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Walking Words - October 10 & 11, 2008
Telluride, Colorado
Hungry? Walking Words feeds both your tummy and your creative spirit. The annual event begins with a progressive literary dinner from 6 to 9 p.m. on Friday, October 10. The evening features appetizers, entrée and dessert at three restaurants; 221 South Oak, the Cosmopolitan and the San Sophia, each served with a reading of either poetry, non-fiction or fiction. This year’s featured writers are poet Stewart Warren www.heartlink.com, non-fiction writer Greer Chesher www.greerchesher.com and fiction writer Tekla Miller www.teklamiller.com. A cash bar is available at all three locations. Cost for the evening, including tax and tip, is $50. Only 32 seats are available, and the event sells out every year.
Saturday, October 11, is devoted to short workshops in poetry, non-fiction and fiction held at the Ah Haa School in the old Depot. Each workshop costs $20 and is limited to 12 people. From 9 to 11:30 a.m. will be a fiction workshop. From 12:30 to 3 p.m. will be a poetry workshop, and from 3:30 to 6 p.m. will be a nonfiction workshop. No materials (except pen and paper) or previous writing experience are necessary. Books by the authors will be available for sale at all events.
To register for this weekend’s events, call the Ah Haa School at 970-728-3886. For more information, contact Writers Guild Director Amy Cannon at 970-728-6467. This program is made possible, in part, by a grant from CCAASE.
Chicago Humanities Festival- November 8, 2008 10:30 a.m.
Chicago, Illinois
Greer Chesher: America’s Best Idea—The National Parks
Surely one of the United States’ best Big Ideas was the creation of the National Park System (NPS). Wild public lands provide critical habitats for wildlife while offering citizens opportunities for solace, recreation, reconnection with the outdoors, and a fresh angle on the nation’s history. Inspired by this US example, countries around the world look to the NPS as a model for successful park and protected area management. Chesher, a former longtime National Park Service Ranger and now writer (Zion Canyon: A Storied Land and The Desert’s Hoodoo Heart: Bryce Canyon National Park), will review how “the best idea America ever had” came to be, question whether that idea is now obsolete, and discuss the importance to our lives—and to those of future generations—of open space and wilderness.
Presented at the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum South Gallery 2430 N. Cannon Dr., Chicago, Illinois
Writing the West - March 4, 2008 7:30 PM
University Forum Series University of Nevada Las Vegas Barrick Museum Auditorium
http://liberalarts.unlv.edu/forum.htm
Annick Smith and Greer Chesher are both children of immigrants, both were raised in the Midwest, and although twenty years different in age and different in heritage and culture, both knew their destinies waited to be fulfilled in the West. Annick moved to Montana and Greer to Utah when they were in their twenties and, though heartache and pain followed them, both found the West they sought. Their new lives in the mountains, plains, rivers, deserts and ranch valleys of the interior West inspired them to become writers.
Bill Kittredge's trajectory flies in the opposite direction. He is a son of the West whose roots go back to pioneer days. Kittredge grew up on an isolated cattle ranch on the high deserts of Oregon and escaped in his mid-thirties to more urban, artistic, and intellectual communities where he was able to become a teacher and a writer. Nevertheless, the country of his imagination--the place where most of his stories are set--is the country he fled, a buckaroo heaven transformed by technology, demographics, and the fracture of traditional families and values.
These two women and one man coming from different spectrums of western experience, will talk about how getting to know a place affects perception, writing, and identity, and how one’s work can, in return, add to and affect the story of that place. What is it about the nature of place that evokes creativity? How does the story of place draw new inhabitants? Do newcomers fit into a historical story or create new ones? Is the story these women came to live within real or imagined? What about Bill's story? What about the stories left behind?
The West draws “settlers” from faraway cities and towns every day. And many who were born and raised here move from one watering hole to another like their nomadic precursors. What are these pilgrims looking for? Many say they are drawn not only by the West’s natural wonders and open spaces but by an implicit promise of personal re-creation. Like the gold prospectors and wagon train pioneers and railroad immigrants who came before, they are seeking freedom from familial histories, societal expectations, and limiting conventions.
The story of the West has always included independence, self-reliance, and a certain liberation from history. In moving west, people bring to life the West of their and our culture’s imagination; a West that perhaps would not exist were it not for the power of story; a West in need of another myth--a myth of diversity and taking care--that will serve the people of tomorrow better than the old myths of radical isolation and personal freedom.
The chance to invent a place, create various selves, and wrap the two in a story is what writers do. Bill Kittredge, Annick Smith and Greer Chesher have imagined and created many stories, both lived and written. They hope they are helping to create a new story for the West. Join us as we bring these three together to talk of the importance of the West in life and in literature.
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