Chattermarks

By Kurt Hoelting
May 3, 2010

My new book The Circumference of Home: One Man’s Yearlong Quest for a Radical Local Life grew quite seamlessly out of a yearlong experiment in car-free local living in 2008. I had been concerned about climate change since it first surfaced as an issue in the 1980’s. Yet my own carbon footprint had only grown larger in the ensuing years. The gap between what I knew to be true, and how I am actually living my life, had grown steadily larger. My wake up call came after I took my own carbon footprint online. I thought I’d do fairly well. After all, I was driving a hybrid car, actively recycling, keeping my thermostat low. But I was also flying a lot for work and pleasure, not noticing how thoroughly this jet travel was trumping all my other conservation efforts. I was shocked to see the size of the discrepancy between the two.

Yet fashioning an appropriate response proved elusive. I was too enmeshed in my high-carbon lifestyle to see any obvious way out of the conundrum. Feeling thoroughly stuck in the mire of this contradiction, I found myself sliding into a chronic depression. I had almost given up finding a way forward at all when the genesis of a creative response ambushed me one morning over breakfast with a friend. “What would it be like,” I found myself musing, “if I didn’t get into a car for a year? What would it be like if I spent an entire year living car-free within walking distance of home.”

Something in the audacity of this idea grabbed hold of me and wouldn’t let me go. I started scheming about places close to home that I could explore under my own power, hidden gems I had neglected in my rush to more distant places. I drew a circle on the map sixty miles in radius with my home at the center – a circle that traced a nearly perfect circumference around the Puget Sound basin. I took a sabbatical from all work and travel that would take me outside this circle, and on the winter solstice in 2007 I parked my car in the garage for a full year. Armed with my boots, a bicycle and a kayak, and public transportation, I set off on the adventure of a lifetime.

» Continue reading Reflections on “The Circumference of Home”

John Miles will read from his book Koma Kulshan at Village Books on Sat, May 1, at 7 pm. Photo by Brett Baunton.

Mount Baker was officially named by George Vancouver for Lieutenant Joseph Baker of the good ship Discovery who directed his captain’s attention to the dominant white peak on the eastern horizon in 1792. Discovery had dropped anchor in Dungeness Bay on the northeast shore of the Olympic Peninsula. Vancouver was impressed, and since he was naming everything encountered on his historic voyage, honored his lieutenant by attaching his name to this great peak. Thus did this mountain come to bear the name of an otherwise obscure British naval officer.

Native people had various names for the peak, but to early white man’s ears the name spoken by the Nooksack people seemed to be “Koma Kulshan” which, they thought, must be the Indian name for the great peak – but it was not. The phrase kwomae klelsaen can be translated “go up high or way back in the mountains shooting.” So, the phrase which sounded like “koma Kulshan” to the white ear referred to the region of the mountain, not the mountain itself. My book, Koma Kulshan: The Story of Mount Baker, takes the Indian meaning and tells tales of the mountain and the region around it.

I am delighted to have a new edition of Koma Kulshan hot off the press after more than two decades. The original research and writing of this book, which was my first, occurred in the late 1970s and early 1980s, with publication by The Mountaineers in 1984. It sold well, but went out of print around 1990. For many years I hoped to revise and reissue it, but the publisher had moved on to other priorities, so it languished. Then, in the summer of 2009, Chuck Robinson of Village Books, the great independent bookstore in Bellingham, approached me with an idea.

Chuck is an extraordinary entrepreneur and is always trying (with success) to keep his independent bookstore flourishing in this age of on-line and big-box bookstores. He was thinking of going into the publishing-on-demand business by installing an Espresso publishing machine in the store. Would I be interested in publishing my two North Cascades books (the other is my edited Impressions of the North Cascades) this way? I would and we have done it. Impressions became available in late fall, and Koma Kulshan in March.

» Continue reading Koma Kulshan

We’re getting ready for Barry Lopez’s visit to Seattle and couldn’t be more excited. We’re meeting him tonight at a private reception near Seward Park, and then co-hosting his presentation “Speak, Landscape” at Benaroya Hall in downtown Seattle tomorrow night, April 7. Inbetween, Barry will be doing an interview on KUOW 90.3 FM with Steve Scheer at 9 am and visiting a creative writing class at Roosevelt High School with the Writers in the Schools program.

