For author Louise Erdrich the painted islands west of Lake Superior in Lake of the Woods are book-islands to be read. Her grandfather was the last person in her family to speak Anishinaabemowin with any fluency. So she tried to acquire what she had not...
Many rivers become one in Oklahoma. The Cimarron, forks of the Canadian, and Salt Fork vein eastward across the state to join the Arkansas River upstream of where it meanders between Ouachita and Ozark uplands. I drove in from New Mexico with an...
The journeys that once-living organisms embark on toward the fossil record, few rarely complete. Decay or disintegration destroys more remains than not. And rocks exposed at Earth’s surface don’t chronicle all of the planet’s past. Tectonic upheavals, such as the forces that made the Rocky...
How is the past remembered and told? Who owns memory? Upland South Carolina that June was a thick ripening green, grown from red-rust soil on the ancient metamorphic Piedmont. Two questions caught between my breath and humid air as I walked the path from the...
We had entered Grand Canyon National Park before sunrise, turning west onto the primitive road toward Point Sublime. This was in those ancient days when a Coupe de Ville could negotiate the unpaved miles with just a few dents and scrapes. My father had driven through...
Celebrate the release of Trace: Memory, History, Race and the American Landscape by Lauret Savoy. Her books include The Colors of Nature: Culture, Identity and the Natural World; Bedrock: Writers on the Wonders of Geology; and Living with the Changing California Coast. Travel through the past and...
My new book Trace: Memory, History, Race, and the American Landscape officially goes out into the world on November 10th. The Odyssey Bookshop in South Hadley, MA, is hosting the launch party and my first reading that evening. To say that I am both nervous and...
From the front cockpit of the biplane, the surrounding mountains and broad plain below seemed familiar to me. I couldn’t remember ever setting foot there, yet I knew the place. After the pilot handed me control and I turned the plane into evening sun, memory...
Launch Podium, a digital content marketing service in San Francisco, is collaborating with Counterpoint Press to build an online presence for Trace and its stories. The new website www.readtrace.com is up and running! It’s been a true pleasure to work with the Launch Podium team to...
The paradox that is our nation’s capital struck me as from a blow on January 20, 2009. That day nearly two million people gathered to witness Senator Barack Obama become the forty-fourth president of the United States, the first African American in this office. My...