Love of Nature Nature of Love Month has arrived on Wilderness Interface Zone, and we’re looking to publish love abroad.  Do you have a message of friendship and love you’d like to send someone? WIZ is looking for original poetry, essays, blocks of fiction, art, music (mp3s), videos or other media that address the topic of amour while making references to nature.  We’ll also take the flipside: We’ll publish work about nature intertwined with themes of love.  Besides original work you’re welcome to send favorite works by others that have entered public domain.  So if you have a sonnet you’ve written to a wild thing of one species or another or perhaps you’ve composed a video Valentine or an essay avowing your love for a natural space near and dear, please consider sending it to WIZ.  Click here for submissions guidelines.

Besides rolling out a (hopefully) plush carpet of love-art, we’ll also be running two WIZ, nature-laced, romantic DVD giveaways, Typhoon, starring Dorothy Lamour and pre-Music Man Robert Preston, and a Pre-Hays Code movie, King of the Jungle, starring scantily clad Buster Crabbe as Kaspa the Lion Man.

We hope you’ll attend the month-long celebration.  Come join us at WIZ and help thaw out February.

While WIZ loves poetry and heartily encourages poets to continue sending their nature-romancing verse, it’s perhaps time to follow nature’s own example of protean morphologies and bring more rhetorical diversity to WIZ’s environs.  WIZ is issuing a call for short, creative non-fiction and fiction pieces for publication on its site.   If you have a nature-oriented essay or field notes that run between 500 and 1300 words, please consider sending them to WIZ.  Longer essays will be considered if they can be divided into parts.

Nature-based flash fiction or short stories running between 100 and 1300 words are also welcome; longer pieces that can be serialized up to four or five parts will be considered also.  Excerpts from longer stories or novels up to 1300 words are encouraged–though pieces may run longer if they can be broken into multiple parts.

If you have written up adventures in the garden or the wilds or have a story that features a scary white whale or incorrigible pocket gopher, or even bees sleeping on flowers in a garden, please consider sending it. Fiction not directly about nature but whose drama unfolds against nature’s backdrop are encouraged.  Please read WIZ’s submissions guide before sending your work.  Then electronically submit your work either to wilderness@motleyvision.org or to pk.wizadmin@gmail.com.  International submissions and submissions from nature writers who are not Mormon but are comfortable interfacing with Mormons are welcome.

Profuse thanks to all the fine poets who contributed to the Spring Poetry Runoff, not only for participating beautifully but also for exceeding (once again) my expectations for the number, quality, and wide-ranging nature of poems submitted.    There really was a great turnout of celebrants and a beguiling show of high-quality verse.  And a shout out to Carla Martin-Wood and my son Saul, who provided pix to brighten up the site for everyone.

The poll to determine the winner of the Spring Poetry Runoff Popular Poem Award will close Saturday, May 14, but winners of both the popular vote and the Admin Award will be announced on or around Monday, May 16th.   So keep an eye on WIZ to see how matters settle out.  Also, grab your fav’rit munchies.  Twenty-five poems qualified for the voting, any one of which can cause you to linger longer.   Also: To ease the discomfort of exercising your agency in  a veritable candy store of choices, each voter can vote for his or her three favorite poems!  Instructions on how to access the poems are available in the post–please read all instructions carefully.

To vote, click here.

The winner of the Most Popular Poem Award and the winner of the Admin Award will receive their choices of  Mark Bennion’s Song and Selah: A Poetic Journey Through The Book Of Mormon (Bentley Enterprises 2009), A Metaphorical God: Poems ( Persea 2008) by Kimberly Johnson, or The Clearing (Texas Tech University Press 2007) by Philip White.

The title for my review segments is from one of my favorite quotes: “I have committed sundry moldy solecisms; yet I was not born to desecrate literature.” It’s the first sentence from Edward Dahlberg’s preface to his collection Bottom Dogs, From Flushing to Calvary, Those Who Perish: And hitherto unpublished and uncollected works. I tried reading the preface several times, but it was slow going till I realized it wasn’t an essay moving logically from one proposition to another, but a collection of epigrams. One of these days I hope to finish the rest of the book. I realized recently that while Dahlberg’s emphasis is clearly on the word desecrate, when I say it out loud I emphasize the word literature, as if I’m searching for what I was born to desecrate, or maybe what I was born to consecrate, or celebrate.

