Temple Stream - by Bill Roorbach (Paperback)

About the Book

Populated by an oddball cast of characters, this book chronicles one man's determined effort-occasionally with hilarious results-to follow the stream that runs by his house to its elusive source.

Book Synopsis

Great blue herons, yellow birches, damselflies, and beavers are among the talismans by which Bill Roorbach uncovers a natural universe along the stream that runs by his house in Farmington, Maine. Populated by an oddball cast of characters to whom Roorbach ("The Professor") and his family might always be considered outsiders, this book chronicles one man's determined effort--occasionally with hilarious results--to follow his stream to its elusive source. Acclaimed essayist and award-winning fiction writer Bill Roorbach uses his singular literary gifts to inspire us to laugh, love, and experience the wonder of living side by side with the natural world.

Review Quotes

A celebration of life...deft and evocative, making small adventures loom large.

Bill Roorbach is a brilliant guide to the natural world. Gracefully combining deep knowledge, lyrical description and wry humor, his writing draws you out of your chair and into a world of streams and meadows and trees and bugs and beavers. And it makes you want to stay there.

Here is a narrator who makes you glad to be alive, giddy to be in his presence, grateful to love friends and family and dogs with generosity and abandon, to show tenderness and thus be saved by strangers,


Roorbach falls, for me, into that small category of writers whose every book I must read, then reread.



Roorbach has a knack for tapping into deep undercurrents and bringing them to the surface with the least amount of fanfare or fuss.

There are other autobiographical books about Maine, but Roorbach's writing is so compelling, his eye for the human condition so keen, that this is in a class of its own.

There is poetry in Bill Roorbach's prose...his lyricism touched lightly with irony.

While genuine in his appreciation of Nature, Roorbach is the antithesis of the smug and self-absorbed Naturalist...Temple Stream is a moving book: thoughtful, precise, about much more than flora.

With a voice as pure and true as the stream itself, Roorbach limns a lyrical yet precise portrait of the life teeming along one deceptively simple yet richly essential part of the natural world.

You'll be homesick for a place you've never visited.

About the Author

Bill Roorbach is the author of the O.Henry Award-winning story collection Big Bend, as well of the novels The Smallest Color and Life Among Giants, now in development for an HBO series. He also wrote the memoir, Summers with Juliet and the essay collection Into Woods. His work has appeared in numerous publications, including the Atlantic, Harper's Monthly, Granta, and the New York Times Magazine. He lives with his family in Farmington, Maine.