Page Lambert: All Things Literary & All Things Natural

  A few years ago, during a progressive dinner in our mountain community, a neighbor who had moved to town said to me, “At our daughter’s new school, the kids aren’t allowed to touch the snow.” I nearly choked on my tomato tart. Willa Cather would have turned over in her grave. Can a child who has never crunched a snowball between reddened palms, or run barefoot through knee-high grass, or climbed into the arms of a waiting tree, ever feel they belong to this great gorgeous and gritty earth? How else can a child come to know simple happiness? Happiness, young Jim Burden contemplates in Willa Cather’s novel My Ántonia , comes from being “dissolved into something complete and great.” He was laying under the sun “like a pumpkin” when he was thinking this profound thought, and he had no desire (just then) to be anything more than a pumpkin. Orphaned at the age of ten, Jim crossed the plains of Nebraska by wagon, arriving at his grandfather’s farm before daybreak. But when t

I am contemplating the November 30 th entry in Linda Hasselstrom’s new book, Gathering from the Grassland: A Plains Journal. I am also contemplating what I see as the three-dimensional structure of the book. It is more than linear entries which invite the reader, day by day, into a year of Linda’s life on the plains of South Dakota.  This book stands as humbly and remarkably steady as a three-legged stool. One might say this about all of Linda’s admirable body of work . She is a gifted wordsmith, but it is not her well-wrought language that she wants us to notice, but the earth upon which that body of work rests—steady as a three-legged stool on a patch of shortgrass prairie. (I hope you're smiling, Linda.) Let’s talk about those three legs. First, deep mapping. The idea of “deep-mapping first occurred to me several years ago when I was reading an interview with Robert Lawlor in Parabola: Myth and Tradition. In the interview, Lawlor speaks of the Aboriginal belief t

Ordinary Skin, Essays from Willow Springs Once upon a recent time , there was a little black hen whose flock was attacked by a coyote. In the story, the little black hen survives, spending several nights alone in the woods but when she returns to her flock in the hen house, she returns as an outcast. “I am her only friend,” writes Amy Hale Auker in her new book Ordinary Skin, Essays from Willow Springs (Texas Tech University Press) . “I think she got lonely out there among the grass and leaves. Sleeping alone.” Life in the transient rural West can be lonely for outcasts, whether they’re chickens or women or men or children. “Any roots I’ve ever had,” writes Auker, “were fragile and tentative, ripped from the soil...” Wallace Stegner was correct, the West is as much about motion as it is about place yet Auker’s connections to place, temporary as they have been all her life, are never thinly forged connections.  Ordinary Skin is an immersion into living skin-to