The Joy Document:
Creating a Midlife of Surprise and Delight
Once you begin looking for joy, you can find it pretty much anywhere.
When Jennifer McGaha’s grandmother was in her late eighties, Jennifer asked her what her favorite age so far had been. “Fifty-five,” her grandmother answered, as though there were something magical about this stage of life, some deeper way of knowing from this vantage point. So, in her own fifty-fifth year, Jennifer began to take note. She jotted down her impressions of simple, everyday things that struck her as beautiful or humorous or intriguing and kept a list of all the accomplishments, large and small, that actually mattered to her.
These observations became Jennifer’s Joy Document, a radical act of reclaiming joy and an exercise in paying attention.
Broadleaf Books (2024)
Order Now:
Highland Books | Amazon | Barnes and Noble | Bookshop
Bushwhacking:
How To Get Lost in the Woods and Write Your Way Out
Trinity University Press, 2023
Part writing memoir, part nature memoir, part meditation on a life well lived, Bushwhacking draws upon the author’s experiences running, hiking, biking, paddling, and ziplining in the woods to offer readers encouragement and practical suggestions to accompany them on their writing and life journeys.
Firmly rooted in the Appalachian Mountains of western North Carolina, Bushwhacking is written in the vein of Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird, Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life, and Natalie Goldberg Writing Down the Bones.
Each chapter links a writing insight to an adventure in the woods, and a guide at the end of the book offers timely, relevant writing prompts.
Ideal for beginning as well as experienced writers, Bushwhacking honors writing craft traditions and offers fresh insights into how a life lived in close communion with nature can transform your writing life and, well, your life in general.
Order Now:
Amazon | IndieBound | Barnes & Noble | Bookshop
Flat Broke with Two Goats
Sourcebooks, 2018
Jennifer’s memoir, Flat Broke with Two Goats, blends stories of homesteading with the journey of two people rediscovering the true meaning of home.
When her family experienced a financial crisis of epic proportions, her world changed.
Desperate to save money, she and her husband foreclosed on their modest home in the country and moved to a one-hundred-year old cabin in a North Carolina holler. There, what began as a last-ditch effort to settle their debts soon became a journey that revealed both the joys and the challenges of living close to the land.
Told with bold wit, unflinching honesty, and a firm foot in the culture and traditions of Appalachia, Flat Broke with Two Goats is a story of loss, reckoning, and healing.
Order Now:
Amazon | IndieBound | Barnes & Noble | Bookshop
Jennifer McGaha 