About the Author
Ruby McConnell is a writer, geologist, and environmental advocate living and writing in Eugene, Ore. Her writing examining the relationships between landscape and the human experience won an Oregon Literary Arts Fellowship in 2016. Her work has been published in Grain, Entropy, and Mother Earth News, among others. You'll often find her in the woods.
We're excited to announce Overcup's acquisition of Ruby McConnell’s new nonfiction collection of essays. The book is tentatively titled Ground Truth: A Personal and Cultural Geology of the Pacific Northwest and will be published in print and digital formats in spring, 2020. A geologist and author of the successful outdoor handbook A Woman’s Guide to the Wild, McConnell’s book will investigate the ways in which people of the Pacific Northwest region are knitted to the land where they live.
Written as an extended eulogy to a rapidly changing world with a population awakening to the realities of climate change, land-use, logging, and pollution - these essays combine the personal narrative of a memoir with a moving portrait of the Pacific Northwest. In 2016, Oregon’s Literary Arts awarded McConnell a fellowship for her essay writing, which became the foundation for “Ground Truth”, calling it “timely and significant, and daring”
“This collection of essays is incredible,” says Overcup publisher Patrick McDonald. “Writing with the authority of a scientist but with a lyricism reminiscent of some of the greatest environmental writers like Wendall Berry and Barry Lopez, McConnell’s ‘truths’ reach far beyond the Pacific Northwest where they are grounded. Overcup Press is thrilled to add McConnell’s collection of essays to the urgent and necessary conversation on climate science and advocacy.”
McConnell says this new work is “a portrait of the forces and landscapes that have shaped one woman’s life in the Pacific Northwest, a place where the land is always the thing. No exertion of human will or industry will take away its precedence. These essays are the fragments and field notes from those portions of this land that I have attempted to ground-truth for myself.”
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