A01752 - Philip Connors, American Essayist and Author

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Connors, Philip

"The greatest gift of life on the mountain is time.  Time to think or not think, read or not read, scribble or not scribble -- to sleep and cook and walk in the woods, to sit and stare at the shapes of the hills, I produce nothing but words; I consume nothing but food, a little propane, a little firewood.  By being utterly useless in the calculations of the culture at large I become useful, at last, to myself."  (05/26/2023)

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Philip Connors is an American essayist and author. He was born in Iowa and raised in Minnesota. He studied journalism at the University of Montana. He interned at the Nation and subsequently worked at the Wall Street Journal for several years. He left New York City in 2002 and moved to New Mexico. He lived in Silver City, NM for several years before moving to El Paso, Texas.

Every year since 2002, Connors has worked for several months in the summer at the Gila National Forest as a US Forest Service fire lookout. His book based on these experiences Fire Season: Field Notes From a Wilderness Lookout was published in 2011 to widespread critical acclaim.^[1] It won the 2011 National Outdoor Book Award (Outdoor Literature) and the 2012 Banff Mountain Book Festival Grand Prize.^[2] It also won the 2012 Reading the West Book Award for best adult non-fiction, given by the Mountains and Plains Independent Booksellers Association.

Connors' work has been published in The Guardian,^[3] Harper's Magazine,^[4] Paris Review,^[5] n+1,^[6] Salon,^[7] and the London Review of Books.^[8]

Bibliography

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• Philip Connors (2011). Fire Season: Field Notes from a Wilderness Lookout (memoir). Ecco. ISBN 9780061859366.
• Philip Connors (2015). All The Wrong Places: A Life Lost and Found (memoir). W. W. Norton & Company. ISBN 9780393088762.
• Philip Connors (2018) . A Song For The River (memoir). Cinco Puntos Press. El Paso, Tx. ISBN 9781941026908

References

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1. ^ Hohn, Donovan (8 April 2011). "The 'Walden' of the Wildfire (Published 2011)". The New York Times. Archived from the original on 2023-03-17.
2. ^ Joe Spring (November 2, 2012). "'Fire Season' Wins Banff Book Competition Grand Prize". Outside. Retrieved February 7, 2018.
3. ^ "How humans added fuel to the wildfires of New Mexico | Philip Connors". The Guardian. 2011-08-26. Archived from the original on 2023-03-17.
4. ^ Fires in the Gila
5. ^ Diary of a Fire Lookout
6. ^ My Life and Times in American Journalism
7. ^ Where have you gone, Edward Abbey?
8. ^ Book reviews by Philip Connors

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