Amy Bess Cook

Women have been organizing since cave-dwellers first gathered around fire (and surely, even before then). Our current era, though, finds women making modern history by uniting with a renewed and palpable urgency.

(Essay) A thin wire of tension binds us all. It’s a fear that runs through the whole town, from the post office to the taco trucks. The year is 2011. There is reason to worry about the grape crop.

There is a saying in Icelandic, Að leggja höfuðið í bleyti, which translates roughly to “Go lay your head in water.” While it seems to echo the Yiddish insult “Go soak your head,” it couldn’t be more different. Instead, it’s an invitation for self-inquiry.

“Sustainable” is just another way of saying “environmentally friendly.” Right?
Well, that’s one piece of the puzzle. According to standards developed by the United Nations, sustainability is built on three pillars.

(Essay) When a writing residency lured me to Iceland during the 2016 summer solstice, I relished not only time to create, but to fulfill that calling.

(Essay) The world—and our bodies—do not always operate in a neat and orderly fashion. Control is not our default modus operandi, or even our ideal. Thirty years with epilepsy has taught me to accept, even love, this truth.

(Essay) The first trailer in my life wasn’t the traveling kind—at least, it never meant to travel. Grandma’s single-wide guest trailer stayed tucked beneath the same sprawling Oak on North Carolina’s Intracoastal Waterway for decades, till Hurricane Fran blew it straight up Easy Street, along with the Oak itself.

(Essay) Dead or alive, the man holds an approval for which I am keenly, unapologetically aching.

According to businesswoman and philanthropist Katie Hamilton Shaffer, it’s a fine start.

(Essay) Rural life is surely a simpler life and winemaking is the dream. “Small farms are, it seems, the new black,” writes Tamar Haspel in the Huffington Post. Hang onto that romance, neighbors. Come harvest season, you might need it.

(Essay) Holiday legends number too many to count: an elderly gentleman flying across the sky in a suped-up sled; a ruthless horned beast named Krampus; and (my personal favorite) the flesh-eating “yule cat,” Jólakötturinn, that has terrified Iceland for centuries. What good are tall tales, anyway?

(Essay) Any seasoned traveler will endorse the cliché that the journey is the destination. Yet most of us have a very difficult time appreciating the twists and turns along life’s way — just as a novice taster struggles to appreciate an evolving wine.

I want to better learn the art of cultivation: but how? For guidance I turn to Founding Father, aspiring winegrower, and (yes!) fellow plant-killer Thomas Jefferson.

I recently conducted a casual, rather non-academic study of American pioneers — both real and fictional. I reread Joan Didion. I swooned over Walt Whitman. I downed a shot of whiskey and cursed heavily, a la Trixie of "Deadwood". After some assessment, I determined that pioneers bear a few similarities.