If you don’t already have your ticket, Seattle Arts & Lectures is offering a special deal on them to all “Fans” on North Cascades Institute’s Facebook page. Tickets are available online, by phone at (206) 621-2230 or at the Benaroya Hall box office beginning at 6pm. The Institute will be tabling our exhibit in the lobby, handing our information on 2010 Learning Center programs and selling the beautiful Barry Lopez poster we designed using Rebecca Allan’s fascinating tondo paintings — come by and say hello!

We’ll leave you with this introspective biographical essay Barry has posted to his website:

For most of my writing life I’ve been driven, like other writers and artists, to explore. The shape this took from the start was geographical, bibliographical, and conversational–I traveled widely, read voraciously, and sought out stimulating conversation. Central to the ideas I developed about what it means to be a writer was the need to remain conscious of the voices I encountered while traveling, reading, and conversing. The voices from two communities, in particular, held my attention: the circle of artists and writers with whom I felt the greatest creative camaraderie, and the group of people–family, friends, mentors, professional colleagues–to whom I felt most beholden. This latter group eventually came to include readers interested in the sorts of things I was trying to illuminate, people with whom I imagine I share a common fate.

A dangerous bit of American folklore is that our social, environmental, and political problems, which grow more ominous by the day, call for the healing touch of a genius. They do, but if we’re intent on waiting for some such remarkable individual to show up we can count on disappointment. The solution to what threatens us, however, is already here, in another form. It’s in our diverse communities. Most often we recognize the quality of genius in an individual man or woman; but the source of that genius lies with the complicated network of carefully tended relationships that sets a vibrant human community apart from a solely political community.

» Continue reading Barry Lopez in Seattle tomorrow, KUOW interview at 9 am

Kathleen Dean Moore is one of the finest writers in our country, a great teacher and generous spirit. We’ve gotten to know her over the past few years as she has been an instructor in our Thunder Arm Writing Retreat at the Learning Center, teaching writing skills alongside Rick Bass, Holly Hughes, Gary Ferguson, Ana Maria Spagna and Jim Bertolino. So, when we received a copy of her new book Wild Comfort: The Solace of Nature, published in early March by Shambhala, we were excited to plunge in to it and see what she has turned her attention to. Even better, we learned that she will be reading in Bellingham on April 2 and Seattle on April 3 (details and more dates at the end of the post).

In anticipation of her visit to the Fourth Corner, we struck up a conversation with Kathleen via email about her new publication.

NCI: What is Wild Comfort about? What were your motives in composing it?

KDM: Wild Comfort is about the healing power of the wet, wild world. Why does the sound of moving water calm us? What explains the gladness we feel in the return of tides, the return of spring, reliable morning after returning morning, bright in our eyes even if they are closed, or crying? How does the Earth transform dark into light, death into life, sorrow into a kind of peace that opens us to the wonder and solace of the world?

NCI: What did you learn in the writing of it? Did you end up somewhere different than where you started?

KDM: I had started out to write a book about happiness, examining times of gladness and by that means learning how to live.  But events overtook me, death after death, and my book became a different journey toward learning how to live.  Even though I was still writing about what I love the most — floating in fog, pitching camp in the desert, tracking buzzards and whales — I found myself on the trail of the hardest questions I know. How do we restore meaning to lives suddenly unmoored?  How can grief bring us into the deepest currents of life, and so connect us to sources of wonder and solace? How do we find the way to celebration and the courage to be glad again?

NCI: Do you have any specific hopes as far as how your essays in this book will be received by the reader? Anything particular you hope will linger in the readers mind?

» Continue reading Kathleen Dean Moore’s “Wild Comfort”

North Cascades Institute is delighted to be welcoming Barry Lopez to Seattle on Wednesday, April 7, and we hope you’ll join us for a one-of-a-kind presentation Barry is calling “Speak, Landscape.” Here’s the skinny on our annual literary event in Seattle next week:

Seattle Arts & Lectures and North Cascades Institute present An Evening with Barry Lopez
Wednesday, April 7, 2010
Benaroya Hall, Seattle

Join Seattle Arts & Lectures and North Cascades Institute in welcoming Barry Lopez for a special engagement at Benaroya Hall in Seattle. Lopez, a long-time Pacific Northwesterner and recipient of numerous awards, prizes and fellowships for his fiction and nonfiction writing, will discuss his recent groundbreaking work, “Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape.”

