If the Japanese poet Basho took a walk on a West Coast beach . . . If Lao Tzu were your hiking buddy . . . This book might be the result. What is it that draws us to love our places, our moments? What is this longing, what is this beauty? Is it real? Or is it just a trick of nostalgia?

A Way Home is a love letter to Oregon and an ode to living in the present moment. Living for several years in Minnesota, Scott Parker finds himself longing for the Oregon of his youth. He explores this longing by returning to his home state both over the course several visits and through the unfolding of memory, to find out what he is capable of understanding about time, home, and himself. The temptation of nostalgia is regarded from many angles—rueful, ironic, yet always still beckoning. Its antidote: being present in the actual moment, with its paradoxes and mixed blessings. Parker's passion for his subject is apparent, and his meditations prove him to be a nimble and penetrating thinker on absence and presence.

Scott F. Parker is the author of The Joy of Running qua Running and Time Again and the editor of Conversations with Joan Didion and Conversations with Ken Kesey, among other books. His writing has appeared in Tin House, Salon, Philosophy Now, The Believer, Portland Monthly, and other publications. He teaches writing at Montana State University and lives in Bozeman with his family.

"A deftly composed collection that evokes, even in its specificity, the feeling of a place that may have only existed in memory." — anonymous, Kirkus

"The book, handily, is pocket sized, a companion for a hike or adventure of the reader's choosing." — Rachel Hergett, Bozeman Daily Chronicle

"[Parker] combines memoir with meditations, some full essays, others short vignettes, about how we define and devote ourselves to places, especially through the prisms of our unreliable memories." — Amy Wang, The Oregonian

"Scott Parker has done something wonderfully fresh in this memoir/essay. . . . reminiscent of the great searching essayists. . . . A deft and valuable journey, not 'nostalgic' (he takes on that literary sin with élan) but gripping in a fully contemporary voice." — Patricia Hampl

"By turns exuberant, philosophical, and optimistic, Parker writes lyrically about place. Braided closely together are his probes of humankind in nature and his own drive to find himself. Who says you can't come home again? Of course you can." — Robin Cody