Prairie Sky is a celebration of curiosity and a book for explorers. In this collection of contemplative essays, Scott Olsen invites listeners to view the world from a pilot’s seat, demonstrating how, with just a little bit of altitude, the world changes, new relationships become visible, and new questions seem to rise up from the ground.

Prairie Sky explores the reality as well as the metaphor of flight: notions of ceaseless time and boundless space, personal interior and exterior vision, social history, meteorology, and geology. Olsen takes listeners along as he chases a new way of looking at the physical world and wonders aloud about how the whole planet moves in interconnected ways not visible from the ground. While the northern prairie may call to mind images of golden harvests and summer twilight such images do not define the region. The land bears marks left by gut-shaking thunderstorms, hard-frozen rivers, sweeping floods, and hurricane-size storms. Olsen takes to the midwestern sky to confront the ordinary world and reveals the magic—the wondrous and unique sights visible from the pilot’s seat of a Cessna.

The book is published by University of Missouri Press. The audiobook is published by University Press Audiobooks.

“Scott Olsen takes the travel essay into the air in the most spectacular way—this is a collection full of grace, style, lyricism, and sharp cloud-level insight.” (Colum McCann, winner of the National Book Award and author of Transatlantic: A Novel)

“I don’t care how many times you’ve been on a plane, you’ve not flown until you’ve read Scott Olsen.” (National Geographic)