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Debra Gwartney

Debra Gwartney is the author of two memoirs, Live Through This (Harcourt, 2009), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and, most recently, I Am a Stranger Here Myself (New Mexico, 2019), winner of the 2017 River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Award. She teaches in the MFA program at Pacific University. 

Author

Suffer Me to Pass

Summer 2020 | Essays

It was only a beer bottle I found in the middle of the trail, but it pinged an impulse in me to go. Get back to the car, give up our Saturday hike. I didn’t tell Cheryl, who stood by while I picked up the bottle and knocked off the dust. She’s known me for thirty years, since our kids were babies, and mostly she endures my jumpy nervousness. But a single empty beer bottle in the big, wide open of Oregon on a sunny June day—it was silly, even for me, to get worked up over such a thing.