This first book I’m reviewing is one that I wish librarians throughout Utah, Nevada, Arizona, Colorado, California (southern, at least) and a lot of their patrons would buy, both to preserve and make widely available a unique part of western American culture, and for a reason mentioned at the end of the review. My thanks to USU Press for a review copy.)

Black and White and Should be Read All Over
A Review of Southern Paiute: A Portrait by William Logan Hebner, Photographs by Michael L. Plyler

Title: Southern Paiute: A Portrait
Author: William Logan Hebner, photographs by Michael L. Plyler
Publisher: Logan Utah, Utah State University Press, 2010
Genre: Oral History
Year Published: 2010
Number of Pages: 196+xii
Binding: Cloth, or e-book
ISBN: 978-0-87421-754-4
ISBN e-book 978-0-87421-755-1
Price: $34.95 cloth, $28 e-book

In July 2004 I attended a field school co-sponsored by the Library of Congress’s American Folklife Center and BYU Library’s William A. Wilson Folklore Archive, “Fruits of Their Labors,” creating oral histories documenting the fast-disappearing orchard culture of Utah Valley, a culture once spread all along the Wasatch Front and causing the weathermen of my youth, usually Bob Welti, to say, “Better light your smudge pots. It’s going to get down near freezing tonight.”

In the classroom portion one presenter started off by playing a chant he had heard at a Native American powwow. “What language do you think we’re singing in?” they had asked, and answered, “English.”

He played it again, and we learned that “Mickey Mouse, Minnie Mouse, Pluto too, they’re all movie stars at Disneyland.” (To hear the Black Lodge Singers’ version click here.)

He didn’t comment on the chant, didn’t need to say, “You can understand a lot of things if you believe you can and you listen carefully,” though one class member later commented on a man and woman who had come to the school from Egypt. The man did not speak a lot of English, but worked as sound engineer for their group and showed a lot of enthusiasm, a lot of care to understand and be understood.

Listening carefully and wanting to understand and be understood is a theme that runs through William Logan Hebner and Michael L. Plyler’s Southern Paiute: A Portrait. When Jeff Needle sent around the call for reviewers I wasn’t listening. I had other things to do. Sometime later Jeff sent out this note, “After Will scolded me for not taking on the Southern Paiute book, I announced it widely. Shocking silence. Is no one able to take this one on?”

I looked again. “Oh, this is oral history, like the field school.” And just as we produced an exhibit of the fruits of our own labors at the bottom of the grand staircase in the Harold B. Lee Library, this book started as an exhibit–portraits of 30 Paiute elders along with their words. And what lovely portraits they are, testaments to the dignity and beauty of the subjects and of the black-and-white photograph.

I didn’t open it up right away, didn’t take off the shrinkwrap–I had to finish up another project–but I kept coming back to the striking dust jacket photo of a white-haired man in a black leather jacket, arms folded across his stomach, head at a slight angle, eyes looking straight at you. He has things to say, and the dignity and strength to say them.

The back cover identifies him as Arthur Richards, and he looks like his name sounds, very Anglo. Do I sense some sly humor in choosing that photo for the dust jacket, playing with our ideas of what Indians look like? The direct gaze is rather disconcerting, and you might say one purpose of the book is to disconcert certain white notions about Indians. (Elders use word Indian throughout.)

“They find some jewelry or maybe a cat buried next to a Neanderthal, and they attribute all these notions of culture to them that they refuse to attribute to us,” Richard Arnold’s story begins. “That’s a pretty heavy racism when you compare badly to Neanderthal.” He also says, “imagine if someone came here in a thousand years and found all this stuff made in China; there must have been Chinese all over here. Like we don’t have the capacity to adapt other technologies, or trade, or steal. We’re not given that credit to think that way; all we were doing was trying to survive” (174).

