Terroir: Love, Out of Place

(Paperback)

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

Unique and new application of popular viticulture term of "terroir" to the development of a person

Immigrant outsider perspective is very timely

Essays cover LGBTQ, race, class, national identity, (oppressive) theocratic influence, plight of East. Euro countries continual fight for sovereignty and identity, interracial marriage, bisexuality, Henry James, poetry, food and restaurant culture.

Travel; place; Switzerland, Baltimore, Washington DC, Salt Lake City, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, the Adriatic, Slovenia, Trieste and Venice

Readers include lovers of creative nonfiction, essays and memoir

Reviews

Captivating reading... Natasha Sajs ranging essay collection explores the nature of the self while shedding light on race, sexuality, nationality, and the meaning of home." Foreword Reviews "Thoughtful essays...will fascinate readers interested in the interplay between identity and place." Publishers Weekly "Combines fascinating personal history with challenging arguments and ideas about identity, writing, race, nationality, sexuality, and more." Book Riot Terroir is about how the roots of a place can't entirely be separated from the time your life that you spent there, and the people with whom you spent that time." Salt Lake City Weekly A complex and full-hearted book. As Saj grapples with what it means to be a human living in community with other humans, she must also consider complicating questions of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, professional and familial loyalties, nationality, and economic class. This is not a book to suggest we are all human and therefore all the same, capable of loving and being loved. Rather, in these pages Saj struggles with what makes us all different, and what it means when she stands by someone in the face of all that might set her and all others apart. Camille T. Dungy, author of Guidebook to Relative Strangers Such a gorgeous memoir-in-essays. One of the most beautiful and intimate self-portraits Ive read in recent years. Saj's mix of intellectual chops and emotional candor creates an unsparing account of one smart and compassionate persons life. That this life becomes a conduit and critique of the last forty or so years of political and social upheaval is an added and bracing benefit for the reader. I cant say, I couldnt put this book down. On the contrary, I put the book down quite often to further reflect upon rich worlds and observations it opened for me. Robin Hemley, author of Borderline Citizen: Dispatches from the Outskirts of Nationhood Terroir is an important collection of personal essays on the theme of otherness, derived from a lifetime of uncommon experience, that offers new ways of thinking about what it means to be human. Awareness of the increasingly pressing question of how to spend my time on earth makes every choice significant, Natasha Saj writes. And her reflections on those choices are by turns revelatory, challenging, and deeply moving. Such wisdom she possesses! Christopher Merrill, author of Self-Portrait with Dogwood Natasha Sajs essays examine coming of age in America as a profoundly intersectional experience with her honest exploration of what it means to be an insider, an outsider, and a passionately alert artist. Her essays are conjured from an inexplicable combination of elementsa terroirthats at once sensual and intellectual, self-scouring and celebratory. Lia Purpura, author of All the Fierce Tethers

Author Bio

Natasha Saj is the author of three award-winning poetry collections, most recently Vivarium, and the postmodern poetry handbook Windows and Doors: A Poet Reads Literary Theory. She is a professor of English at Westminster College and a faculty member in the Vermont College MFA in Writing Program. She lives in Salt Lake City.