Writing Miracle Country

The first words that appear in Miracle Country came from an essay I wrote when I was twenty years old. The essay was called “Charade” and I wrote it in a college class taught by the writer Marcia Aldrich, the very first creative nonfiction class I ever took—my introduction to the genre that would become my life.

The assignment? Write about grief. Twenty-year-old me had lost her mother four years before, so coming up with material wasn’t wildly difficult. I remember sitting on my dorm room bed on my hand-me-down pink flannel sheets, the warm night air and the cut grass smells of Southern California coming in the window, digging up memories I’d been trying to avoid. 

What started as homework took me surprising places. After college, I revised that essay and used it to apply to graduate writing programs. “Charade” took me to the University of Minnesota to study writing. It got selected for 2015’s Best American Essays, edited by Ariel Levy, which led me to sign with my agent. Whatever I was channeling when I wrote that essay struck a nerve with readers, but years passed before I had learned enough to turn that kernel into a book. 

“Charade” told the story of me in high school in the early 2000s, an outsider listening to goth bands and wearing too much eyeliner, wandering around my tiny, rural neighborhood with my best friend at night in the rain dressed as vampires. Writing about that time in my life was a roundabout way to talk about death and impermanence—my mom’s death from a rare autoimmune disease, and what her loss felt like at sixteen. 

That loss carries into Miracle Country, but in my book, what was once only personal becomes public. Time and distance and a whole lot of research allowed me to move beyond my own grief and into the story of loss at the level of the landscape, loss as experienced by the people of my home place, both now and in history.

In Miracle Country I tell stories of loss and also resilience. What started in a dark bedroom with “Charade” ends with a birds-eye-view of California and the West, drawing from collective memory, from the lessons of geologic time. 

Miracle Country follows my life as I ricochet away from my isolated home place, the wild and harshly beautiful Eastern Sierra Nevada in the high desert of California. It was a place I loved as a child because my parents taught me to love it. After my mom’s death, home became a bad place and I fled, leaving behind my crumbling family. I went first to Los Angeles, then San Diego, then another couple thousand miles away to Minnesota. It was in Minneapolis that I started to make sense of the place and the people I’d left behind. Homesickness hunted me down. I dreamed almost nightly of the desert and mountains. I started writing about home. 

During my time in Minnesota, my home neighborhood burned down in a freak winter wildfire. This was 2015, in the heart of the California drought, the worst drought in more than a thousand years. Miracle Country opens with this fire. I took a red-eye flight home and sifted the ash with my neighbors while the earth was still warm and hot spots sizzled on the mountain.

During those days, I watched the people our region mourn as one organism. I’d spent a night imagining my own childhood home, site of my memories of my mother, burning. In that conflagration, I realized my own loss was tied to the losses my landscape and community were bound to experience in the face of a changing climate. I also realized that if we were to persevere, we’d do so together. 

While writing Miracle Country, I was living the book’s trajectory of leaving home and making the complicated decision to return, to buy a house in my strange little hometown of Bishop, California, to live beside my most difficult memories in a place often visited by disaster. Wallace Stegner once wrote that deeply lived in places are rare in the West, a land of use-it-up, slash-and-burn mentality.

I wanted to change that norm; I wanted to follow the example of the indigenous people in my home, the Paiute/Nuumu, who had survived genocide and maintained a vital presence and stewardship practice. I wanted to dig in with my community and prepare to face what was coming. 

And so I settled in to write in Minnesota, my homesickness sharpening my perspective, and my university library providing endless access to century-old newspaper archives as I dug deep into the history of home.

Miracle Country has a 500+ source bibliography and is also packed with interviews and anecdotes from the folks that make up my home. For six years I researched, wrote, revised, cut, and rewrote, working with my patient and brilliant agent, Janet Silver, to link the parts of Miracle Country. It found a publisher in Algonquin Books, and I couldn’t be happier or more proud to present the world with this love letter to home. 

Kendra’s parents taught their children to thrive in this beautiful, if harsh, landscape, prone to wildfires, blizzards, and gale-force winds. Above all, they were raised on unconditional love and delight in the natural world. After Kendra’s mother died of a rare autoimmune disease when Kendra was just sixteen, however, her once beloved desert world came to feel empty and hostile, as climate change, drought, and wildfires intensified.

The Atleework family fell apart, even as her father tried to keep them together. Kendra escaped to Los Angeles, and then Minneapolis, land of tall trees, full lakes, water everywhere you look.But after years of avoiding her troubled hometown, she realized that she needed to come to terms with its past and present and had to go back.

Miracle Country is a moving and unforgettable memoir of flight and return, emptiness and bounty, the realities of a harsh and changing climate, and the true meaning of home. For readers of Cheryl Strayed, Terry Tempest Williams, and Rebecca Solnit, this is a breathtaking debut by a remarkable writer.