In the summer of 2009 I taught a workshop called Outpost, a writing retreat sponsored by the literary organization Fishtrap at a remote field station in NE Oregon, where we slept in tents, wandered the wilds, wrote what came to us, and shared our writing around the campfire. In 2023 I decided to be part of this writing retreat again, this time as a student of the writer CMarie Fuhrman, who gathered us for a series of gratitude ceremonies on the beautiful Zumwalt Prairie, a place of wild bounty only lightly wounded by the plow. Again, we slept in tents, wandered the prairie, and wrote. This book came from my time there.