<p>In Strange Company, a delightful collection of short essays, Jean Ryan brings us closer to the natural world. From lizards to lady bugs, from the inscrutable sloth to the resplendent quetzal, Ryan reveals some of our commonalities with earth’s creatures and hints at the lessons we might learn from them.Do lizards fall in love? What do sloths think about all day? Why is the blood of a horseshoe crab so valuable? Do starlings flock for fun? Can a parrot serve as a therapist? Do turtles ever grow bored with their long lives? Why would a crow foster a kitten? Can snails be fearless?These are just a few of the questions Ryan poses in Strange Company as she invites the reader on a wild journey through land, sea and sky. While these essays acknowledge our responsibility to Mother Nature, the insights they offer are affirmative and heartening. With her precise, elegant prose, Ryan draws us into the tantalizing world of animals and their oddities.</p>

Strange Company

Literature & Fiction

Ryan, Jean

Essays & Correspondence

MadeMark Publishing

<p>Jean Ryan's debut collection tells stories of nature and of human nature. The characters who inhabit Jean Ryan's graceful, imaginative collection of stories are survivors of accidents and acts of nature, of injuries both physical and emotional. Ryan writes of beauty and aging, of love won and lost-with characters enveloped in the mysteries of the natural world and the animal kingdom. In "Greyhound," a woman brings home a rescued dog for her troubled partner in hopes that they might heal one another-while the dog in "What Gretel Knows" is the keeper of her owner's deepest secrets. In "Migration," a recently divorced woman retreats to a lakefront cabin where she is befriended by a mysterious Canada goose just as autumn begins to turn to winter. As a tornado ravages three towns in "The Spider in the Sink," a storm chaser's wife spares the life of a spider as she anxiously waits for her husband to return. And in "A Sea Change," a relationship falls victim to a woman's obsession with the world below the waves. The world is at once a beautiful and perilous place, Jean Ryan's stories tell us, and our lives are defined by the shelters we build.</p>

Survival Skills: Stories

Short Stories & Anthologies

Ashland Creek Press

A Day Like This

Poetry

Kelsay Books

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