Four different writers who deal with the natural world in their work come together to discuss their process and muse.
Chris La Tray is a writer, a walker, and photographer. His freelance writing and/or photography has appeared in various regional and national anthologies and periodicals. His first book,
One-Sentence Journal: Short Poems and Essays From the World At Large won the 2018 Montana Book Award. Chris is Chippewa-Cree Métis, and is an enrolled member of the
Little Shell Tribe of Chippewa Indians. He lives in Missoula, MT.
Heather Durham is the author of
Going Feral: Field Notes on Wonder and Wanderlust, an examination of a life of wandering in wild nature. With the scientific knowledge and observation skills of an ecologist and the existential inquiry of a philosopher, Heather immerses readers with all their senses in adventures, wanderings, and musings in wild places around the United States. She faces solitude on a deserted island in Maine, spelunks in bat caves in New Hampshire, chases herons on the Florida Gulf coast, and hides out with flamingos in urban Utah. She locks eyes with a cougar in Colorado, traps and bands hawks in Nevada, surveys owls in Oregon, and communes with coyotes in Washington.
As a nomadic and often reclusive introvert, Heather grapples with discomfort among her own kind and resists traditional paths to fulfillment. It is ultimately her intimate bond with the natural world wherever she roams that offers meaning, solace, and a sense of belonging both within and apart from human communities. Part reverential nature writing, part soul-searching memoir,
Going Feral is the story of a human animal learning to belong to the earth.
Heather Hansman, DownriverThe Green River, the most significant tributary of the Colorado River, runs 730 miles from the glaciers of Wyoming to the desert canyons of Utah. Over its course it meanders through ranches, cities, national parks, endangered fish habitats, and some of the most significant natural gas fields in the country, as it provides water for 33 million people. Stopped up by dams, slaked off by irrigation, and dried up by cities, the Green is crucial, overused, and at risk, now more than ever.
Fights over the river’s water, and what’s going to happen to it in the future, are longstanding, intractable, and only getting worse as the west gets hotter and drier and more people depend on the river with each passing year. As a former raft guide and an environmental reporter, Heather Hansman knew these fights were happening, but she felt driven to see them from a different perspective—from the river itself. So she set out on a journey, in a one-person inflatable pack raft, to paddle the river from source to confluence and see what the experience might teach her. Mixing lyrical accounts of quiet paddling through breathtaking beauty with nights spent camping solo and lively discussions with farmers, city officials, and other people met along the way, Downriver is the story of that journey, a foray into the present—and future—of water in the west.
Antonia Malchik has written essays and articles for
Aeon,
The Atlantic,
Orion,
GOOD,
High Country News, and a variety of other publications. Her first book,
A Walking Life, about the past and future of walking’s role in our shared humanity, is published by Da Capo Press, a division of Hachette. She lives in northwest Montana.
