Halloween Dance finally arrives, most of the major characters in town, including Gitch, the sheriff's faithful dog, become involved in the night of terror. A fast-paced pursuit leads to a chilling ending set against the immensity of Lake Superior.
Also by Vincent Wyckoff:
Black Otter Bay
Rubies in the Mud
$16.95
By Terry Hauptman
Interior glyphs and cover by Terry Hauptman
Release date: March 9th, 2021
Terry's written works often focus on a Phoenix of hope rising from tragedy. They churn the blood of our past into an informed metaphor, which transcends a temporal definition. Her images urge on the symbolic. Their figures and potent calls, shrieking and whimpering, assert echoes of ancestry that resound in the chambers of today. Through a curious eye they utter, whisper, and choke us with tentative movements that blend reality, history, dreams, sand, water, wine, and blood to intimate an unforeseen direction comprising a part of humankind's silhouette. Our eyes water from the sophisticated plan which, in essence, remains hidden from sight.
Terry Linda Hauptman is the author of four previous poetry collections: Masquerading in Clover: Fantasy of the Leafy Fool, with hand-painted plates (Boston: Four Zoas, 1980), Rattle (Tulsa: Cardinal Press, 1982), On Hearing Thunder (St. Cloud, Minnesota: North Star Press of St. Cloud, Inc., 2004), and The Indwelling of Dissonance (North Star Press of St. Cloud, Inc., 2016). She has a Master’s degree in Poetry from the University of New Mexico, Alburquerque, and a Ph.D. in Interdisciplinary Arts from Ohio University, Athens. She reads her poetry rhapsodically and exhibits her luminous Songline Scrolls nationally. She has taught World Art, Poetry, and Ethno-poetics, as well as classes in Genocide at several universities and workshops. She lives in Vermont with Robert and Kira Lily.
The Kontum Madonna
$15.00
By J. Vincent Hansen
Illustrations by Dick Adair
50 years after the war Hansen continues to mine his time in Vietnam as an 18-year-old machine gunner with the 101st Airborne Division. These poems inform us that no soldier ever grows so old as to see a war's final ripple.
J. Vincent Hansen grew up on a farm near Sauk Rapids, Minnesota. After high school, he spent three years in the Army followed by seven years working in East Africa as an agricultural volunteer with the Maryknoll Fathers. He is the recipient of the 1990 Loft-McKnight Award for Poetry, and a 2009 Bush Artist Fellowship in Poetry. He is the author of the books Blessed Are the Piecemakers, Without Dividend in Mind, The Medicine of Place, and a multi-media play, The Wedding of Tomorrow and Sorrow. He lives with his wife, Jeanette, in Sauk Rapids, Minnesota.
Dick Adair (1935-2018) was a Navy journalist and war correspondent for the military newspaper Stars and Stripes and also the author of the book Saigon published by Weatherhill in 1971. Later in life his art brought him many awards while working as a cartoonist in Honolulu, Hawaii.
Illustrations by Dick Adair
50 years after the war Hansen continues to mine his time in Vietnam as an 18-year-old machine gunner with the 101st Airborne Division. These poems inform us that no soldier ever grows so old as to see a war's final ripple.
J. Vincent Hansen grew up on a farm near Sauk Rapids, Minnesota. After high school, he spent three years in the Army followed by seven years working in East Africa as an agricultural volunteer with the Maryknoll Fathers. He is the recipient of the 1990 Loft-McKnight Award for Poetry, and a 2009 Bush Artist Fellowship in Poetry. He is the author of the books Blessed Are the Piecemakers, Without Dividend in Mind, The Medicine of Place, and a multi-media play, The Wedding of Tomorrow and Sorrow. He lives with his wife, Jeanette, in Sauk Rapids, Minnesota.
Dick Adair (1935-2018) was a Navy journalist and war correspondent for the military newspaper Stars and Stripes and also the author of the book Saigon published by Weatherhill in 1971. Later in life his art brought him many awards while working as a cartoonist in Honolulu, Hawaii.
Power Children PREORDER (Release date: Fall 2022)
$26.95
Corinne A. Dwyer
Edited and Forward by Elizabeth Dwyer
Power Children is the first book in the Nasha-sheen Chronicles, a series detailing the life of Autumn Leaves, an unlikely hero, and the enthralling, hidden world of the Nasha-sheen, her people. Power, the exquisite attunement of physical ability and intelligence, is what saved the Nasha-sheen from oblivion, it's what maintains their secrecy, what rules them, what gives them purpose and culture, and, what nearly caused their undoing. Autumn Leaves, an apparent orphan, struggles to reconcile her small, relatively weak frame with the immensity of her developing mind, and her insatiable need to understand. All the while the enigmatic forces behind the traumas of her past hope to guide her, aid her, and somehow rein her in to prevent her from becoming what she must become.
Hardcover
Lost Little Sister
$16.00
By Michael Prelee
Kelly Dolan has been missing for nine years. The college graduate was preparing to start her life with a new job in a new city when she vanished over Labor Day Weekend. For almost a decade, her sister Quinn and private detective Paulie Carmichael have been searching for her. After an armed robbery at a lakeside store turns to murder, they become convinced a serial killer is targeting the small town of Hogan but can't convince the police.
Vintage Wisdom
$15.00
A Collection of Reflections, Quotes, and Beliefs from Dear Friends
Compiled by Jim Secord
Editor Jim Secord sent a letter out to over 160 of his friends and colleagues he has known in his eight decades of life, asking then to submit a small kernel of wisdom and knowledge that they have learned over the years. Some are short little quips, others more lengthy and involved, but all are authentically representative of the human experience and the pain and joys we collect on our journey through life. Set in a beautiful and engaging style, every page illuminates and distills the complexities of life as experienced through one particular person, while displaying the universal truths of kindness, friendship, and love that unite us.