Dear Wags,

In my senior year of college, I got two job offers in publishing. One was as a publicity staffer at a big trade house in Manhattan. I could have been like Kate Beckinsale in The Last Days of Disco, even if I was too late for Studio 54. The other opportunity was less sexy. An academic publisher in Colorado needed an editorial assistant. There would be fewer champagne flutes and spangly tube tops in my future, but it offered a decent wage and a good résumé credential. 

I accepted the gig in the Rockies because I was engaged to a West Point cadet who was to be posted at nearby Fort Carson after graduation. However, when it came time for him to accept the assignment, an opportunity in Berlin popped up. On a whim, he took it. I wasn’t consulted about this leap into the Teutonic void.

This wasn’t so wunderbar for a fledgling relationship. But Germany proved to be a real adventure, and I forgave his youthful impulsivity. Instead of editing professors’ manuscripts, I wound up revising regulations for the U.S. Army. This turned out to be more interesting than it sounds. One of my military manuals detailed the rules for Rudolph Hess’s incarceration in Spandau Prison.

It took me a bit, but I found my way into a publishing. I went to graduate school, raised two kids, and suffered my share of setbacks. My path has been anything but linear. Somehow, I have made a career.

I wouldn’t have had it any other way. Mother’s Day just passed, but I’d like to give some credit to my mom. Back in 2004, I was faced with another choice: between taking a stable civil service job and an opportunity as a digital books editor in an industry that was volatile even then. There was every reason to go for security over romance. My mother told my husband to let me take the same kind of risk that sent us to Europe. She said: You have to let Bethanne follow her passion. 

I’ve had quite a few media jobs since. Even the ones that went up in flames were worth it. I got to be immersed in literature, publish a memoir, teach creative writing and so much more. I’m not saying this was the most sensible route, but for me it was the only one.

We can be so tormented by the illusion of choice. We take jobs because they are there, because we must, because they sing to us or because we see no other way. In the end, they are pretty incidental in finding our way to where we ought to be. It sounds pat to write this during graduation season, but it happens to be true: Stay true to what you love. And leap.

Yours ever,

BKP

Rednecks by Taylor Brown

Brown has ancestral ties to the West Virginia Mine Wars of the 1920s: His great-grandfather, a physician, provided battlefield triage. Amazingly, this mostly forgotten episode of labor unrest was the largest armed conflict in America since the Civil War. Although the multiracial rebellion involved figures such as union organizer Mother Jones, it rarely gets attenion. Brown aims to change that with his sweeping rendering of the Battle of Blair Mountain, in which 10,000 coal miners wearing red bandannas fought mine owners, the state militia and the U.S. government. Among the characters is Doc “Mu” Mohanna, a Lebanese immigrant doctor modeled on his ancestor.

Amphibious Soul by Craig Foster

If you’ve seen the documentary My Octopus Teacher, you know that filmmaker Craig Foster can deliver on this book’s subtitle, Finding the Wild in the Tame World. Foster has explored very remote places, but he believes wilderness is just beyond every front door. The trick is in seeing beyond the built environment and tapping into our innate sense of wonder. This celebration of the environment is a blend of memoir and essays on nature. If Foster’s writing isn’t quite as polished as his camera work, his reverence for the earth and optimism about saving it make this a terrific read.