Page Lambert: All Things Literary & All Things Natural

Well, Colleen didn’t really meet Porter or Henry, but she met David Sedaris. Colleen, a figment of Tim Johnson’s imagination, came to life on the pages of a short story, with her stunning white teeth and big green eyes. A Foosball wizard, the mere touch of her hand could set the heart of a teenage boy on fire. Here’s a look inside the title story:       Charlie gripped his left hand in his right, remembering the Foosball game. His heart would not slow down.        “I like the girl,” he said.        “Colleen?”        He turned and William smiled and Charlie saw a light in his eyes he hadn’t seen in so long he’d forgotten it even existed.        “You know what her name means?” William asked.        It was the light, Charlie realized, from the nights when they shared a room and William told stories and they had no idea that one of them was adopted...

Reading my father's copy of Moby Dick,  The Limited Edition's Club, 1943. First line: "Call me Ishmael." (#1 of 100 Best First Lines from Novels) Before the monstrous sperm whale “reaped away Ahab’s leg,” the raging Captain had “dashed at the whale with a six inch blade to reach the fathom deep life of Moby Dick.” So wrote Herman Melville. And ever since that fatal encounter, Ahab had “cherished a wild vindictiveness against the whale…. He piled upon the whale’s white hump the sum of all the rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down, and then as if his heart had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart’s shell upon it.”* Rage. The desire for revenge. “Gnawed within and scorched without," Ahab was intent on "an audacious and supernatural revenge." It drove Captain Ahab some said to madness. And surely Herman Melville inhabited a bit of that madness as he penned the novel now considered an American classic. The Heart of the Sea Traile...

Chuck Pyle, fly fishing   When musician and song writer Chuck Pyle passed away on November 6th, he'd been fly fishing on a lake close to home, casting out across the water, no doubt watching his line arc and loop as he reached for the shadowed depths. When Chuck didn't come home at dusk, his sweetheart Terri followed her own heart line, that mysterious filament that links two souls as surely as a nylon line links rainbow trout to faithful angler. Near dark, she headed out to the lake to find him… Chuck Pyle, Lambert wedding But that story is Terri’s to tell, not mine, and when she’s ready, I know her own poetry will lead her back to the peace and joy that Chuck’s music brought to the world. The story that is mine to tell is of the friendship that evolved between Chuck and Terri and John and me over the last ten years, and of the song that he sang at my daughter’s wedding.  As my daughter walked arm in arm with her father toward the young cowboy to wh...

Farside Last night Farside was lifted from the world of the seen, into the world of the unseen. I did not awaken yesterday sensing that the day would be filled with heartrending decisions. I did not envision holding Farside’s proud Arab head in my arms, stroking his neck, running my hands along the length of his still body. Nor did I know when I awoke yesterday that my corral friends, Farside’s human herd, would gather around us during a twelve-hour vigil, or that Dominica, the big white warmblood who has been Farside’s closest companion for seven years, would come to touch noses and bid him adieu. In the end, five women were with Farside and me—offering strength, solace, prayer. “You were his life blessing, Page,” Sheri said. “Send him to the love and light.”   Farside and Tripp, Wyoming Before Farside came to live here with me in these green mountain pastures, he and Sheri traveled over 4000 competitive trail miles together—in Utah, Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico. ...

It’s morning and the October sky is subdued, the early sun obscured by a veil of haze. The house is quiet. I’m alone. The rascally pine squirrel that John trapped last week and set free near a pond three miles away is back – burying pine cones in my flower boxes, carrying pilfered insulation from the crawl space beneath the house to his nest in a nearby ponderosa. Tufts of insulation peak out from uninhabited bird boxes. He’s creative in his choice of winter larders. At dusk, he’ll retreat to curl up in his drey, nose tucked to tail. At dawn, he’ll be back at it again. Some of the graduate students at the university taking my “Writing Life” class this fall quarter have been discussing what time of the day they’re most creative—dusk or dawn, or late into the midnight hours. For me, like for the squirrel, creativity comes early, like dewdrops on the leaves of a bleeding-heart. Morning hours are hopeful hours, when no idea seems too insignificant, no inspiration too frivol...

“Aim for the absolute version,” editor Tom Jenks advised us during a week-long intensive writing workshop in Denver several years ago.  “Write the story so that anyone can understand it.”  I struggled to understand this advice.  What about the complexities of plot and character?  What about hidden meaning and layered nuances?  Didn’t I want my story to appeal to the sophisticated reader, the reader who sought out intelligent stories?  Surely I didn’t want to write uncomplicated stories that anyone could understand. And yet, that is exactly what Laura Pritchet t did with her novel Red Lightning . I’m not talking simple here; I’m talking uncluttered.  Anyone who has ever known or lost a mother, loved a sister or a brother, given up a child, or regained a piece of lost, fractured heart—anyone who’s own small humanity has shriveled because of large failures—who has ever sought forgiveness—will appreciate Red Lightning for the clarity with which it p...

Timothy Egan, Summer Fishtrap Gathering Photo credit: Sam Traylor, Whitman Intern "I get afraid sometimes when I've signed a book contract," Seattle author Timothy Egan told the Fishtrap crowd Friday night, "because I start out kind of panicky when I don't know where the story arc is." Pulitzer-prizing winning author of seven award-winning books, including  Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher: The Epic Life and Immortal Photographs of Edward Curtis, Egan   came to the Summer Fishtrap Gathering at Wallowa Lake, Oregon, to talk to writers who had been immersed in a week of workshops, panels, digital storytelling, and poetry since Monday. A generous and thoughtful speaker, Egan shared his three-step approach to writing a book. "First, I go out and see if I can find that story arc.  For The Worst Hard Time  about the Dust Bowl, I went to places like Texas and Oklahoma and Kansas - places the hardest hit by the worst environmental disaster our count...

In 2011, writer William deBuys joined conservation biologist William Robichaud on a trek into the jungled river country of Laos in search of the elusive and endangered saola, one of the earth’s rarest creatures. The small country of Laos, surrounded by China, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Thailand, holds within its fragile borders a richly diverse, rapidly disappearing ecosystem.  Smugglers from Vietnam, their own country now devoid of its once plentiful flora and fauna, haul out everything from Siamese rosewood to elephant trunk snakes and scaly “pangolin” anteaters.  Most of the contraband is en route to China. The Vietnam I knew in the late 1960s—when many of my male friends were either drafted into the Army, or recruited by the Air Force or Naval Academy after graduation—was a country divided north from south. I knew Vietnam only by what I saw on the news, or by what our liberal, armband-wearing civics teacher whispered about “the political truth” of this unholy war. ...