I take it Arnold’s point is not that international and global trade didn’t begin in the 20th century (BC or AD), but that we treat people differently depending on what we think of their culture. Part of Hebner’s purpose is to document Paiute cultures. If we don’t believe that people have a culture we may may ignore their claims to basic human needs, water, land, religious freedom, language.

“At Stewart [Indian School] they used to whip us if we talked Indian. . . . They’d starve us, put us in a big closet by the matron’s room and take the light bulb out. I’d lie there and they’d give me some crusty bread for a couple days, just for talking Indian. Away for two days with crusty bread and whip us too. It’s still vivid for me now,” (134) Evelyn Samalar says.

Others say the same thing, but perhaps the saddest sentence in the book doesn’t come from an elder but from Hebner, “Today there are less than 50 Southern Paiute who can still fluently speak the language” (20).

The book ends with the Pahrump band, which has never been federally recognized, and with words about language. Many of the elders comment about the fading or loss of spiritual powers, but Clara Belle Jim says, “It’s not lost. It will cycle back in.” But there’s a problem. She talks about Joe Pete who healed her and left behind objects with power when he died, which could be passed to a relative. “One of his relatives, he said he dreamed about it coming to him. But he cannot speak Paiute language, so he cannot take it. It has to be in Paiute language.” And her last words in this last interview are, “That’s what it’s all about–the language. And the bushes” (184).

And Hebner gives us another telling sentence, “All the events for this project were scheduled around Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, as the majority of elders had dialysis on those days: ‘Even your food is killing us,’ observed Madelan Redfoot” (19).

But I make the book sound far too somber. True, 10 of the 30 elders have died, and many echo Clara Belle Jim’s words about songs and stories and powers being tied to landscape and language, but the book is full of lovely stories, full of the exuberance of a powwow dance, full of stories about powwows and dancing and healing and singing, and where Salt Songs and Cry Songs come from, and when they can be sung. “Herbert used to talk about the Ants. They’re in the Salt Songs, one of the Midnight Songs, I think. I can’t tell the Ant Story now. Even though it’s still officially winter, I’ve already heard a morning dove cry,” Lalovi Miller says (141).

The night before I finished the book KSL ran a story about an ancient village and burial site unearthed in Kaibab Paiute areas during dam construction, which reminds me that important as place is in this book, rich as it is in details about place and sacred places, I haven’t even mentioned the area where the Southern Paiute live and lived, southern Utah, southern Nevada, some of southern California, some of northern Arizona.

I knew the general territory before reading this book, but didn’t automatically connect it to Mormon history, so consider this comment from Darlene Pete Harrington, Cedar Band and Caliente: “I love this town [Caliente, Nevada] and I’m going to die in this town. Granpa Charlie and Gramma Queen worked hard to raise their family here. Charlie and his family came over here after that Mountain Meadows Massacre. Charlie saw it. He knew we’d get blamed, so they left Sham, came over here” (119).

The Mountain Meadows Massacre, and what it means to be blamed for something everyone knows you didn’t do, are threads in the book, important threads, and this is one of the first sources to record Paiute accounts of the massacre.

Relations with Mormons generally, and the Student Placement Program, are also important threads in the book’s tapestry, worth a few thousand words, surely, but two quotes will do for now.

Here’s Alvin Marble, speaking of some Mormon neighbors. “They didn’t ever talk about Lamanites, that we were cursed, that our skin color was a curse. They’d just tell us that oh, we are the chosen ones, blossom like a rose someday. I think that’s almost true” (104).

And here’s Arthur Richards, he of the leather jacket, who joined the Mormons at about age 30. “I went through the temple with my wife, had all my kids sealed to me. It was quite a thrill. But we got the dirtiest looks I ever seen from some of the Mormons in that temple. I served in the bishopric. I’m still a Mormon, but I’ve retired” (91).

I could write thousands more words about this book, and probably will, but I want this review to be short enough to read, so I’ll just say the book has wonderful stories about getting and using the healing powers of the earth, and the complexities and dangers of asking for, receiving and using the powers.

This is a lovely, intense, vibrant book, shimmering with the energy of that water you see in the distance as you drive across Nevada, except there is water in the distance if you know how to ask the earth for it, as Mathew Leivas’s story about praying over a spring, reviving it, bears moving witness (171).

