The stories are grouped by theme—heritage, holidays, and contemporary culture; family life; friends and other relationships; and dealing with differences. Individual stories explore additional themes such as the challenge of making do with little money, the process of moving to a new country and learning English, and young people's relationships to animals and to the natural world. Each story contains an introduction that offers historical, cultural, and biographical information. A general introduction and list of works by the thirteen contributors offer further avenues for research and discussion.

Once upon a time in Texas...there were liberal activists of various stripes who sought to make the state more tolerant and more tolerable. David Richards was one of them. In this fast-paced, often humorous memoir, he remembers the players, the strategy sessions, the legal and political battles, and the wins and losses that brought significant gains in civil rights, voter rights, labor law, and civil liberties to the people of Texas from the 1950s to the 1990s.

In his work as a lawyer, Richards was involved in cases covering voters' rights, school finance reform, and a myriad of civil liberties and free speech cases. In telling these stories, he vividly evokes the "glory days" of Austin liberalism, when a who's who of Texas activists plotted strategy at watering holes such as Scholz Garden and the Armadillo World Headquarters. Likewise, he offers vivid portraits of liberal politicians from Ralph Yarborough to Ann Richards (his former wife), progressive journalists such as Molly Ivins and the Texas Observer staff, and the hippies, hellraisers, and musicians who all challenged Texas's conservative status quo.

It could be argued that to tell stories is to be human. Storytelling evolved alongside us to provide entertainment via literature, plays, and visual arts. It helps shape society through parables, moral tales, and religion. Storytelling plays a role in business, law, medicine, and education in modern society.
 
Academic librarians can apply storytelling in the same way that teachers, entertainers, lawyers, and businesspeople have done for centuries, as education within information literacy instruction and as communication in the areas of reference, outreach, management, assessment, and more. Once Upon a Time in the Academic Library explores applications of storytelling across academic librarianship in three sections:

• The Information Literacy Classroom
• The Stacks
• Physical and Virtual Library Spaces 

A thorough introduction discusses the historical and theoretical roots of storytelling, as well as the mechanics and social justice applications. Chapter authors demonstrate using storytelling to share diverse viewpoints that connect with their users, and each chapter contains practical examples of how storytelling can be used within the library and cultural considerations for the audience. The first section focuses on storytelling as a pedagogical tool; the others include examples of how storytelling has been used as a communication method in sharing and developing collections, at service points, and in online spaces. Once Upon a Time in the Academic Library can provide ideas and inspiration for incorporating storytelling into your teaching and communication, and inspire you to invent new ways of using it in your work.

Fun and innovative exercises and prompts for creative writing students
 
Once Upon a Time in the Twenty-First Century: Unexpected Exercises in Creative Writing is a unique creative writing text that will appeal to a wide range of readers and writers—from grade nine through college and beyond. Successful creative writers from numerous genres constructed these exercises, including poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction to one-act plays, song lyrics, genre fiction, travel guides, comics and beyond. The exercises use a broad range of creative approaches, aesthetics, and voices, all with an emphasis on demystifying the writing process and having fun.
 
Editor Robin Behn has divided the book into three writing sections: Genres and Forms, Sources and Methods, and Style and Subject. In each section, Behn offers a brief introduction which explains how to get started and specific ways to develop one’s writing. Each introduction is followed by extensive exercises that draw on literature from classic to contemporary, as well as other art forms and popular culture. Examples range from Flannery O’Connor and Langston Hughes to Allen Ginsberg and Gertrude Stein, from Jamaica Kincaid and James Joyce to Arlo Guthrie and Harryette Mullen. Integrated within the exercises are apt examples of student writings that have emerged from actual use of the exercises in both the classroom and in writing groups. The book concludes with general advice and direction on how to get published.
 
Based on years of hands-on experiences in the teaching of creative writing in high schools, colleges, and after-school writing clubs, this volume of exercises offers inestimable value to students and teachers in the traditional classroom, as well as a growing number of homeschoolers, those who are part of a writing club or group, and independent writers and learners of all ages.
 

The complete outdoorsman looks back on fifty years of wilderness adventures to find answers to today’s questions.

Though he began his life as a Twin Cities resident, Calvin Rutstrum came to see noise, material wealth, and perpetual frenzy as the narcotics of the city dweller. Like Henry David Thoreau, he set out to live a simpler, more meaningful life. In his pursuit, Rutstrum came to appreciate the natural world and the skills necessary to survive in it. Part memoir, part guidebook, and part environmental treatise, Once upon a Wilderness is a treasury of wilderness wisdom.

Rutstrum reminisces about lessons that his time in the wilderness has taught him. He writes about a range of backcountry issues, including environmental preservation, cultural sensitivity toward Native Americans, the urban versus the rural, and the artistic value of practical skills. Through his thoughtful consideration of the pleasure and value of wilderness, Rutstrum offers a clarion call for a saner, more socially responsible and environmentally sensitive way of living.

Once Upon the Permafrost is a longitudinal climate ethnography about “knowing” a specific culture and the ecosystem that culture physically and spiritually depends on in the twenty-first-century context of climate change.

The author, anthropologist Susan Alexandra Crate, has spent three decades working with Sakha, the Turkic-speaking horse and cattle agropastoralists of northeastern Siberia, Russia. Crate reveals Sakha’s essential relationship with alaas, the foundational permafrost ecosystem of both their subsistence and cultural identity. Sakha know alaas via an Indigenous knowledge system imbued with spiritual qualities. This counters the scientific definition of alaas as geophysical phenomena of limited range. Climate change now threatens alaas due to thawing permafrost, which, entangled with the rural changes of economic globalization, youth out-migration, and language loss, make prescient the issues of ethnic sovereignty and cultural survival.

Through careful integration of contemporary narratives, on-site observations, and document analysis, Crate argues that local understandings of change and the vernacular knowledge systems they are founded on provide critical information for interdisciplinary collaboration and effective policy prescriptions. Furthermore, she makes her message relevant to a wider audience by clarifying linkages to the global permafrost system found in her comparative research in Mongolia, Arctic Canada, Kiribati, Peru, and Chesapeake Bay, Virginia. This reveals how permafrost provides one of the main structural foundations for Arctic ecosystems, which, in turn, work with the planet’s other ecosystems to maintain planetary balance.

Metaphorically speaking, we all live on permafrost.