“In an age in which we often find ourselves at odds with nature, Stafford serves as a guide and interpreter listening for the way stories name a region, a country, and with familiarity and affection, explicating the terrain for those of us who have forgotten or never learned how.”

—FROM THE 1986 CITATION OF EXCELLENCE AWARDED BY THE WESTERN STATES BOOK AWARDS

“Having Everything Right was a joy to read. Stafford is immensely talented with an unerring ear, the clearest vision, and a lovely exactitude of language. This book is sheer pleasure.”

—KATE WILHELM

“Having Everything Right is not just an Indian place name but the summation of a way of living on earth in a spirit of harmony, gratitude, and adventure . . . (Stafford’s) poetic eye to nature and personal biography knit together themes and ideas, which range from the unique fragility of the earth to the breadth and courage of the human spirit.”

—LIBRARY JOURNAL

“Kim Stafford’s senses are tuned like fine instruments to perceive, record, and draw memory and meaning from the quiet daily events that surround all of us, but are lost on most of us because we are still learning how to see and hear. These pages contain a record of what we’ve missed and an invitation to wake, and become whole.”

—ELIOT WIGGINTON

“The energies and acuities that make Kim Stafford’s poetry so valuable are wonderfully at play here in his essays: an eager and dilated eye for lore, both human and natural; a belief in the wisdom of the stories people tell, and an enviable gift for telling his own; as well as a conviction that the more things change, the more important it is for us to apprentice ourselves to the humble things that continue and abide.”

—JAROLD RAMSEY

“The effort registered here is not only to understand, as Thoreau put it, where we live and what we live for, but also to translate that comprehension into belonging; to achieve a connection with earth, time, history, and the universally common elements of human existence.”

—INDEPENDENT PUBLISHER 1986