Morning is a part of everyone’s life. But relatively little has been written directly about morning itself because it is a background rather than a major theme. In this book of creative nature non-fiction, author Philip Lee Williams takes us on a journey that is scientific, artistic, and very personal. A self-proclaimed “morning person,” Williams looks at morning from a number of angles, including those of science, art, religion, and sociology. But mostly he shows us, in deeply personal essays, how morning has operated in his own life.

Writing in the kind of charged and poetic language for which he is well known, Williams takes us on a journey through time with morning. We hear of how musicians and visual artists envisioned morning, and how our concept of morning shifted radically after the invention of electric lights. But much more, Williams takes us with him on an odyssey of his own life’s mornings. Go with him and his brother on a morning canoe trip on a wild stretch of a Georgia river. Walk with him from dawn to noon on the 7 wild acres where they live in the southern part of Georgia’s Oconee County. But mostly, the book is a reconsideration of something we all take too much for granted.

Hardcover, Mercer University Press, 2006