Lewis Mehl-Madrona explores the use of stories for healing and personal transformation. By introducing new characters and plots in the stories we tell, we can perceive ourselves in new ways. The author draws upon indigenous cultures of North America, Maori, East Africa, Mongolia, Australia, and Lapland to illustrate the healing use of stories throughout the world.

Jessie's life will be forever changed when a mysterious boy from the reservation is transferred to her school. When Jessie meets Jimmy, the attraction is both instant and overwhelming. It's something that had never happened before and the once timid girl is driven to connect with him. But Jimmy Blackfeather is not what he seems. Dropped by a lone coyote on the side of the road, the baby's origins were a mystery to the tribe yet they took him in and raised him as one of their own. Intelligent, empathetic, and sensitive Jimmy grows into a stunning young man with gifts that even he can't explain. He wants to be normal, but normal is not written in the stars for him. When another coy stranger appears, death and danger soon follow. It seems that Shiye is toying with Jimmy and using those close to him to flush him out, but to what end? Join Jessie and Jimmy in this magical tale of danger and desire that leads to Jimmy's true identity. Sometimes the truth is more than we can handle. Will the truth destroy them?

“[A] gracefully narrated, arrestingly illustrated myth originating from the Karuk people” about a coyote who steals fire and shares it with the world (Publishers Weekly). There was a time when the animals had no way to keep warm in the winter, because the miserly Yellow Jackets kept fire for themselves at their mountaintop home. But wise old Coyote devised a plan to trick the Yellow Jackets and steal a burning ember. As the Yellow Jackets give chase, Coyote passes the ember to Eagle, who then passes it to Mountain Lion, and so on. The animals work together, using their individual strengths and abilities, to get the ember down from the mountain where it is kept inside a willow tree. This delightful retelling of the legend from the Karuk people of Northwestern California is enlivened by beautiful illustrations and includes an afterword by Julian Long, a member of the Karuk tribe.

A hiking trail through majestic mountains. A raw, unpeopled wilderness stretching as far as the eye can see. These are the settings we associate with our most famous books about nature. But Gavin Van Horn isn’t most nature writers. He lives and works not in some perfectly remote cabin in the woods but in a city—a big city. And that city has offered him something even more valuable than solitude: a window onto the surprising attractiveness of cities to animals. What was once in his mind essentially a nature-free blank slate turns out to actually be a bustling place where millions of wild things roam. He came to realize that our own paths are crisscrossed by the tracks and flyways of endangered black-crowned night herons, Cooper’s hawks, brown bats, coyotes, opossums, white-tailed deer, and many others who thread their lives ably through our own. With The Way of Coyote, Gavin Van Horn reveals the stupendous diversity of species that can flourish in urban landscapes like Chicago. That isn’t to say city living is without its challenges. Chicago has been altered dramatically over a relatively short timespan—its soils covered by concrete, its wetlands drained and refilled, its river diverted and made to flow in the opposite direction. The stories in The Way of Coyote occasionally lament lost abundance, but they also point toward incredible adaptability and resilience, such as that displayed by beavers plying the waters of human-constructed canals or peregrine falcons raising their young atop towering skyscrapers. Van Horn populates his stories with a remarkable range of urban wildlife and probes the philosophical and religious dimensions of what it means to coexist, drawing frequently from the wisdom of three unconventional guides—wildlife ecologist Aldo Leopold, Taoist philosopher Lao Tzu, and the North American trickster figure Coyote. Ultimately, Van Horn sees vast potential for a more vibrant collective of ecological citizens as we take our cues from landscapes past and present. Part urban nature travelogue, part philosophical reflection on the role wildlife can play in waking us to a shared sense of place and fate, The Way of Coyote is a deeply personal journey that questions how we might best reconcile our own needs with the needs of other creatures in our shared urban habitats.

Explores through words and images the stories and cultures of some Native American tribes.

Coyote Speaks describes the strengths, the strategies, and the resilience a therapist needs to work successfully with alcoholics and addicts. It reports what a therapist sees, hears, smells, and feels in the midst of treating those yet to achieve sobriety, those recently sober, and those with years of recovery behind them. In the Navajo cosmology, those possessed by Coyote are neither inherently evil nor morally lacking, but like alcoholics and addicts they suffer from a malady of the soul as much as the body. The provocative humor of Coyote stories illustrates the mercurial and quixotic nature of the alcoholic and addict in treatment, while evocative case histories from the author's private practice reveal the humanity behind a disease that binds two individuals in a struggle toward honesty, humility, and sobriety. Coyote Speaks explores the darkness of alcohol and drug addiction, the humility we accept when we acknowledge our limitations as therapists, and the redemption we witness as we attend to a disease that is at best treatable. It is about caring enough, sometimes too much, and about knowing when to let go. It is about the importance of examining the trickster in each of us, and it is about listening, when Coyote speaks.

Coyote is three years old when she leaves her family in Algonquin Provincial Park in Ontario and embarks on a 500-mile odyssey eastward in search of a territory of her own and a mate to share it with. Journeying by night through the dead of winter, she endures extreme cold, hunger, and a harrowing crossing of the St. Lawrence River in Montreal before her cries of loneliness are finally answered in the wilds of Maine. The mate she finds must gnaw off a paw to escape a trap. The first coyotes in the northern U.S., they raise pups (losing several), experience summer plenty, winter hardship, playfulness, and unmistakable love and grief. Blending science and imagination with magical results, this story tells how coyotes may have populated a land desperately in need of a keystone predator, and no one who reads it will doubt the value of their ecological role. Told through the eyes of a coyote, this is a riveting story with mythic dimensions. A work of creative nonfiction that adheres to the highest standards of wildlife biology. With deep insights into wild canine behavior, penetrates the veil of “otherness” that separates us from the animals with whom we share the planet. An appendix explores the history and current status of coyotes in North America. Native Americans considered them tricksters, messengers, and companions. Given the disappearance of wolves, they are even more critical to ecosystem health today. The author explains how, without coyotes, prey species are weakened by disease and parasites. Geri Vistein speaks extensively about coyote-human interactions to a variety of audiences. She is a nationally recognized expert on the topic and maintains the website CoyoteLivesInMaine.com. A QR code in the book takes readers to a hauntingly beautiful recording of coyote song.