Welcome to Wonder Valley: Ruin and Redemption in an American Galapagos
Welcome to Wonder Valley
You might have passed through there, maybe. Out for a drive with time on your hands you might have noticed the abandoned homestead shacks crumbling along a grid of dirt tracks scraped into this corner of the Mojave Desert. Wonder Valley. It's a place peopled by a menagerie of misfits and miscreants, artists and retirees, methheads and the otherwise marginalized. They live in the derelict cabins, fixing them up, some, or just making do in others.
Author William Hillyard came to Wonder Valley to investigate the death of an old woman who had succumbed, alone, to the dry, desert heat. From his first encounter, however, Wonder Valley had a hold on Hillyard. He found it haunting and otherworldly, almost unbelievable in its strangeness. It was like a lost island, a desert Galapagos in a sea of sand. In its isolation a people had evolved, a breed apart from mainstream society, many of them living on this edge, the edge of an abyss, an abyss Hillyard felt he needed to peer down into. Hillyard appointed himself Wonder Valley's Darwin. He spent years in Wonder Valley immersed in and documenting the resilience and humanity of these people in the face of mental illness, alcoholism, poverty, and neglect, until the line between his reporting on and becoming one of them blurred.
In the vein of Hillbilly Elegy and the work of Michael Perry and writers like William Vollman, Ted Conover, and William Finnegan, Welcome to Wonder Valley explores a darker side of the American dream, a side so pervasive, yet so largely unacknowledged by major media. Interwoven with the memoir of Hillyard's own fall and recovery from financial and personal crises, the book looks at life in a place where the safety net barely exists and falling through the cracks is too often fatal.
Author: William Hillyard
Publisher: William Hillyard
Published: 11/22/2019
Pages: 288
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.94lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.65d
ISBN: 9781733399920
About the Author
Hillyard, William: - Prior to embarking on this project, William Hillyard worked as a day laborer, a handyman, and in a guitar factory. He ran an environmental consulting firm, a restaurant, huge call centers, and hired, trained, and mentored hundreds of employees. He also made and lost a fortune in real estate, casting him into the downward spiral that sparked this Wonder Valley odyssey. An avid traveler, he has visited more than forty countries on five continents. he's crossed the equator by plane, boat, bus, and on foot. he's battled forty-foot seas in a thirty-five-foot sailboat, been chased by a wild orangutan in a Sumatran jungle, stared into the black pupil of a rebel Kalashnikov in the rainforest of Guatemala. He received an M.F.A. in Creative Nonfiction and Screenwriting from UC Riverside where he was mentored by L.A. Times Book Critic and notable author David Ulin. His work has appeared in magazines and anthologies including the Denver Voice and Best American Nonrequired Reading. He currently lives between Wonder Valley and Orange County, California.