Delving Beneath Ordinary Skin with Amy Hale Auker
Ordinary Skin, Essays from Willow Springs Once upon a recent time , there was a little black hen whose flock was attacked by a coyote. In the story, the little black hen survives, spending several nights alone in the woods but when she returns to her flock in the hen house, she returns as an outcast. “I am her only friend,” writes Amy Hale Auker in her new book Ordinary Skin, Essays from Willow Springs (Texas Tech University Press) . “I think she got lonely out there among the grass and leaves. Sleeping alone.” Life in the transient rural West can be lonely for outcasts, whether they’re chickens or women or men or children. “Any roots I’ve ever had,” writes Auker, “were fragile and tentative, ripped from the soil...” Wallace Stegner was correct, the West is as much about motion as it is about place yet Auker’s connections to place, temporary as they have been all her life, are never thinly forged connections. Ordinary Skin is an immersion into living ski...