Just Beyond Harmony

Just Beyond Harmony

By Gaydell Collier

In 1963, at the Summit of Interstate 80, Gaydell and Roy Collier with their four young children, tumble out of ancient vehicles laden with cats and belongings and gaze off at snow-crested peaks and down at the Big Laramie River twisting through the valley where they will make their home after a 2,000 mile journey from the East Coast. Just beyond the little community of Harmony, Wyoming, they settle into a rustic cabin tucked beneath cottonwoods next to an everchanging river. But the pump over the kitchen sink hisses when someone passes by, the tyrant woodbox dominates their days, and they never know what creature they might encounter on a nighttime trip to the privy. With commitment, humor, optimism, and perhaps a touch of insanity, they struggle to earn their place in the community.

• • 978-0-931271-98-4 • trade paper •interior illustrations • 256 pp • $17.95ORDER NOW
• • 978-0-931271-97-7 • limited edition hardcover • signed and numbered with a dust jacket • 256 pp • $35.00 ORDER NOW
• • Audio Book: CIPA Award Winner. Read by Diana Andrade. Unabridged. Brook Forest Voices, $19.95 ORDER NOW

Just Beyond Harmony

By Gaydell Collier

"Gaydell Collier has penned a graceful story of dreams and family adjustment, of challenge and community and, most of all, a story of landscapes and how they shape us into beings we might never have imagined."
•• Jane Kirkpatrick award-winning author of A Flickering Light and Homestead

"Gaydell Collier’s delightful sense of humor never undermines her frankness and honesty, and she reminds us that isolation, wind, cold, and difficulties are the other side of the West’s natural beauty, opportunity, open space, and freedom. Just Beyond Harmony belongs on a shelf alongside books like Elinore Pruitt Stewart’s Letters of a Woman Homesteader, Hughie Call’s Golden Fleece, and Ivan Doig’s Heart Earth."
•• Robert Roripaugh former Wyoming Poet Laureate; Wrangler Award, Honor Thy Father

"Great painters invite us to pause and look into the center of a new experience. Such a center exists within the beautifully rendered pages of this book and rekindles your belief in the importance of family."
•• Page Lambert In Search of Kinship: Modern Pioneering on the Western Landscape

"A warm, wonderful story, written with depth, humor, and faith. It deserves a place on every bookshelf, especially in the West."
•• Jeanne Williams author of 69 books, including 4 Western Writers of America Spur winners

"To say that Just Beyond Harmony is the story of the time spent in that not-exactly-idyllic cabin by the river is to sell it very short. This book is so much more: a testament to the power of dreams and the ability to thrive on plenty of love and imagination, if not much money or conveniences; a coming-of-age-story chronicling Collier's blossoming as a mother, writer and a person with dreams of her own; a love song to a harsh and beautiful place. Perhaps most of all, it is a testament to one woman's unflappable sense of humor, clear-eyed wisdom, and steady belief that life will come out not just all right, but wonderfully, improbably well. Somehow. And in Collier's hands, it does."
••Susan J. Tweit, Story Circle Book Review

Just Beyond Harmony

By Gaydell Collier

Author retells segment from the book on video:

Print interview and review

• • Audio Book: CIPA Award Winner. Read by Diana Andrade. Unabridged. Brook Forest Voices, $19.95 ORDER NOW

Gaydell Collier

Gaydell Collier, author of Just Beyond Harmony, lives on her ranch in Wyoming's Black Hills where the family moved after leaving the Harmony community in 1977. Inspired by the beauty of land and wildlife, she writes, walks the hills with her dog Maxie, and looks forward to visits from children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren.

Collier co-authored three books on horses and horsemanship for Doubleday (including Basic Horsemanship: English and Western) and co-edited three collections of women's writing for Houghton-Mifflin (including Leaning Into the Wind). Her essays, articles, and poetry have appeared in a variety of publications and anthologies, and she has given numerous workshops and presentations on journaling, memoir, and women's writing in the West.

In 2004 she received the Wyoming Governor's Arts Award for Literature.