Page Lambert: All Things Literary & All Things Natural

Well, for one thing, the first two book titles made the list of Oprah's top 27 summer reads .  The third, Becoming Animal, should have, but didn't.  A Small Hotel, Robert Olen Butler's latest work of fiction, is an unapologetic romantic story of a couple in love for nearly 25 years but now in the throes of separation and divorce.  (I first met Butler about six years ago at a Narrative Magazine fundraising dinner in Santa Fe, New Mexico.)  Butler read from   Intercourse , his 2008 collection of irreverant short stories that, through humerous paired dialogues, allow the reader to romp through imagined sexual moments of some very famous characters. It's a very "fleshy" book, but more about "connections" than separations, which is the theme of A Small Hotel. Richard Louv's latest book, The Nature Principle: Human Restoration and the End of Nature Deficit Disorder is also about separation (you'll have to look a little harder f...

I have a file box on my desk next to my Storyteller Doll with clippings torn from magazines and newspapers -- uplifting stories of people reconnecting to the land.  These stories appear in diverse publications, like Native Peoples Magazine and High Country News , or The Quivira Coalition Journal and the Nature Conservancy , even the World Ark and The Denver Post . The Omeg family in Oregon has planted blanket flowers and catmint around the perimeter of their cherry orchard so that threatened bumblebees, mason bees, and even sweat bees will have blossoms to sustain them. In the heart of Navajo country, Tammy Herrera is reconnecting people to the land and helping teach horsemanship to youth through a feral horse 4-H program  (see pg.22 of pdf). In a small Amazon village in the Oiapoque region of northern Brazil, children are helping to restore native populations of tracaja, the green and yellow river turtles. In Colorado, prison inmates are training mustangs that are l...

Helen Terry Dunton c. 1912 When I asked my redheaded Great Aunt Violet, who died many years ago but in whose western saddle I still ride, to tell me what she remembered about my paternal grandmother, she said, "Well, besides being a crack shot with a rifle, Helen was part Irish, and part Cherokee , and that wasn't a very good thing to be back then."   Auntie Vi was from the Dunton clan, my father's clan. "We have Scots blood," was the pronouncement, and I took it to mean that Scots blood was somehow superior to the Irish blood my grandfather had married into.  The Cherokee blood was rarely mentioned, and never with "princess" lineage claims. I continue to research this claim but have found no direct lineage tying me to enrolled ancestors, only the names of distant cousins and ties to Cherokee communities in Oklahoma such as Wauhillau and Stillwell. Beyond the American Pale In David M. Emmons book, Beyond the American Pale: The Irish in t...

Bull elk on Lookout Mountain  in snowstorm Writing is not just about what we already know.   It's also about what we wish we knew.  At this juncture, where facts and experience meet curiosity, inspiration takes root.  Passion and our emotional connection to a story may form the heart, but research gives a story legs; it keeps the story moving forward and keeps writer and reader engaged.  Research is exploration.   It is venturing into unknown territory, and the tension created between knowing, and not knowing, like a taut rubber band, can catapult us into someplace new. Take this elk, for instance.   Large antlers serve bull elk  well during the rut, when they're sparring to test strength and endurance and hopefully gather up a harem of cows. But twice this winter, my neighbors and I have seen big bulls tangle with the orange plastic mesh fencing used on construction sites. This particular  bull is...

My mother’s mink stole and two fur collars, one sable, one white, have been hanging in the back of my closet since she died five years ago.  I remember how beautiful she looked to me as a child when she wore her mink—how the soft fur graced her bare sloping shoulders and showed off her own mother’s strand of pearls—how proud my father looked as he offered my mother his arm. The mink stole symbolized to my father his ability and desire to provide for my mother (not unlike what his grandfather must have felt when he dragged a deer back to his waiting wife). Old Fugate Sawmill, Stringtown, OK read essay My grandmother never wore a mink stole, though.  She had been born in Indian Territory—the child of a laboring, mixed-blood family that logged for the railroad companies as they laid track from Arkansas and Kentucky and Oklahoma west to Washington.  Judging from old family photos, they ate a lot of deer meat—and rabbit.  Members of the weasel family, no doubt, provi...