Living in the Country Growing Weird: A Deep Rural Adventure

In 1972, Dennis Parks, a young potter with a promising academic career ahead of him, decided to move to Tuscarora, a near-abandoned mining town in remote northeastern Nevada. Parks and his wife were attracted to Tuscarora’s isolation and beautiful setting, and they believed that it might be a wholesome environment in which to raise their two small sons. Living in the Country Growing Weird is Parks’s account of his family’s life in Tuscarora, a tiny settlement whose population even forty years later numbers fewer than twenty permanent residents. Parks created a pottery school that attracts students from around the world and developed for himself an international reputation as the creator of powerful, innovative works in clay. Meanwhile, he and his family had to master the numerous skills required of those who choose to live in the backcountry - growing and hunting their own food, renovating or building from scratch the structures they needed for residences or studios, resolving conflicts with neighbors, inventing their own amusements. As Dennis Parks reveals, the life that he and his family found in Tuscarora is also richer, infinitely more interesting, and profoundly more creative than what they left behind. This book is certain to delight admirers of Parks’s pottery who want to learn about his environment and the inspiration for some of his work, but it will also fascinate any reader who has ever dreamed of relocating
far from the maddening crowd
and living a simpler and more self-sufficient life. The complexities of life in Nevada’s harshly beautiful and remote back country have never before been depicted with such sensitivity, or with such good-humored candor.