I love the story Hebner tells at the beginning about him and Plyler “before a skeptical Paiute Indian Tribe of Utah (PITU) tribal council, where Michael said, yeah, here we are, two more white guys here to help. In the end we committed to donating all our royalties to the tribe. So in buying this book you’ve helped pay the elders for their stories” (6).

That the story has a matching bookend in Hebner’s introductory paragraph to Clara Belle Jim’s interview suggests some of the book’s artistry. “She sizes me up as if I were a horse at an auction and gets right to the business of how money will work for this book” (180).

Likewise the striking portrait of Arthur Richards has a matching bookend in a portrait of 106-year-old Margaret King’s backyard, abandoned Studebaker in the foreground, Paiute Mountain in the background. Hebner says, “if you held all 60 pounds of her to the sunlight, purples, reds, blues, yellows and browns would stream through her parchment skin” (34). These stories are full of such hues, new ones to discover each time. The picture itself gains hue when you know Paiute Mountain is now called Navajo Mountain. Why is another story, and there are lots of other stories. Come and listen.

In keeping with WIZ’s mission to help develop, inspire, and promote literary nature and science writing in the Mormon writing community, we encourage poets to help call an end to winter and sing up a season of flower and vegetable gardens, returning flocks, and light that takes the tarnish off the blood.

To view contest rules and submission deadlines, go here.

The contest will run from March 20 through April 8 or longer, if enough poems come in to warrant extending the contest. All submissions will be published on the blog, where they’ll become automatically eligible for competition as well as open to readers’ informal feedback in post comments. Authors retain all rights to their work.

Following the contest’s closing, readers will vote on WIZ to choose the winning poem in the Most Popular Vote Award category.  We will also offer an Admin Award to a second poet whose poem is chosen by blog administrators.

Winners will be announced within a week after the last poem has been posted and all votes have been cast.  The winners of the Most Popular Vote Award and the Admin Award will be given his or her choice of   Mark Bennion’s Psalm and Selah: A Poetic Journey Through The Book Of Mormon (Bentley Enterprises 2009), A Metaphorical God: Poems ( Persea 2008) by Kimberly Johnson, or The Clearing (Texas Tech University Press 2007) by Philip White.

So, if you have written a poem which mentions spring or one in which spring figures prominently and that fits WIZ’s themes and content, e-mail it to us at wilderness@motleyvision.org or pk.wizadmin@gmail.com.  Please review our submissions guide before submitting.

For the second year, we’re making February “Love of Nature, Nature of Love” month over at Wilderness Interface Zone.  To celebrate Valentine’s Day, all month long we’ll publish poetry, essays, blocks of fiction, art, music (mp3s), video or other media that address the subject of love while making references to nature.  Or it could go the other way around: We’ll publish work about nature that also happens to give a nod to love.  That presents a wide field of possibilities.  We’re seeking submissions of original work or you can also send favorite works by other artists that have entered public domain.

Compare someone to a summer’s day.  Or maybe you’ve never seen a sight so lovely as a tree.  If you have a sonnet you’ve written to someone dear to your heart–even and perhaps especially your dog–please consider sending it to WIZ.  See our submissions guidelines.

Also, February 24th is WIZ’s birthday.  We’ll be two years old—we’ve made it to toddlerhood without doing something unfortunate like sticking our tongues into electrical outlets.  To celebrate, a couple of posts will offer presents to our readers.  Because without you, dear readers, where would we be?

There’s more than a slight hint of thaw in the air.  The light is growing longer.  The first waves  of migrating Canadian geese have begun rolling through San Juan County.  Hen-and-chicks and stork’s bill are beginning to preen.  The coyotes are pairing off.  February is a good month to warm things up.  Come over and toss a log of love on the fire at WIZ.

Please submit your nature poetry, prose, or pix to wilderness@motleyvision.org or pk.wizadmin@gmail.com.  Please allow two weeks for response.

