Rightful Place, Paperback

From the Texas panhandle to the mountains of Arizona, Amy Auker has lived the cowboy life--as wife, as mother, as cook, as ranch hand, as writer. In fine-grained detail she captures the prairie light, the traffic on small farm-to-market roads, the vacant stillness of shipping pens when fall works are over. But she also captures the unmistakable westernness of the people and animals around her: the son who must get back on the horse, the husband who gives great gifts, the horses whose names and temperaments are as recognizable as family. Auker understands those who live in the sway of nature's moods far off the main roads, and she commends them to us in luminous prose backlit by her own hard-earned experience.

Amy Hale Auker writes essays, poems, and fiction while working for day wages on an Arizona ranch. Twenty years on commercial cattle operations in Texas cooking for cowboys, homeschooling children, and taking long walks have given her material for writing about a way of life that is alive and well in the heart of the American west. She lives in Prescott, Arizona.