The artist at the end of the world

In the mid-90s, having just returned from stints as a wide-eyed journalist in Nicaragua and a teacher in the Philippines, I felt I had run out of writing material. My wife and I had settled in Chicago with new jobs, a little house and yard, two children, and a third on the way. All of the risky excitement and freedom of our travels was soon replaced by routine and responsibility.

It was then that I discovered the work of Scott Russell Sanders, including Staying Put: Making a Home in a Restless World (1993) and later Hunting for Hope: A Father’s Journeys (1998). Sanders, a longtime English professor at Indiana Univer­sity, is the author of more than 20 books, including essay collections, novels, collections of short stories, and children’s books. But reading those two early books at that opportune time taught me anew the core challenge of writing essays: paying compassionate attention to everyday life, in­cluding ordinary miracles like home repair and gardening and fatherhood. You don’t have to live in a war zone to find good material.

Sanders’s new collection of essays also stems from his observations of daily life. He attends to many of the themes he has explored in other books: the joys and struggles of fatherhood and marriage, the evolving role of spirituality and religion in our culture, the double role of the writer as artist and activist, and the slow catastrophe of climate change and the denigration of the natural world.