Seasons of the Urban Coyote

Back in 1976, Jim Lenfestey and his wife, Susan, were part of the founding of a community newspaper, the Hill and Lake Press. Jim later took up the task of writing a monthly column, and kept at it for thirteen years. A selection of those columns was published in 2000 as The Urban Coyote: Howlings on Family, Community and the Search for Peace and Quiet. A decade later, Jim returned to the columnists desk at Hill and Lake, producing a delightful new series of stories and observations as the world rambled by. The best of these occasional pieces have once again been collected and published by Nodin Press. Catholic and curious, local and grandiose, personal and communal, they range in subject from professional sports to tree identification, from holiday celebrations to environmental activism, from cemetery wanderings to spindal painting, all of it liberally spiced with extravagent rhetorical flourishes and sincere joie de vivre.

But in the midst of all the fun and games, Lenfestey succeeds in raising plenty of meaty issues. Patricia Hample praises the collection's super-local, even civic, commitment, while Eric Utne describes it as a field guide for living and creating vital communities.