Page Lambert: All Things Literary & All Things Natural

In my hands I held a hardback copy of Jules Verne’s Classic Science Fiction , torn airmail packaging scattered at my feet. The inscription: “To Matt, with love from Grandpa Loren, San Francisco.” Why is my 75-year-old father sending my 9-year-old son a 511-page book? The inappropriateness of the gift irritated me—a gift hurriedly bought with too little care given. But perhaps it was unfair of me to expect my father to know what a boy of nine would like. Then I remembered that spring, when we had visited San Francisco. Dad had sprinted after a cable car, grabbing Matt’s hand and leaping aboard. Later he plucked a nickel off the street. “Matt, look! When you put a coin on the track—the cable car almost cuts it in half!” I can still picture them standing there, heads bent in mutual admiration. Less irritated, I stared out the window at our dog Hondo, sleeping on the deck. He had been with us since he was eight weeks old. Gray hairs covered the muzzle of glossy black head, and the...

I was only a little surprised when I read in Mary Pflum Peterson's piece in The Washington Post  that her 21st century kids liked,  really liked, the original Mister Rogers. So much, in fact, that they binge-watched all the old episodes with her. "He likes kids, Mommy,” her daughter said. “Kids know when a grown-up likes them.” But it was her youngest son's comment that got my attention.  “And he’s not too loud,” her son added. “When we watch him, there’s no noise. You don’t have to worry about anything.” Our modern world is, most often, a noisy place. Which is not the same as being filled with sound. And for Peterson's son, noise is worrisome.  We live on the edge of a forest, and rarely is the forest silent. Fall is filled with the sounds of chickadees caching their winter supply of seeds and insects, black Abert's squirrels trying to outrun the red fox squirrels, crows warning away intruders.  As I sit here in the quiet stillness o...

If you read fiction, chances are you’re drawn now, more than ever, to stories that help you escape today’s polarizing politics. Nostalgic stories. Futuristic stories. Stories that draw you into worlds other than your own. Penguin Random House editor Sally Kim, during a panel in New York City at this year’s BookExpo (the industry’s mega trade event), suggested to the audience that readers are urgently craving perspectives that are not their own. “Which, of course,” she said, “is the whole freaking point of fiction.” So why is it so hard for us, when it comes to politics, to lift the cloak of opinion from our own back and crawl inside someone else’s skin—just for a minute? We do it all the time when we read fiction—we jump from one character’s point of view to another’s without batting an eye. We lose ourselves in a scene where the author takes us deep inside the heroine’s innermost desires, and them —bam— we’re taken inside the mind of the man who’s about to break her hear...

Nature & Words is on a summer sabatical, which is to say that I just "got off the river" after my 22nd annual "River Writing Journey for Women," which featured renowned sculptor Roxanne Swentzell as my featured artist, 21 other amazing women, an ancient canyon, a river following an ancient bed to the sea, and ....  Now I'm on the road again, heading to New Mexico with my husband John Gritts to lead our 7-day, "Santa Fe & Taos Sojourn: Sacred Lands, Sacred Art, Sacred Words" retreat. Wishing you safe travels if you're on the road, and sequestered moments of creativity if you're close to home. Page 

NEW YORK, NY — Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, poet, playwright, and professor N. Scott Momaday, Ph.D., accepted the 2019 Ken BurnsAmerican Heritage Prize at an event held at the American Museum of Natural History. May 2019.  Last week my daughter Sarah, visiting from Oklahoma, took home with her a chest filled with her great-grandmother’s antique grape-patterned silverware, and a portrait of her great-grandmother taken when she was a young newlywed. An antique pewter broach from this same great-grandmother had been the center piece of my daughter’s wedding bouquet. While organizing the silver, I shared a few family stories with Sarah. “Could you write them down, Mom?” she asked. She wanted to share the stories with her daughters when they were older. I printed out a chapter I had written for The Light Shines from the West,  a book on the rural American West , which included this story: "As a young woman, my Missouri-born grandmother knew both physical isolatio...

When women gather at the river, something rather wonderful happens. Like eagles, we have  been gathering at the river for thousands of years. To bathe our children. To wash our clothes. To gather water for drinking, for ceremony, for cleansing. Even, like the eagles, to catch the fish we will feed our families. Six years ago, 18 of us gathered on the Colorado River with Joy Harjo. We laughed. We bathed. We danced. We wrote in our journals. We asked, "How do we know when a story ends?" In "Eagle Poem," Joy writes about eagles that soar over rivers, sweeping our hearts clean with sacred wings. She writes about the eagles that "round out the morning" in each of us. On Day 2 of the river trip, we hiked to the top of a steep rim above the river. "Rocks calm me," I wrote in my journal, "because of their stillness. The wind is speaking a gentle language, whispers...." Joy sat on the edge of the rim with her flute, her notes rounding...

Hidden beneath the enthusiasm most writers profess for writing , is an underlying belief that what we do does not matter. Not really. Not in the larger scope of things. Think of what else we could be doing with our time? Things with tangible results that others not only appreciate, but yea gads , might even pay us to do!   When I first encountered Yuval Noah Harari’s book, SAPIENS: A BRIEF HISTORY OF HUMANKIND , it was obvious that the Israel author and professor had hit the motherlode. By 2018, Sapiens had sold over 10 million copies, and had been published in 50 different languages. His agent has probably paid off his mortgage on speaking fees alone. What was the draw? According to Harari, 70,000 years ago, our human ancestors were insignificant animals.   Our impact on the world was not much greater than jelly fish or woodpeckers. Yet modern human beings want to believe that we are special—that our bodies, minds, and hearts are unique in the animal kingdom. We...

Water Mask by Monica Devine THE DESIRE to hold a mirror up to one’s face and reflect upon the past is uniquely human. We imagine the places we have lived, the people we have known, and we create stories from these memories in order to make sense of our lives. But we also write memoir in order to keep safe within the pages of a book the places and people who have touched our souls. In 2012, Alaskan author, artist and photographer MONICA DEVINE flew from the wilds of Alaska to the mountains of Wyoming to attend the Literature & Landscape of the Horse Retreat that I co-lead with Sheri Griffith. I was excited to share Wyoming, a landscape that claimed my soul, with a woman who called Alaska home. I sensed we shared a common kinship. Carolyn at the Vee Bar, Monica Devine Monica was working on a collection of essays and, though she had ridden dogsleds across the frozen tundra of Alaska, the idea of riding Wyoming ranch horses across the open range still thrilled ...