Out of This World: A Journey of Healing » (1)

A Distinguished Professor of English at Iowa State University, Mary Swander has written several poems, essays, and books, none more profoundly stirring than her personal account of healing after a car accident, The Desert Pilgrim.

When a life-threatening allergic illness demanded that she eat only organically grown food, writer and professor Mary Swander built a new life in a former one-room Iowa schoolhouse in the middle of the largest Amish community west of the Mississippi. In this rich and engaging memoir, which follows the course of a farmer’s year, she writes from the well-named Fairview School to share the radical transformation of her life.