Celebrate Women's History Month
Discover stories of the trailblazing women of the past and present.
Discover stories of the trailblazing women of the past and present.
Walking the Tideline
Regular price $19.95 Save $-19.95In Walking the Tideline, Caroline Kurtz solo hikes the rugged, beautiful Oregon Coast—an expedition of isolation, adventure, joy, and grief inside the emotional wilderness of finding one's identity after the death of a loved one.
In her third memoir, Portland-based author Caroline Kurtz travels the coast of Oregon on foot in her late sixties, tracing the boundary of sand and salt water, rock and forests, carrying her shelter and food as she navigates the edges of solace and resolution after the death of her husband. During her journey, Kurtz grieves as she reflects on her long, and at times rocky, marriage to Mark, whom she had known and loved since she was a teenager in boarding school in Ethiopia. As she navigates the adventures encountered along the trail—leaky tents, hitching rides, chance encounters, and beautiful landscapes—she intertwines the historical events of coastal Oregon with her spiritual experience, giving space for the shattering of an old identity and the planting of a new self, nourished and enlightened by the depths of a profoundly complex and considered life.
Kurtz spent her early years in Oregon before her parents moved she and her siblings to remote Ethiopia, where she spent her childhood and teen years, before returning to America for college, where she reunited with and married Mark. The two lived variously in Portland, Ethiopia, and Kenya, and retired to Portland, where Caroline now lives.
Salt in the Snow
Regular price $21.95 Save $-21.95From the sunlit courtyard of her family home in Mogadishu to the icy streets of Minneapolis, Life, Interrupted is a deeply personal memoir about migration, motherhood, and the enduring influence of a father’s love.
Raised in a close-knit, multigenerational Somali household, Sahra was shaped early by tradition and by the towering presence of her father, Noor. His voice, his choices, and his values became the compass by which she learned to navigate the world. But when she arrived in the United States as a teenager, everything shifted. As she built a life in America on her own terms, she examined how her father’s hopes and expectations both shaped and confined her and how the love between them, though complex, endured through every chapter of her life.
Told with fierce honesty, emotional clarity, and quiet resilience, Life, Interrupted is a memoir for anyone who has ever straddled two cultures, two generations, or two selves and searched for belonging in the in-between.
Today is Tomorrow
Regular price $18.95 Save $-18.95By 1996, millions of South Sudanese have been killed, died of starvation, or fled the decades-long civil war ravaging their country. So when the Presbyterian Church in the United States begins recruiting a development team to work with war refugees in the region, Caroline and her husband Mark are eager to help. But it’s only months before ghosts from their individual pasts whistle in to disrupt their marriage and their new postings.
Caroline finds relief in teaching and peace work in South Sudan, but the heavy responsibility she now carries for dozens of vulnerable families—coupled with the prevailing ideas of Biblical womanhood that put pressure on her personal life—makes it increasingly clear that Caroline is under-prepared for the high-stakes crisis in which she is now embedded.
Through a number of consequential mistakes and increasingly debilitating self-doubt, Caroline clings to hope that her willingness to stand with the South Sudanese will count for something in the end. A deeply personal examination of South Sudan at war—and a woman at war with herself—Today is Tomorrow shines a warm light on the darkest of places.
A Road Called Down On Both Sides
Regular price $16.00 Save $-16.00Caroline Kurtz grew up in the remote mountains of Maji, Ethiopia in the 1950s. Inside her mud adobe home with her missionary parents and three sisters, she enjoyed American family life. Outside, her world was shaped by drums and the joy cry; Jeep and mule treks into the countryside; ostriches on the air strip; and the crackle of several Ethiopian languages she barely understood but longed to learn.
She felt she’d been exiled to a foreign country when she went to Illinois for college. She returned to Ethiopia to teach, only to discover how complex working in another culture and language really is. Life under a Communist dictatorship meant constant outages—water, electricity, sugar, even toilet paper. But she was willing to do anything, no matter how hard, to live in Ethiopia again. Yet the chaos only increased—guerillas marched down from the north, their t-shirts crisscrossed by Kalashnikov bandoliers. When peace returned, Caroline got the chance she’d longed for, to revisit that beloved childhood home in Maji. But maybe it would have been better just to treasure the memories.
Caroline Kurtz speaks Amharic fluently and spearheads development in Ethiopia’s Maji District, introducing apples, solar energy, and women’s cottage industries.