W. Scott Olsen

The Eastern Shore Writers Association is proud to showcase the year's best poetry, essays, short stories and cover art from two dozen members, as chosen by editor and author W. Scott Olsen. Spanning the Delmarva Peninsula, which includes portions of Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia, ESWA supports the professional networking and advancement of its members through meetings, workshops, and the annual Bay to Ocean Writers Conference.

On April 27, 2011, just days after learning of their pregnancy, B. J. Hollars, his wife, and their future son endured the onslaught of an EF-4 tornado. There, while huddled in a bathtub in their Alabama home, mortality flashed before their eyes. With the last of his computer battery, Hollars began recounting the experience, and would continue to do so in the following years, writing his way out of one disaster only to find himself caught up in another. Tornadoes, drownings, and nuclear catastrophes force him to acknowledge the inexplicable, while he attempts to overcome his greatest fear—the impossibility of protecting his newborn son from the world's cruelties. Hollars creates a constellation of grief, tapping into the rarely acknowledged intersection between fatherhood and fear, sacrifice and safety, and the humbling effect of losing control of our lives.

“It’s almost like ballet. Preflight. Starting. Warmup. The voices from the control tower—the instructions. Taxiing. The rush down the runway. Airborne. There are names for every move. The run-up. Position and hold. Every move needs to be learned, practiced, made so familiar you feel the patterns in every other thing you do. It’s technical, yes. But there is a grace to getting metal and bone into the sky.” Prairie Sky is a celebration of curiosity and a book for explorers. In this collection of contemplative essays, Scott Olsen invites readers to view the world from a pilot’s seat, demonstrating how, with just a little bit of altitude, the world changes, new relationships become visible, and new questions seem to rise up from the ground. Whether searching for the still-evident shores of ancient lakes, the dustbowl-era shelterbelt supposed to run the length of the country, or the even more elusive understandings of physics and theology, Olsen shares the unique perspective and insight allowed to pilots. Prairie Sky explores the reality as well as the metaphor of flight: notions of ceaseless time and boundless space, personal interior and exterior vision, social history, meteorology, and geology. Olsen takes readers along as he chases a new way of looking at the physical world and wonders aloud about how the whole planet moves in interconnected ways not visible from the ground. While the northern prairie may call to mind images of golden harvests and summer twilight such images do not define the region. The land bears marks left by gut-shaking thunderstorms, hard-frozen rivers, sweeping floods, and hurricane-size storms. Olsen takes to the mid-western sky to confront the ordinary world and reveals the magic-the wondrous and unique sights visible from the pilot’s seat of a Cessna. Like Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s classic work Wind, Sand and Stars, Olsen’s Prairie Sky reveals the heart of what it means to fly. In the grand romantic tradition of the travel essay, it opens the dramatic paradoxes of self and collective, linear and circular, the heart and the border.

From the lowest highway in North America to the highest, W. Scott Olsen takes readers on a journey that is more about going than about getting there. These are stories of travel as it is lived, essays about motion and the desire to keep moving. In a companionable style that puts readers in the passenger seat, Olsen describes his travels through the United States, observing the world close-up as it rushes toward and then away from his old Jeep. The Upper Peninsula in March, a one-day drive from Death Valley to Mount Evans, a harrowing trip from Fargo to Spokane in the dead of winter: these journeys and others offer opportunities for Olsen's unconventional narrative to take flight in exploring the intricacies of America, its small towns, its people, its roads, its histories, and its landscapes in vistas long and short that might otherwise be overlooked. In Olsen's hands, travels along the most American routes of the heartland become an addictive tale that will appeal to anyone who has ever wondered what lies over the next hill.

According to W. Scott Olsen, there are two reasons for flying. The first is just to get somewhere. The second has nothing to do with destination. It is this second reason, expressing our deepest curiosity and our longings for infinity, grace, and clarity, that Never Land explores. At once frankly philosophical and engagingly practical, the book combines accounts of touring in the air, the history of flight, the sensations of flying, and the technical acts and facts of navigating, piloting, lifting off, and landing. As it brings together many views on flight, Never Land also chronicles Olsen's own personal journey—his experiences and the shift in his perspective as he goes from green beginner to seasoned pilot. Whether reflecting on airmail delivery, plotting routes from above, interviewing veterans, learning aerobatic moves, or encountering history in the making, Olsen makes the feel of flying a reality for his earthbound readers. Albeit a personal narrative, his book is ultimately a celebration of aviation that brings to bear the intellectual precision, emotional passion, exhilarating risk, and incalculable reward behind the human desire to fly.

Hard Air is a book about extraordinary flying—flying under conditions that keep fighters on the carrier deck and rockets on the launch pad—a book about rescue missions and long, lonely flights to gather urgently needed information, about flights to places where no one should be flying: into hurricanes, firestorms, and deep, engine-killing cold. As a pilot himself, W. Scott Olsen brings to these tales a sense of wonder and adventure as well as a genuine, firsthand understanding of the dangers and rigors of such flying. In prose that deftly conveys the grit and grace of his subjects, Olsen transports us into the air with hurricane hunters who fly into the planet's fiercest storms, with helicopter pilots racing emergency patients to clinics, with Canadian pilots who fly supplies to the Arctic, and with heavy air tanker pilots who drop water and slurry on remote wildfires. Their stories afford a rare look into the working lives of pilots whose methods are extreme and missions are simple: get there, do the job, and get out alive.