Together, Alone : : A Memoir of Marriage and Place / / Susan Wittig Albert.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter University of Texas Press eBook-Package Backlist 2000-2013
• VerfasserIn: Albert, Susan Wittig,
• Place / Publishing House: Austin : : University of Texas Press, , [2010]; ©2009
• Year of Publication: 2010
• Language: English
• Series: Southwestern Writers Collection Series, Wittliff Collections at Texas State University
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (195 p.)

What does it mean to belong to a place, to be truly rooted and grounded in the place you call home? How do you commit to a marriage, to a full partnership with another person, and still maintain your own separate identity? These questions have been central to Susan Wittig Albert's life, and in this beautifully written memoir, she movingly describes how she has experienced place, marriage, and aloneness while creating a home in the Texas Hill Country with her husband and writing partner, Bill Albert. Together, Alone opens in 1985, as Albert leaves a successful, if rootless, career as a university administrator and begins a new life as a freelance writer, wife, and homesteader on a patch of rural land northwest of Austin. She vividly describes the work of creating a home at Meadow Knoll, a place in which she and Bill raised their own food and animals, while working together and separately on writing projects. Once her sense of home and partnership was firmly established, Albert recalls how she had to find its counterbalance—a place where she could be alone and explore those parts of the self that only emerge in solitude. For her, this place was Lebh Shomea, a silent monastic retreat. In writing about her time at Lebh Shomea, Albert reveals the deep satisfaction she finds in belonging to a community of people who have chosen to be apart and experience silence and solitude.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Prologue Documenting a Life -- Chapter One. Meadow Knoll: Getting Here, Alone Together -- Chapter Two. Where in the World -- Chapter Three. Moving Through, Moving On, Moving In -- Chapter Four. Dwelling, Rooting, Learning -- Chapter Five. Naming -- Chapter Six. All Our Food Is Souls -- Chapter Seven. Gaining, Losing -- Chapter Eight. Right Livelihood -- Chapter Nine. Alone, Together, Apart -- Chapter Ten. Lebh Shomea: Getting Here, Alone -- Chapter Eleven. Silence -- Chapter Twelve. Seeing Th rough Time -- Chapter Thirteen. Spirits of the Place: El Desierto de los Muertos -- Chapter Fourteen. Plains Fare -- Chapter Fifteen Storms -- Chapter Sixteen The Kenedy Women -- Chapter Seventeen Belonging to the Community of the Land -- Chapter Eighteen. In Place and Free -- Notes