Tickets ($10-50) are available at www.lectures.org or (206) 621-2230

In his nonfiction, Mr. Lopez writes often about the relationship between the physical landscape and human culture. In his fiction, he frequently addresses issues of intimacy, ethics, and identity. Lopez deftly integrates environmental and humanitarian concerns in both forms. Best known for Arctic Dreams, a National Book Award winner, Lopez’ books includes Of Wolves and Men, Winter Count, About This Life, Resistance, Crow and Weasel, Desert Notes, The Rediscovery of North America and Aplogia. His writing have appeared in Orion, Harper’s, Granta, Outside, National Geographic, The Georgia Review and The Sun. His work has been widely anthologized and translated into thirteen languages.

Most recently, Lopez has co-edited Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape, a landmark work of language, geography, and folklore.

Lopez is a recipient of the Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the John Hay, John Burroughs and Christopher Medals, Guggenheim, Lannan, and National Science Foundation fellowships, Pushcart Prizes and other honors. Last year, he received the C.E.S. Wood Distinguished Writer Award, given to an “Oregon author in recognition of an enduring, substantial literary career,” joining the company of Ken Kesey and Ursula Le Guin. Lopez travels widely and has collaborated with a number of artists on a variety of projects in theater, music, and the fine arts.

Lopez lives on the McKenzie River in the Cascade range east of Eugene, Oregon.

Here is a pdf of an essay Barry published last year entitled “An Intimate Geography” to give you a taste of his thought and prose, and here is an essay he published in National Geographic on permafrost.

Photo by David Liittschwager

When we arranged to have novelist Jim Lynch appear at the Learning Center to be a Sourdough Speaker a year ago, our timing couldn’t have been better — Jim’s then-forthcoming novel Border Songs is set in Whatcom County near the foothills of the North Cascades and is populated with an astonishing amount of natural history of birds of our region. Border Songs was released last summer to great critical acclaim, including a review in Crosscut.com that claimed Jim “could be the best new novelist in the region since David Guterson rolled out Snow Falling on Cedars in 1995″ and a similar rave from author Howard Frank Mosher: “Border Songs is a masterwork, and Jim Lynch, for my money, is our best new storyteller since Larry McMurtry: deeply in touch with the natural world, the absurdities of our era, and the hearts and minds of his unforgettable and endlessly surprising characters.” (Amazon.com has a compilation of praise for the new novel too.)

We’ve got a copy of Border Songs to give away to one of our readers– to enter the running, leave a comment at the end of this blog mentioning a book you’ve read recently, fiction or nonfiction, that included a healthy amount of nature in it. We’ll randomly chose a winner from everyone who leaves a comment at the end of next week.

Jim will be at the Learning Center Oct. 10-11, reading from his novels and discussing what it is like writing fiction set in Washington State, as part of our intimate Sourdough Speaker Series. For only $95, participants get to experience Jim’s presentation as well as enjoy a sit-down dinner and overnight accommodations in our lodges; breakfast and a naturalist-led activity the next morning is included too. We know of at least one book club that has been reading Jim’s books and will be joining us — what a great idea!

We want to extend a special thanks to Jim, and all our Sourdough Speakers, for coming up to the North Cascades to talk about their work — they all appear at the Learning Center on their own dime, helping us to raise money to support our various Youth Programs designed to connect the next generation with the natural world.

Here’s a book review I wrote on Border Songs earlier this summer for the Cascadia Weekly:

» Continue reading Jim Lynch at Learning Center, Oct. 10-11; win a copy of his new novel “Border Songs”

North Cascades Institute is very fortunate to have so many talented and dedicated instructors leading a wide variety of classes, field excursions and retreats at the Learning Center and across Washington State this summer. Our goal is to help people of all ages experience and enjoy the mountains, rivers, forests and wildlife of the Pacific Northwest — so all will care for and protect this special place. We rely on the dynamic skills of the Pacific Northwest’s most knowledgeable teachers to help us foster these connections between people and place.

We’re excited to have celebrated author Rick Bass joining us for the first time ever at the Learning Center July 30 – August 2 for the Eleventh Annual Thunder Arm Writing Retreat. Having written so many amazing books — staff favorites include Colter, Where the Sea Used to Be, The Hermit’s Story, The Lost Grizzlies and The Book of the Yaak — it is wonderful to have him coming from northwestern Montana to Diablo Lake to share his prodigal skills and insights over four days in the peak of summer. We’re especially intrigued to have him introduce us to his brand-new publication The Wild Marsh: Four Seasons at Home in Montana.

