Books by Diana Coogle |
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An Explosion of StarsThis book is about places Diana Coogle has been and people she loves. It’s about her passion for literature and art, for the earth and the stars, for flowers and frogs, for language and music. The 64 short essays range wide and plunge deep. From the first walking through wild lilacs to the last examining a starry sky through binoculars they are full of delights. In a prose as smooth and graceful as poetry, Coogle tells her stories: her son’s wedding, a windstorm on a mountain pass, her student days in France, Christmas with her family in Georgia. With gentle humor she pokes fun at herself her mistakes of identity, her short stature, embarrassing moments of childhood and probes human faults: our garbage problem, the cutting of old-growth forests, the “dumbing down” of language. |
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Living with All My Senses: 25 Years of Life on the Mountain"What is it like to live in today's world without electricity, in a house inaccessible by car, on a mountainside where trees and bears are more common than human company? What is it like to have lived there for a quarter of a century? What is it like for a well educated, highly creative, laughter-loving writer like Diana Coogle?Coogle's new book, Living with All My Senses: Twenty-five Years of Life on the Mountain, gives the reader a good dose of this kind of life with 64 essays selected from her 14 years of commentaries on Jefferson Public Radio, broadcast out of Ashland, Oregon, and reaching as far south as Redding, California, as far north as Roseburg, Oregon, west to the coast and east to the desert. Lee Gutkind, in choosing Coogle's first book, Fire from the Dragon's Tongue, as a finalist for the 1999 Oregon Book Award in literary nonfiction, said, "[Diana Coogle's] voice is warm, conversational but it's who and what she is that really makes the book appealing." It's that "who and what she is" that's at the heart of Living with All My Senses. Although the title refers to the five senses of sight, smell, taste, touch, and hearing that Coogle feels have been enhanced by her life on the mountain, it also refers to five other senses that have been deepened by that life - a sense of home, a sense of nature, a sense of fun, a sense of other, and a sense of self. It is these senses that form the structure of the book. Coogle tells stories about lighting her house with candles, about her struggle with clocks and calendars, about migraine headaches, living without a refrigerator, and playing classical guitar. In one essay Coogle builds an imaginary Stonehenge on the mountain she sees from her house; in others she describes a swim in Crater Lake or gives us the Beaufort categories for wind or discusses what to read on backpacking trips. She takes us rollicking through language with essays like "Flocks, Gangs, Gaggles, and Skulks." She writes about her son growing up in their home in the wilds, about visiting Ken Kesey, about love gone sour and students demanding As. Underlying all these essays are the humor and insight that listeners and readers alike have come to expect from Coogle's work.  |
Fire from the Dragon's TongueFire from the Dragon's Tongue is a collection of radio commentaries about living with nature in the Siskiyou Mountains, selected from more than ten years of Diana Coogle's broadcasts on Jefferson Public Radio. The basis of these commentaries is Coogle's home, a house she built herself in the "mountains above the Applegate River of southern Oregon," which is the tag line for her radio commentaries. She has lived there for 25 years with no electricity and no access by automobile, closer to neighbors in nature than to human neighbors. The essays in Fire from the Dragon's Tongue tell of her life in the mountains with the same lively humor and lilting poetry that have delighted JPR listeners for years. In these essays the reader finds literary flower beds and chiaroscuro autumns; an invasion of skunks, winter survival tips, and forest fire; opossum wisdom, scorpion karma, and tales of backpacking, canoeing, skiing, and swimming in the Siskiyou Mountains. The essays are peopled with her son, Ela, and various other friends and adventure partners and peppered with allusions to Shakespeare and Mondrian, to Einstein, Bach, and more than sixty other sources of inspiration and metaphor, as Coogle draws on her background in literature (she has a masters degree from Cambridge University, which she attended as a Marshall Scholar) and her interest in art, music, and matters of the intellect. In the last few years the Klamath-Siskiyou ecoregion has been receiving world-wide attention as an ecological treasurehouse. The World Wildlife Fund has selected it as one of the worldÕs biologically significant areas. Coogle's book is an important contribution to the literature about the area. Solidly based on her experiences and ruminations, these essays are personal stories, not objective, distant, scientific treatises; they treat nature as a neighbor to love, not as an experiment in a jar. If "the world is not a zoo," as one essay attests, it is also not a painting in a frame. In these essays it contains a touch of the mysterious, a passel of beauty, and the give and take of true relationship. Praise for Fire from the Dragon's Tongue. |
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Ordering info | ||
| Product | Price | Shipping |
| An Explosion of Stars | $15.00 | $ $3.50 |
| Living with All My Senses | $15.00 | $ $3.50 |
| Fire from the Dragon's Tongue | out of print | |
| Payment | Ordering Address | |
| Make checks & money orders payable to Diana Coogle |
9700 Thompson Cr. Rd. Applegate OR 97530 |
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