In Narrow Escapes, memoirist Louise Nayer takes the reader on a journey filled with danger and romance. Haunted by a terrible accident and adrift in love, the writer travels through Morocco, to New York City and finally, on a solo journey, to California, thousands of miles from her home. Set in the early 70s at a time of cataclysmic change in America, Narrow Escapes resonates with those who find themselves needing to release themselves from a difficult past in search for joy and home. https://www.spuytenduyvil.net/narrow-escapes.html

Author Louise Nayer is a long-time educator and author of six books.  Burned: A Memoir was an Oprah Great Read and won the Wisconsin Library Association Award. She received six California Arts Council grants as a poet and has taught for years in community colleges, senior centers and nursing homes. She now teaches at OLLI UC Berkeley and at the Writer’s Grotto where she is a member.  She has given readings of her work across the country at bookstores, colleges, and universities as well as on over 60 radio stations including NPR. She is the mother of two grown daughters and a step-daughter and lives with her husband and dog in Glen Park, San Francisco.  louisenayer.com

As a poet and writer Louise Nayer has established herself as a singular voice of her generation.
–the late Robert Creeley

Narrow Escapes is a riveting, beautifully told story of Nayer’s journey across continents, but also through layers of grief from a childhood trauma, as she learns to find her way home. I will not forget this book. — Katherine Seligman, journalist and winner of the Pen/Bellwether Prize for socially engaged fiction for the novel At The Edge of the Haight

Nayer takes us on multiple journeys, across Morocco and across America as she leaves the East and everything she knows. She also must take a more difficult journey: to deal with the effects of a childhood trauma. Suspenseful, fast-paced and an important story of a woman finding her inner strength. –Julia Scheeres, New York Times bestselling author of Jesus Land and the award winning A Thousand Lives

Louise Nayer plumbs the depth of her extraordinary life—traveling the world, facing love, death and destruction—to remind us of a simple truth: the intrepid heart is and will remain our greatest ally at a time that threatens to make calamity ordinary. Nayer shines forth with the light of her luminous and poetic past to bring us urgently needed perspective. –Roberto Lovato, Journalist and author of the memoir Unforgetting: A Memoir of Family, Gangs and Revolution in the Americas

A haunting memoir tracing the path to artistic maturity, Louise Nayer walks readers through a journey fraught with danger and romance. Here, the act of writing poetry transforms grief into something transcendent. Suspenseful and beautifully written. –Lee Kravetz, therapist and author of many books including the novel The Last Confessions of Sylvia Plath