“Written with the naturalistic zeal of Annie Dillard and the confessional spirit of St. Augustine, Pilgrim River is the story of an ordinary life’s extraordinary journey. It is a story of pursuing—and being pursued by—God. I finished the last page with a lump in my throat that won’t quickly go away.”
— NANCY NORDENSON
author of Finding Livelihood: A Progress of Work and Leisure
“Ken Garcia’s Pilgrim River flows from the wild headwaters of youth through the fretful meanderings of middle life into the sometimes placid, sometimes turbid, waters of later years. At its heart is the story of an often-troubled soul searching for its footing, then its calling, in the wilderness of an immanent and increasingly resplendent God. Filled with profligate yearnings that in time mature into a balanced Catholic faith, it echoes Thomas Merton’s The Seven Storey Mountain and Augustine’s Confessions. Yet, in its evocations of the natural world and its honest depiction of a tortured journey toward hope and love, it stands alone.”
— MICHAEL N. MCGREGOR
author of Pure Act: the Uncommon Life of Robert Lax
“At once luminous, tragic, and hopeful, this memoir is balanced on the edge of belief and doubt, of knowing and unknowing. Pilgrim River invites the reader into the heart and life of a man haunted by the call of Spirit. This is a book to be read and reread, a companion for those who seek—for the God-haunted, the wanderer, the misfit. A sense of divine presence in all things—especially in the margins—hums within the pages of this memoir.”
— LISA OHLEN HARRIS
author of The Fifth Season and Through the Veil
“Ken Garcia’s Pilgrim River is an extraordinarily fascinating memoir, brutally honest, often painfully so. Unlike many spiritual autobiographies, Garcia resists the temptation to paint a portrait of himself as hero, or as reformed reprobate, and avoids the lure of creating a false happy ending. The prose is full of grace and beauty, pain and confusion, and we realize that Garcia, though he speaks for himself, actually describes us all. Pilgrim River is a postmodern Everyman tale.”
— MICHAEL MARTIN
author of The Incarnation of the Poetic Word
Kenneth Garcia is Associate Director of the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts at the University of Notre Dame. His literary work has appeared in journals such as The Gettysburg Review, Southwest Review, Saint Katherine Review, Notre Dame Magazine, and Hunger Mountain. His essays have been selected for note in Best American Essays (2015 and 2016), and finalists for the Hunger Mountain Creative Nonfiction Essay Prize and the Waterston Desert Writing Prize.
