A Bicycle’s Echo
Cover Art & Illustrations by Adam Wagler
An illustrated linked-collection of essays on cycling and the love of dogs from Laura Madeline Wiseman. A Bicycle’s Echo includes “Finding the Gap on Dead Man's Run” selected as a Finalist in the 41st New Millennium Writings 2016 Literary Awards for Nonfiction and “Seven Cities of Good” which was the Honorable Mention in the 2016 Pacifica Literary Review Creative Nonfiction Contest. When Laura Madeline Wiseman got her first part-time job washing dishes in a nursing home, her dad got her a bicycle, a Ten-Speed Olympia Huffy, and started her on a commuter’s adventure. Written in clear and compelling prose, A Bicycle’s Echo reflects on commuting, long-distance cycling, and refurbishing old Scwhinns. Crossing international borders by bicycle, riding through a Midwestern fog, and taking city trails where wildlife still forages, these essays consider the ways we journey, who guides our path, and the pets, friends, and family who welcomes us home.
In A Bicycle’s Echo, Laura Madeline Wiseman lets us ride sidesaddle as she journeys through headwinds and heartbreak, over mountains and memories, from the Midwest to the Mojave and beyond. Tender, thoughtful, and packed with vivid, chewy prose, A Bicycle’s Echo invites us all to consider what’s out there and how we might go about finding it.
—Brian Benson, author of Going Somewhere
Praise for A Bicycle's Echo
Echo Whitwer
"Do objects teleport us to other times?" asks Laura Madeline Wiseman in A Bicycle's Echo a compilation of essays about cycling. The answer is a resounding "yes." Not only another place in time but "a place reachable only by bike." Places that are beautiful, painful, educational, hard, healing and sweet. Both cyclist and non-cyclists are heartily welcomed into this delightful work. Enjoy the ride. —Clint Whitwer, organizer of 7 Cities Century Ride
Echo Mason
Wiseman pries open the heart of cycling as a sport, as a diversion, and as an escape from what ails you. Few today realize that bike racing was a premier participant and spectator sport in 1920s and 30's America, and Wiseman is part of, and an author for, the rebirth of this great human pursuit in the U.S. Whether you are a rider, a racer, a parent, and/or a reader, A Bicycle's Echo will spin your wheels and widen your horizons. —Lance Mason, Race Across America (RAAM) record-holder and author of A Proficiency in Billiards
Echo Benson
In A Bicycle’s Echo, Laura Madeline Wiseman lets us ride sidesaddle as she journeys through headwinds and heartbreak, over mountains and memories, from the Midwest to the Mojave and beyond. Tender, thoughtful, and packed with vivid, chewy prose, A Bicycle’s Echo invites us all to consider what’s out there and how we might go about finding it. —Brian Benson, author of Going Somewhere
Echo Farmer
In prose that evokes all the sensory experience that bicycling provides, Wiseman takes us along as she pedals throughout the Great Plains and the West. Along the way we are given lyrical reflections on the way cycling connects her to childhood memories, to her father and grandfather, as well as her beloved dog Echo. Ultimately, this book does what the best bicycling books do; it makes you want to get out and ride! —Daryl Farmer, author of Bicycling beyond the Divide
Echo Case
In these essays on intimacies—between bicycle and bicyclist, memory and body, body and landscape—Wiseman captures in quiet complexity those oft-sought moments when loss and beauty exist side by side and the rider “is nowhere.” —Jennie Case, author of Sawbill: A Search for Place
Echo Fraterrigo
From the shifting color of the sky to polite conversations with fellow cyclists, everything in Laura Madeline Wiseman’s A Bicycle’s Echo means much more than its initial glance. There is a meditative depth to these essays that transcends the page and encourages all of us to consider our place in time anew. Both insightful and rich, I found in these linked essays an invitation to reflect on big questions about the human condition and what it means to hold on whether or not the wind is at my back. —Melissa Fraterrigo, author of Glory Days
Echo Montgomery
How many words are enough to speak the language of bicycles?” asks Laura Madeline Wiseman to open a collection of essays that explores the beauty of making one’s way through the world by bike, human and machine working in unison. In essays at once questioning and nostalgic, Wiseman reflects on trips through the bucolic Midwest and the bike trails of the Southwest, weaving these travels with stories of her father and her steadfast canine companion. Much like the act of riding, A Bicycle’s Echo asks readers to cycle through a collage of landscape and memory, undertaking a journey of space, self, and spirit. —Sarah Fawn Montgomery, author of Quite Mad: An American Pharma Memoir
Related Links
- 2016 Creative Nonfiction Honorable Mention Pacifica Literary Review
- 41st New Millennium Writings Literary Awards Nonfiction Finalist