Alison Hawthorne Deming is a brilliant writer whose work often serves as an inspiration for my own. Her prose is beyond reproach, but I give it four and not five stars because the book as a whole fell short of my expectations. For one, I expected it to be a bit more focused on the "writing" piece. I'd mistakenly put it on my bookshelf with my craft books when it clearly belongs with environmental writing. Of course, she does discuss how the four places she takes us to in each chapter influence her craft, but that piece of it seemed to arise not as the purpose of her stories but more out of the fact that she is a writer writing about her life so the writing part of her life will naturally come up. There's also just very little to the book itself. There are 140 pages in the volume, but AHD's words take up fewer than 90. I haven't read other books in the Credo series, but I assume the others are similar. My critique, then, is less of the author and more of the publisher. ( )