Michael P. Branch

Michael P. Branch is a humorist, essayist, and professor of literature and environment at the University of Nevada, Reno. His forthcoming books of environmental creative nonfiction are Rants from the Hill: The High Life Out West, from GFT Publishing, and Shambhala Editions’ Raising Wild: Becoming a Father in the High Desert.

New Nature Writers – Issue 19

Title ("The Amargosa Dune Sea") written into sand

•Claire Vaye Watkins

When I encounter Claire Watkins’s place-based prose, I’m reminded of the first photograph I ever saw of a nuclear detonation crater. The image, shot at the Nevada Test Site, is disturbingly aesthetic.

Nonfiction – Issue 7

Ghosts Chasing Ghosts: Pronghorn and the Long Shadow of Evolution

Our daughter Hannah Virginia saw her first pronghorn during the week of her second birthday. It was early April, and the wind swept light snow around the sage and rabbitbrush as I shoved her three-wheeled stroller up a sandy draw…

Nonfiction – Issue 3

Endlessly Rocking

The day Eryn and I decided to have a kid we had, it’s true, been drinking quite a lot of gin. Gin, the product of fermented juniper berries; juniper, the wild trees that surround our home in the high desert—Juniperus…