The last two autumn readings for Trace took me across country to the Pacific Northwest. My first stop was at the amazing Elliott Bay Book Company in Seattle, thanks to Rick Simonson, then an event to Powell's City of Books in Portland. It was a...
Thank you, Justin Desmangles. I didn’t expect this. To be in the company of writers of such beautiful and powerful words is a gift; to be chosen and celebrated by the founders and board members of the Before Columbus Foundation on its 40th anniversary is a...
One lesson I learned as a small child was this: the American land did not hate. People did. These were the late 1960s, when riots ignited cities across the nation. These were years when journeys with my parents introduced me to national parklands. Yellowstone. Grand Teton....
Last night Terry Tempest Williams gave me the honor of asking me to share her reading event with her. Terry is on tour with The Hour of Land: A Personal Topography of America's National Parks for this centennial of the National Park Service. With gracious...
The openness and maturity of First Lady Michelle Obama's speech last week at the DNC National Convention stand in stark contrast to ignorant dismissive responses by certain pundits. But the truth remains. The White House, United States Capitol, and the nation's capital as Washington, District...
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...
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...
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...