Skinny Dipping And Other Immersions in Water, Myth, and Being Human - Hardcover

"For readers who appreciate the essay form in all its complexity. Lembke's fluid style can challenge and fascinate. She goes in and out of mythology and fact, fairy tale and history, past and present, like a practiced swimmer diving beneath a wave and floating on the next one, always aware of the underlying current but buoyed by new surprises at every swell."

The author of the acclaimed Dangerous Birds returns with a new collection of essays on the natural world, these connected by the theme of water: exploring issues as varied as the joy that water brings, the wistful rememberings it engenders, and its sacredness. As with all of Lembke's essays, the world of Classical myth and its characters meld with her native haunts and their people, lending resonance to the seemingly simplest things: a beetle in the garden, a tangle of forgotten roses, an afternoon rainstorm.Skinny Dipping brings us waters as diverse as the River Styx and the stream near her home called the Bullpasture. In the title essay she looks down a long corridor of time to visit Pliny, the natural historian, for a "skinny dip" in A.D. 79; "Up the Creek" examines a lazy day's canoe trip with a frightened young friend about to leave home; "And This Way the Water Comes Down at the Gorge" is a tale of a burial - with a fine supporting cast of Faulkneresque characters. (61/4 X 91/4, 196 pages, illustrations)