Coyote Songs

"A man tasked with shuttling children over the border believes the Virgin Mary is guiding him towards final justice. A woman offers colonizer blood to the mother of chaos. A boy joins corpse destroyers to seek vengeance for the death of his father."--Back cover.

A long out-of-print classic returns at last.

In many Native American stories of creation, Coyote proudly takes his place as the ultimate trickster, the mischievous hero whose lessons may even include painful lessons for the unwary. Mindy Dwyer's retelling of a Northwest coyote legend allows readers young and old to meet that same colorful and wily creature, but this time made vulnerable himself by love. Coyote in Love is a tale of love and the way things came to be. Children will be entranced as they hear of the antics of Coyote as he sings to the heavens in pursuit of the love of a star. They'll also learn from the Old Ones how a lake with never-ending depth and the bluest waters of Oregon's Crate Lake was formed by a flood of tears from heartbroken Coyote. This appealing legend is matched by the bright, whimsical watercolor images of Coyote.

Developed from her tremendously popular blog, this book offers the inspiring and beautifully illustrated account of the author's experiences raising an orphaned coyote as a beloved pet. Full-color photographs throughout.

"Being a girl was something that never really happened for me." —Rae Spoon Ivan E. Coyote and Rae Spoon are accomplished, award-winning writers, musicians, and performers; they are also both admitted "gender failures." In their first collaborative book, Ivan and Rae explore and expose their failed attempts at fitting into the gender binary, and how ultimately our expectations and assumptions around traditional gender roles fail us all. Based on their acclaimed 2012 live show that toured across the United States and in Europe, Gender Failure is a poignant collection of autobiographical essays, lyrics, and images documenting Ivan and Rae's personal journeys from gender failure to gender enlightenment. Equal parts hilarious and heartbreaking, it's a book that will touch LGBTQ readers and others, revealing, with candor and insight, that gender comes in more than two sizes. Ivan E. Coyote is the author of six story collections and the award-winning novel Bow Grip, and is co-editor of Persistence: All Ways Butch and Femme. Ivan frequently performs at high schools, universities, and festivals across North America. Rae Spoon is a transgender indie musician whose most recent CD is My Prairie Home, which is also the title of a new National Film Board of Canada documentary about them. Rae's first book, First Spring Grass Fire, was a Lambda Literary Award finalist in 2013. This publication meets the EPUB Accessibility requirements and it also meets the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG-AA). It is screen-reader friendly and is accessible to persons with disabilities. A Simple book with few images, which is defined with accessible structural markup. This book contains various accessibility features such as alternative text for images, table of contents, page-list, landmark, reading order and semantic structure.

In The Voice of the Coyote, J. Frank Dobie melds natural history with tales and lore in articulating the complex and often contentious relationship between coyotes and humans. Based on his own life experiences in Texas and twenty-five years of research, Dobie forges a sympathetic and nuanced picture of the coyote prefiguring later environmental and conservation movements. He recognizes the impact of human action on the coyote while also examining the prominent role of the coyote in the myths and legends of the West.

"One day, a purple coyote appeared on the hill. A coyote unlike any other. A purple coyote. Jim's never seen a purple coyote before, and he's determined to find out how the creature got his unusual color. But the coyote isn't saying. It's a big secret. So is the reason why the coyote howls a strange howl and dances a strange dance. Jim is stumped, and the more he questions the coyote, the more frustrated he becomes. Then one day the secret is revealed . . . .

A hiking trail through majestic mountains. A raw, unpeopled wilderness stretching as far as the eye can see. These are the settings we associate with our most famous books about nature. But Gavin Van Horn isn’t most nature writers. He lives and works not in some perfectly remote cabin in the woods but in a city—a big city. And that city has offered him something even more valuable than solitude: a window onto the surprising attractiveness of cities to animals. What was once in his mind essentially a nature-free blank slate turns out to actually be a bustling place where millions of wild things roam. He came to realize that our own paths are crisscrossed by the tracks and flyways of endangered black-crowned night herons, Cooper’s hawks, brown bats, coyotes, opossums, white-tailed deer, and many others who thread their lives ably through our own. With The Way of Coyote, Gavin Van Horn reveals the stupendous diversity of species that can flourish in urban landscapes like Chicago. That isn’t to say city living is without its challenges. Chicago has been altered dramatically over a relatively short timespan—its soils covered by concrete, its wetlands drained and refilled, its river diverted and made to flow in the opposite direction. The stories in The Way of Coyote occasionally lament lost abundance, but they also point toward incredible adaptability and resilience, such as that displayed by beavers plying the waters of human-constructed canals or peregrine falcons raising their young atop towering skyscrapers. Van Horn populates his stories with a remarkable range of urban wildlife and probes the philosophical and religious dimensions of what it means to coexist, drawing frequently from the wisdom of three unconventional guides—wildlife ecologist Aldo Leopold, Taoist philosopher Lao Tzu, and the North American trickster figure Coyote. Ultimately, Van Horn sees vast potential for a more vibrant collective of ecological citizens as we take our cues from landscapes past and present. Part urban nature travelogue, part philosophical reflection on the role wildlife can play in waking us to a shared sense of place and fate, The Way of Coyote is a deeply personal journey that questions how we might best reconcile our own needs with the needs of other creatures in our shared urban habitats.