Sifting Artifacts: Essays

In her third book of essays, Kathy Bradley continues to ask important questions about humanity, community, and stewardship. Writing from the family farm where she has lived for almost forty years, she has long looked for answers to those questions in her interactions with the natural world–the change of seasons, the wildlife that shares the land, the sky and its occupants–interactions that provide a framework for making sense of uncertainty and obscurity. In Sifting Artifacts, however, she discovers a new lens through which to look at the world and herself. An unexpected visit to a doctor’s office introduces Bradley to the metaphor around which her questions begin hovering and in which these essays find their theme, a metaphor that causes her to examine what it means to be a writer.
I have spent much of my life searching,
she writes in the introduction,
mostly for the right words, but also for the right time, the right choice, the right person. It is because I have understood without ever saying, ever articulating, ever being able to articulate that nothing just happens. It happens and it leaves something behind, like a trace element. And what is left behind is never gone.
Bradley invites the reader to accompany her on that search as she moves chronologically toward the understanding that, as she is told by a friend,
It is not simply what you find. It is what you find out.