Satellite

By Simmons Buntin

Trinity University Press, March 2025

A beautifully written love letter to the intertwining tendrils of nature and community.
– Joe Wilkins

How do we find a way to exist equitably in the world without exhausting our natural and cultural resources? Exploring how to create belonging, among the human and more-than-human world, is our essential work. Parents have the added responsibility of conveying this charge to their children in a way that centers hope and empowerment over guilt and fear.

In Satellite, Simmons Buntin delves into the idea of belonging—in place, time, family, and community—in 16 essays written over nearly two decades. The pieces range throughout the Desert Southwest, on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border, and as far afield as Mount Saint Helens, Montana, Vermont, Sweden, and even the moon (if a telescope atop Kitt Peak counts). Buntin examines the beauty and challenges of raising a family and creating more sustainable communities in the Sonoran Desert—and, more broadly, in any of America’s diverse cultural and ecological landscapes.

Satellite seeks answers to essential questions: How should community be defined? How do we protect heritage in an age of globalization? How do we find renewal following personal and place-based trauma? What forms may grace take, and how can parents pass that dignity on to their children?

Fortunately, that seeking is a responsibility both shared and rewarding, funny and phenomenal, for at every turn there is a new discovery, a new insight, a new integration between ourselves and the world that culminates, when we succeed, in a vibrant sense of place. In Satellite, Simmons Buntin searches for a balance between the built and natural environments and the beings that inhabit them in a way that enables us not only to survive but to thrive, together.

Praise + Reviews

“I can’t think of a better guide—to whiptails, desert super blooms, craft beer, constellations, photography, fatherhood, community, and, well, life—than Simmons Buntin. From Denver to Tucson, to the Bosque del Apache, Mt. St. Helens, and beyond, Buntin writes with equal facility about the beautiful, dynamic intricacies of the natural world and the many lovely, knee-buckling complexities of family. These wide-ranging, self-aware, astute essays will leave you enlightened and deeply glad—glad right down to your heart and bones, the feathery roots of what some of us might even call a soul.”
— Joe Wilkins, author of The Entire Sky and The Mountain and the Fathers

“Propelled by the fruitful tension between a powerful homing instinct and a genuine passion for travel, Satellite moves gracefully from the complex intimacies of family to transformative adventures afield in wild desert landscapes. Bringing a photographer’s eye to his incisive observations of both the human and more-than-human worlds, Simmons Buntin explores a range of fascinating experiences in a prose style that is unfailingly engaging and lyrical. A beautifully written love letter to the intertwining tendrils of nature and community, Satellite takes its rightful place among the finest work by outstanding Sonoran Desert writers including Gary Paul Nabhan, Alison Hawthorne Deming, and Alberto Ríos.”
— Michael P. Branch, author of On the Trail of the Jackalope and Raising Wild

“What I love best about Satellite is that unlike so many of his predecessors, Simmons Buntin is never torn between loving the wilderness and loving his family, between wanting to explore with his camera and wanting to explore with his young daughters. The love for one increases the love for the other in a sort of whirlwind of curiosity, generosity and deep feeling. These are thoughtful, detail-rich essays that are deeply engaged with the natural world and with humans as part of the menagerie. They model in the best way what I have lately heard called tonic masculinity, and manage to have a great deal of fun in the process.”
— Pam Houston, author of Deep Creek: Finding Hope in the High Country

“The best personal essays offer insights into the world as well as the writer. Simmons Buntin manages that fine balance in this collection, which ranges geographically across the American West, from his Tucson backyard to the slopes of Mount Saint Helens, and ranges autobiographically from memories of growing up as the son of a troubled mother to scenes of delight and anguish as the father of two young daughters. Readers will find him an illuminating guide as he searches for beauty and spiritual grounding in nature, a search reflected in the haunting photographs that accompany each essay.”
— Scott Russell Sanders, author of The Way of Imagination

“Simmons Buntin’s Satellite explores the ways we create and sustain community. Humans thrive in community, doubly so when the neighbors include the wilder life beyond. These insightful and lyrical essays ground truth those ideas. When his daughter raises a lizard, it teaches her about “the desert’s intricacies,” but also about relationships with family and human neighbors. When that same daughter has a traumatic accident, Buntin turns to Mount St. Helens to understand how renewal happens after a violent disruption. He writes of the beauty of nature and the nature of beauty, of walking amid birdsong “into the ballad of the afternoon.” He writes of heritage in America, where everyone comes from another place, as a shared act of creation. The range of the essays is impressive: he is eloquent in writing about the profusion of craft beers and soulful in writing about his mother’s death. Writing in the tradition of Scott Russell Sanders, Buntin has given us a beautiful book grounded in family, community, and nature, a book from which to take hope and inspiration.”
— Alison Hawthorne Deming, author of Blue Flax and Yellow Mustard Flower

“Simmons Buntin’s Satellite links us lyrically to expanses of wildness, recollections of familial experience, and the necessity to nurture both even as both nurture him—and us. It is at turns poetic and then prose, orbiting an ever revolving heartfelt artistry that takes the reader on a journey towards reverence, respect, and greater kinship with nature and humanity. I call Satellite an act of love.”
— J. Drew Lanham, author of The Home Place and Joy is the Justice We Give Ourselves

“Even as naturalist and writer Simmons Buntin introduces his daughters to nature, he must come to terms with his place in the world. His memoir Satellite, which is replete with biota and reliant on scientific fact, keeps yielding to beauty, building wonder, and sketching out hope for our children. Here is a field guide to a father’s love.”
— Janisse Ray, author of Craft & Current: A Manual for Magical Writing

“From the direct sensual pleasures of photographing wildflowers and drinking beer, to the more complex pleasures, and pains, of fatherhood, fraught with dangers from rattlesnakes to mood swings, this beautiful and deep collection of essays covers fascinating terrain. There is wisdom here, too, hard won, and in his pursuit of that wisdom I am reminded of one of Buntin’s heroes, Scott Russell Sanders, another essayist who, in the midst of our cynical age, is unafraid to launch himself on quests both moral and adventurous. A moving distillation of a lifetime of work and thought.”
— David Gessner, author of All the Wild That Remains and Return of the Osprey

“‘The discovery of beauty,’ Simmons Buntin tells us, ‘is simply a matter of refocusing.’ And that is exactly what these engaging and urgent essays teach us to do.  Whether admiring the Great Orion Nebula with his daughter or chasing a rare “explosion” of desert wildflowers along the U.S.-Mexico border or asserting craft beers as an expression of place or meditating on individual and communal heritage, Buntin invites us to re-discover the extraordinary in the seemingly simple intimacies—with people and places, near and far. Wherever you call home, Satellite is a guide to belonging and to cherishing ‘the sheer abundance of it all.'”
— John T. Price, author of All is Leaf: Essays and Transformations

“Satellite is a rich and warm and love-filled meditation, page after page after page. Generosity of spirit and constancy of attention imbue every one of the essays in this splendid shining collection.”
— Elizabeth Dodd, author of Horizon’s Lens: My Time on the Turning World