Watershed & Other Travels
new and selected essays
Emily Hiestand, Ebb Tide Editions, 2026
Travels in other lands, in home territories, and time
The selected works in this collection have appeared in books, The Very Rich Hours (Beacon Press, 1992), and Artesian & Other Domestic Travels (Beacon Press, 1998); in anthologies (among them The Norton Book of Nature Writing, This Impermanent Earth, Jo’s Girls, and Best of A Quarter-Century of the Pushcart Prize); and in magazines and journals (among them The Atlantic, Agni, The Georgia Review, Southwest Review, and Orion. Awards include The National Magazine Award and the Pushcart Prize.
Read selected essays online • Reserve a print copy
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Reviews for works included in this collection
“The most exciting travel writing I have read in years. These pieces are, in the best sense, world-views...The poetic eye is their greatest strength, a sensibility and perceptiveness combined with a remarkably civilized intellect. — Robert Finch, essayist, and ed., The Norton Book of Nature Writing
“In these fresh accounts of far-flung locations, Hiestand keeps returning us to the profound questions of home. That is the book’s great discovery: we’re in this together, wherever we are.” — Patricia Hampl, author of A Romantic Education
“Irrepressible curiosity and sense of adventure” “Hiestand stretches the elastic border 'around the place we call home,' dissolving boundaries imposed by time and geography as she looks beneath the surface of the familiar.”
— The New York Times Book Review
“Comic Genius”
— The Boston Globe
”Travel writing is a demanding genre. At its best, it is an exquisite mix of the personal, the philosophical and the factual — artfully propelled by vivid description. That's not an easy balance to achieve. But Hiestand gets it just right.”
— The Philadelphia Inquirer
“In these fresh accounts of far-flung locations, Hiestand keeps returning us to the profound questions of home. That is the book’s great discovery: we’re in this together, wherever we are.” — Patricia Hampl, author of A Romantic Education
“Hiestand journeys in this altogether terrific book to the far reaches of the human heart as well as to places for which there are maps. Her language is special. It is also, in the best sense of the word, ‘poetic’: precise, intense, compacted, and full of surprises.” — Geoffrey Stokes, The Boston Globe
“Stylistically perfect”
— National Magazine Award for the essay “Hymn”
What is right habitation? “Though she muses brilliantly on the joys of aimless travel, Hiestand leaves such pursuits to others. Her trips to far-off places are taken ‘to pose a question – what is right habitation? — and to listen for such answers as each place has to give.’”
— Kathleen Courrier, Sierra Magazine
Intelligent, funny, moving explorations of home — “Hiestand's latest book of essays takes as its central theme the idea of home, though it is clear from the beginning that for Hiestand ‘home’ covers a lot of territory.”
— Jim Armstrong, poet, critic, and professor
“The originality of Joyce in Dublin”
— The Cambridge Chronicle
“This tour de force of personal narrative is a rich and rewarding literary journey told with the voice of a poet and the heart of a consummate observer.”
— Fiona Luis, The Boston Globe
“She confronts head on some of the basic issues of writing and thinking about nature: the connections between human and wild nature; the differences between ‘good’ and ‘natural;’ etc... And I love her fluid, rich style, with its expansive rhythms and slight formality of diction.”
— Robert Finch, essayist, ed., The Norton Book of Nature Writing
"An elucidation of the here and now is one of the author’s greatest gifts: she shows us what it is to 'be.'"
— Colette Kelso, Agni
“Hiestand encounters flora and fauna, myths and language, history and ecology as participants in an ancient, discontinuous colloquy. As she eavesdrops, she must reconstruct, by conjecture, wit, and erudition, the contexts, issues, and nuances. Her ability to do this is astonishing. Her range of references is wide and unexpected, and she is a wonderful observer. But what holds the book together is an elegant intelligence, and a sense of humor that engages both the solemn revelations and the undignified exasperations of travel with elan.”
— Franklin Burroughs, author, Confluence: Merrymeeting Bay
“A dazzling, often hilarious exploration of identity and the art of being human.” — Beacon Press
Cover image: detail from the watercolor, “Castle Upnor,” c.1829-30, Joseph Mallord William Turner. Photo: Courtesy of the Tate Museum, London. Full image at the Tate Images Library.