The Humpbacked Flute Player

by Sharman Apt Russell

From the flooding of southern New Mexico's Mimbres River in the summer, to the year-round search for community in rural America, Sharman Apt Russell recounts her experiences in creating a life for herself in the remote southwestern desert. She, along with her husband, chose to leave a faster lane in order to find a way of life not possible in a larger urban area: building their own adobe home, giving birth to their first child at home, and developing self-reliance and a deepening commitment to each other. Her reverence for the land, its history, and native inhabitants always informs her writing, and her intelligence and strong narrative voice ring clearly throughout this remarkable work. Like the best personal memoirs, the book is also about the events, people, myths, and emotions that define the days and seasons. Songs of the Fluteplayer, called an "enchanting book" by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, marks an exciting literary debut.

162 pages, Paperback

First published April 12, 1994

About the author

I am pleased to be considered a nature and science writer and excited that my Diary of a Citizen Scientist was awarded the John Burroughs Medal for Distinguished Nature Writing. The John Burroughs Medal was first given in 1926, and recipients include Aldo Leopold, Rachel Carson, Barry Lopez, John McPhee, and many others. To be in such a list.

My most recent nonfiction is What Walks This Way: Discovering the Wildlife Around Us Through Their Tracks and Signs (Columbia University Press, 2024)--part memoir of my tracking experiences, part introduction to the basics of identifying mammal tracks, and part call to reform how we manage wildlife in North America.

My previous Within Our Grasp: Childhood Malnutrition Worldwide and the Revolution Taking Place to End It (Pantheon Books, April, 2021) combines my longtime interest in the environment with my longtime interest in hunger. I began writing about this subject some twenty years ago, believing firmly that the goals of the environmentalist and the humanitarian are aligned. Healthy children require a healthy Earth. A healthy Earth requires healthy children.

Essentially I write about whatever interests me and seems important--living in place, grazing on public land, archaeology, flowers, butterflies, hunger, Cabeza de Vaca, citizen science, global warming, and pantheism.

I like this range of subject matter. I believe, too, in this braid of myth and science, celebration and apocalypse.

A little bit of bio:

Raised in the suburbs of Phoenix, Arizona, in 1981 I settled in southern New Mexico as a "back to the lander" and have stayed there ever since. I am a professor emeritus in the Humanities Department at Western New Mexico University in Silver City, as well as a mentoring faculty at Antioch University in Los Angeles. I received my MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Montana and my B.S. in Conservation and Natural Resources from the University of California, Berkeley.

My work has been translated into Korean, Chinese, Swedish, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Turkish, Polish, and Italian. That is really a unique thrill: to see your words in Chinese ideograms.