For those who are unaware, the autobiographical novel by LDS journalist and writer Coke Newell tells the story of “Kit” West (a Rocky Mountain loving name, if I ever heard one), who is a Zen believing, semi-hippie, pot smoking, vegetarian, guitar playing, hitch hiking, Colorado mountain man… who also happens to give up his life and lifestyle to follow Jesus and  join the Mormon Church. Kit, from the get go, had me invested in him. His narrative voice was engaging, his heart sincere, his principles rooted, his spirituality sublime, and his flaws beautifully human. His instinctual attraction to nature made me think of those rare moments in my life when I have been able to escape my predominantly suburban existence, and find myself in the wilderness, with millions more stars above me than I was used to and the wind swaying the mountain aspen peacefully. His inner romantic for the love of his life Annie was something that completely mirrored my own amorous strivings when I was younger. And his deep spirituality, even before his introduction to the Church, sealed my affection for this marvelous character.  He was a spiritual seeker, he was a lover, he was a poet. My kind of guy.  

I started straight into the novel and was cruising through it pretty quickly, sincerely hooked into the storyline and its characters. Kit’s mountain adventures and philosophical outlook drew me, his distaste for hypocrisy made me admire him, and his all too human errors and their aftermath made me cast a sad glance back at my own life.  But then I hit the snag… the novel went from conversion story to missionary story.

Now, the LDS faith has a strong tradition for its missionary narratives. It’s a powerful sub-genre within Mormon Letters, Theatre, and Cinema in its own right. But I was burned out on them. After a couple of chapters, I almost quit the novel altogether… I got a satisfying fulfilled storyline with Kit’s conversion to the Church, so I was almost ready to call it good and spare myself yet another missionary story. After a while Mormon proselyting stories all start to blend in together. However, several months later, the book still cried out to me, singing to me from my book shelf.

I ignored it for a while, thinking I would get back to the book, after I caught up on other reading and labored at the monoliths of real life. Still, in the back of my head Annie and Kit’s love story remained unresolved, and I really did want to see where Kit ended up after his call to Colombia. So finally I relented, knowing that I wanted to write this review and give the well written book a shout out, as well as really wanting to legitimately finish the well crafted piece of art.

To my pleasure, the missionary section of the book was intense, sincerely spiritual, and gratifying. It did suffer from some of the pitfalls I knew would come with that sub-genre… constantly shifting missionary companions and investigators made it hard for me to keep track of the quickly-on-quickly-off supporting characters, and a lot of focus was given to missionary culture, which took time away from the real relationship building that hooks me into a story. But the spine of the novel was still strong, as the Latin American background proved to be a wonderful canvas to paint on, and Kit’s spiritual journey remained the center of the novel. Not to mention the relationship between Annie and Kit (long distance as it was at this point), which I found sweet and quietly engaging. It even made me remember fondly my own mission experiences, as that aspect of the story really went past the cliches and went into the specifics of Newell’s own individual experiences in a foreign country. It also made me very grateful that I served in a more developed country like Australia, where I didn’t have to deal with tape worms and murdering drug smugglers.

There were a lot of stand out moments in the book which I am reluctant to share here, as I want readers to discover the trail of gold nuggets that lead the reader throughout the story. But what I can say is that the writing is clear, evocative, and poetic. I have to confess, I have never read any Jack Kerouac, which the style of the novel pays homage to, but the novel piqued my curiosity enough to want to look him up. Even though the supporting characters were on too briefly to really establish a relationship with, the central core of Kit and Annie were more than enough to keep me emotionally invested.  And the spirituality which infuses the book, bolstered by all its earthy realism, is what makes the journey On the Road to Heaven truly worth it. Even amidst the Milky Way’s worth of lights in a Rocky Mountain sky, this beautiful novel is a bright star.

Mormon Artist Magazine Literature editor and fellow AMVer Katherine Morris suggested I post here at AMV questions and answers cut from the interview.   So, for your reading pleasure:

There also seems to be an underlying theme of agency in your writing: “[I]t enables those who read or hear it to create choices for themselves”. How does the concept of agency inform your writing?

