So, I’m halfway into my US tour now. I sit typing this (and fiddling with a new poem, “Basin and Range"), in Liquid Planet, a groovy little cafe in Missoula, Montana. Missoula’s more renowned for fishing than coffee, but I’m here to tell you the coffee’s fine, and the mountains ring beautifully about. I have a reading tonight in Fact & Fiction, the independent bookstore in town (Higgins Street at 7:00 PM) and a class in environmental studies to lead tomorrow. Thursday I fly to Minneapolis to talk to students about the writing life at the University of Minnesota, and then at night to run an environmental writing workshop at The Loft.
From Monday 4 April to Friday 8, I’m in residence at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, where I give a couple of talks and share some classes. That’s the gig that brought me to the US, in the first place, though it occurs two-thirds of the way through my tour. Tom Lynch carefully timed my visit to coincide with the arrival of the sandhill cranes.
After Lincoln, a sophisticated university town on the prairie, I’ll head down to James Madison U in western Virginia for a residency there, courtesy of my friend the poet Laurie Kutchins. And after that a couple of days (14 and 15 April) in New York.
My reading in Powell’s, the world’s biggest bookstore, with Barry Lopez on 20 March went beautifully—thanks, Barry. Portland is a very elegant city set down in some spectacular, if wet, scenery.
And Scott Slovic and his students made me very welcome at UNR (University of Nevada, Reno), last week. Reno is the epicentre of ecocrciticism, and it was a joy to share some classes there, and make a presentation to Scott’s brilliant graduate seminar. Part of the welcome I received was a late spring snow squall, in which I learned to walk on ice. Reno, in the rain shadow of the Sierra Nevadas, in the ecotone between montane and desert landscapes, is an exciting and beautiful part of the world. They have the odd casino, too. My friend, the essayist, anthropologist, art historian and curator (of the brilliant Nevada Museum of Art) drove me east into the basin and range country on Sunday—right up into the palya of Black Rock Desert, site of a famous annual art bacchinal/festival.
Off to run a writing seminar at U of Montana. Another update soon.