Rick will be joined at the Writing Retreat by another out-of-town guest, Kathleen Dean Moore, a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and University Writer Laureate at Oregon State University in Corvalis. Best known for her books about cultural and spiritual connections to wet, wild places — Riverwalking, Holdfast, and The Pine Island Paradox, Kathleen has recently co-edited three books involving fierce love for land: They are How It Is: The Native American Philosophy of V.F. Cordova, Rachel Carson: Legacy and Challenge and In the Blast Zone: Catastrophe and Renewal on Mount St. Helens. Kathleen writes for Orion, Discover, Audubon and Northwest Review, serves on the board of directors for the Orion Society and the Island Institute and is co-founder and director of the Spring Creek Project for Ideas, Nature, and the Written Word. Whew! We’re lucky that, considering all of her activities, Kathleen has made time to teach at the Learning Center this summer.

» Continue reading 11th Annual Thunder Arm Writing Retreat: Rick, Kathleen, Jim and Holly in the North Cascades

If you know anything about Gary Snyder, then you can understand why we here at North Cascades Institute are incredibly excited about his forthcoming visit to Seattle on May 27. Strands of Snyder are interwoven in to the Institute, our mission, our staff and our North Cascades Environmental Learning Center, and his poetry and worldview have an almost totemic presence in our work.  The 50 years of poetry, interviews and essays that Snyder has produced has educated, inspired and illuminated many of us in many different ways. Some of us came out west after reading one of his books on the mountains and trails of our region. Others have been impacted by his writing about community, culture, watersheds, ecology and sustainability — concepts he was exploring decades before they became influential buzzwords in our society. I know of people that have become fire lookouts or trail workers, poets or environmental educators, Buddhists or off-the-grid pioneers in part because of the example Snyder set in both his lifestyle and his writing.

Has Gary Snyder likewise inspired or informed you in some way? Has a particular poem crystalized some thought or feeling for you? Did one of his essays change the way you look at the world ? Which of his writings have impacted you and why?

We’re curious and hope you’ll share your Snyder story with us. Everybody who responds to this post with a germaine comment will be eligible to receive a free copy of Snyder’s book Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems, a compendium of mountain poetry that is turning 50 years old this year. I’ll give folks a week to respond and then randomly pick three lucky winners, announcing them in the comments early next week.

» Continue reading Gary Snyder and “Riprap” book give-away

Though we haven’t coerced him in to a Sourdough Speaker Series presentation — we’re working on it! — Skagit Valley scribe Tom Robbins is definitely a part of the cultural history of our region. His first novel Another Roadside Attraction, published way back in 1971 and today a certifiable cult classic, was set in the Skagit Valley, and the La Conner-dwelling author recently penned the Foreword for Skagit Land Trust’s book Natural Skagit.

Robbins will be reading from his latest book “B is for Beer” in Bellingham at, appropriately enough, Boundary Bay Brewery on May 7. It is a testament to his popularity in this region that the event was sold-out months in advance. In lieu of getting to experience Tom Robbins in person, I’d like to suggest you purchase a copy of my recently-published ‘zine featuring the story “Tom Robbins Incognito: Tracking the Pacific Northwest’s Elusive Literary Outlaw” from the website MagCloud. It features a semi-serious, semi-farcical quest around western Washington in search of Robbins, from La Conner to Seattle’s Blue Moon Tavern, and it concludes with an exclusive enlightening interview with the reclusive novelist.

» Continue reading “Tom Robbins Incognito”

American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau

Edited by Bill McKibben, Foreword by Al Gore, The Library of America

I already own plenty of different anthologies of nature writing, but Bill McKibben argues in his introduction that “environmental writing” is different — “it takes as its subject the collision between people and the rest of world,” he explains, “…it seeks answers as well as consolation, embracing controversy, sometimes sounding an alarm.”

If this distinction is too vague, you’ll soon get a sense of what this genre contains as you read the many different authors collected herein: Whitman, Muir, Pinchot and Roosevelt; Jeffers, Snyder and Abbey; Carson, Eiseley and Leopold; Lopez, Dillard, Bass, Momaday and McPhee; Pollan, Kingsolver and Solnit. Aside from the rousing, incisive, often epochal classics, McKibben makes some surprising choices, too: John Steinbeck, Philip K. Dick, Alice Walker, E.B. White, R. Crumb and Joni Mitchell.

The overall feel of the combined readings is modern yet empathetic. The tones are often urgent but seldom strident. Humanity may be in precarious position on Planet Earth, but without the thoughtful ecological influences of these gathered writers, it’d probably be a lot worse.

» Continue reading American Earth: book giveaway contest!