The “It” here refers to “sustainable language.”  Sustainable language is creative, proactive, productive language that effectively sparks others to create their own risk-choice spectrums and generate possibilities for themselves.  It’s the language of life. Sustainable language goes out on its faith in others’ creativity, creative drive being a far more commonplace phenomenon in all levels of society than is popularly supposed. Good language—sustainable language—allows for that creativity and invigorates human agency.

Bad language runs the other way.  Through fear, guilt, shame, and other devices of control it prods people in the direction it wants them to go, dismissing agency as counterproductive and undependable.

I believe language and human agency to be intimately bound up together. I depend on readers’ native creativity and tendency to exercise choice to make something meaningful for themselves (within reason) of the words I put out there.  The question of language—what it is and what it does to and for us—lies at the heart of my novel The Pictograph Murders.  At a critical moment the protagonist catches wind of a key element of the villain’s philosophy—he “perceived himself as having the power, and so he could make things mean what he wanted them to”—a version of the might makes right stance, which shows as clearly in rhetorical acts as it does in physical ones.

What role does religious symbolism play in The Pictograph Murders?

I think what symbolism comes across depends on what symbolism readers bring to the story.  Since The Pictograph Murders seems to sell in a steady trickle in non-LDS bookstores on the tourist circuit here in southeastern Utah, like the local museum gift shop where people visit from all over the world, readers may well find a wider range of symbolic elements in the book than I can anticipate. To my thinking, that’s perfect.  My hope is that even readers who distrust religious symbolism will find archetypal appeal in the story’s spiritual elements.

When I read your essays/posts on language, I feel your gentle urging for awareness and watchfulness in the use of language.  In “The Downstream Principle” your concern is with the rhetoric of those with two different perspectives on the use of a canyon. “But given the weighty importance of what I don’t know about this place, I’m cleaning up my language”. Could people be substituted for place and what suggestions do you have for cleaning up language?

“Could ‘people’ be substituted for ‘place’?”  Yes.  Practices that result in exploitation and manipulation of or damage to the natural environment or that display carelessness or unawareness are only extensions of our behavior in the human environment. In other words, if I’m doing it to nature, I’m doing it to people, too, at one level or another.  I don’t think we can improve our behavior in the natural sector without improving behavior in the human one. I said earlier that spirituality is a quality of character, not of place, and so carries across in person from home to church to field to canyon.  Furthermore, human language now exerts tremendous influence upon the world. It creates experience for others and can affect them powerfully, for good or for ill, with some effects extending beyond sight. That suggests that how I behave in language is a deeply spiritual concern.

Characteristics of human language make it a wilderness in its own right, chock full of wild beauty and miraculous realms where fabulous adventures unfold and heroes and villains choose their parts.  It contains a wealth of cultural and natural resources. Whenever I act to clean up my language, I examine it for unfortunate or wrongful intent, looking for evidence that I’ve relied on anger, fear, guilt, etc. to assert myself.  I also look for shortsightedness.  To me, the question of bad language reaches beyond what’s commonly considered off-colored or offensive—it goes to usual words thought clean as a whistle that are spoken in common conversations but carry the interest to control, exploit, or harm.

But really, my hope for my language is not just to clean it up but to find ways to apply the common dictum many outdoor websites and camping brochures contain: Leave the environment better than it was when you found it.

Richard Louv’s book Last Child in the Woods makes the case that a beautiful, ages old relationship is on the rocks: children and nature have fallen out of love.  Say it isn’t so.  There must be some kids still getting out there, developing lightning-fast reflexes from chasing lizards, solving the whole-body puzzle of climbing a tree, honing their future driving skills by walking on logs across creeks, etc.

It’s in the hope that nature children still exist somewhere that Wilderness Interface Zone is issuing a call for nature poems and short essays written by children.  The works may address any aspect of nature and the child’s relationship to it.  Poems should be 50 lines or under and essays 150-1000 words.  If you have a budding nature photojournalist in your family, we’ll consider posting his or her photos.  Children ages 6-18 are invited to submit work to pk.wizadmin@gmail.com from July 6, 2010 to July 31, 2010.  Depending on how many submissions we get, we’ll post them in batches off and on July-August.  Parents and kids: Please review submission guidelines here before submitting.