“Annie Connole represents a new and compelling voice arising out of the American West.”
Announcing The Spring
From Chin Music Press
Traversing the wild landscapes of the American West, prose and photography combine to create a lucid, dream-like vision of visitations and allegorical animal encounters with Snake, Owl, and Dragonfly, among others. The Spring tells a stirring, elegiac tale of death, love, rebirth, and transformation.
Announcements
The Spring made the list: Best of 2020-2021: Nonfiction Books / Entropy Magazine.
Buy the Book
The Spring is available for purchase at local bookstores and online through Bookshop.org, Amazon, and Chin Music Press.
Watch and Listen
Town Hall Seattle, Launch Event with Frances McCue
Desert Split Open Presents… Annie Connole
Skylight Books, Skylit Podcast, May 24.
The Write Question, Montana Public Radio and podcast
Montana Book Festival, Debut Truths: Three Authors Debut Memoirs in and of the Wild, Panelist.
Press and Reviews
Local Author’s “Mythic Memoir” Explores Transformation after Suicide, The Desert Sun, by Greg Archer, July 24, 2022
“Annie Connole’s The Spring: A Mythic Memoir,” High Desert Journal, Review by Rick Newby, May 1, 2021
Montana: The Magazine of Western History, Montana Book Round-up, Review by Aaron Parrett, Autumn 2021 (print only)
Further Reading
“Wolf / Lone Wolf” an excerpt from The Spring featured in Alta Journal
“What to Read When You are Visited by Grief,” an essay and list of book recommendations by Annie Connole, The Rumpus, May 2021.
The art of Devin Leonardi
Praise for The Spring
"Annie Connole's The Spring is a remarkable debut. By turns raw and mystical, steeped in loss but also reconciliation, it is a book that challenges our preconceptions, in regard to content and form. Connole is a poet in essayist's clothing; her language ripples and burns. Even more, she has an open heart, and she does not hold back. Elliptical, pointed, unrelenting, this is a work of astonishing power."
— David L. Ulin, author of Sidewalking: Coming to Terms with Los Angeles
“Annie Connole’s The Spring shapes an accruing fable with the wellspring of a seer’s vision, and thus out of a devastating, gorgeous, and hailing prose is a work startled and “halted by the openness” of what it witnesses. She writes of the death of the painter, who, carries on, skimming “on shallow ripples of the river, on the glassy eyes of the wolf in the dark.” The dark is what Connole transforms into a lighted path of rising truth, and the wisdom from this solitary eye holds these tender visions close and upheld.”
— Prageeta Sharma, author of Grief Sequence
“Sometimes the only way through unbearable grief is to pay attention to everything it illuminates. In this sustained and lyrical examination of life after loss, Annie Connole attunes us to the animals and their interminable mystery. Her words and images, like quiet reveries, lead us from the domestic to the wild, wingbeat to heartbeat, to reveal how, even in our deepest despair, we can listen and look our way into what comes next. Provocative and reassuring, The Spring is like a wide-eyed walk through rich and resonant human and natural worlds."
— Kimi Eisele, author of The Lightest Object in the Universe
Published Essays
About
Annie Connole is a writer and artist living in the Mojave Desert. She was born and raised in the rocky highlands of Helena, Montana. Annie received a B.A. from The New School where she studied art and philosophy and a M.F.A. in Creative Writing from University of California Riverside - Palm Desert. Her work has appeared in Alta Journal, High Desert Journal, Writers Resist, and The Rumpus. THE SPRING: A MYTHIC MEMOIR is her first book.
"Annie Connole is the real deal. A writer of uncommon nuance, she goes her own way, mixing text and image, poetry (or poetic intention) and starkly vivid prose to trace a landscape where the inner and the outer, the human and the elemental, merge into the landscape of the mythic, which is, of course, the landscape we all traverse each day. Her writing is fierce, her perspective sharp but also open -- to both the differences and affinities between her and what she sees. Call it an engagement, art as the pursuit of deep connection, both to ourselves and the natural world. This is writing that enlarges us as we read."
— DAVID ULIN, CRITIC AND AUTHOR
Contact
For book and literary rights inquiries, please contact Dara Hyde, Hill Nadell Literary Agency, www.hillnadell.com.
For media inquires regarding THE SPRING, please contact bruce@chinmusicpress.com.
To request a review copy of The SPRING, please contact bruce@chinmusicpress.com or find a digital review copy at Edelweiss.
For collaborations, book club appearances, speaking engagements, teaching opportunities, events and other inquiries, please contact Annie at annieco@gmail.com
