Page Lambert: All Things Literary & All Things Natural

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 ski...

Into every book there is a portal, an opening that beckons. In Braiding Sweetgrass , every sentence is a portal, so finely crafted that we do not notice the frame of the door, only the entrancing light that invites us in. No wonder so many friends said to me in the last few years, “Page, you will love this book!” Thank you, Kathleen. Thank you, Julie. Thank you, Milkweed Editions, for sending the review copy. Thank you all. What I do here matters, writes Robin Wall Kimmerer. Everybody lives downstream. This one line epitomizes a major theme weaving in and out of Robin’s fine book. Published by Milkweed Editions in 2013, Braiding Sweetgrass is more than memoir, more than nature writing, more than one woman’s narrative. What I do here matters. The words echo. Each story – as it loops back to the story before, simultaneously sends out tendrils, rooting itself to the next story. We are reminded metaphorically and literally that what happens upstream sends ripples to all ...

Leaving for Moab to meet up with 20 women guests, 5 women guides--ready to embark on my 20th anniversary River Writing Journey for Women with Sheri Griffith Expeditions. Renowned sculptor Roxanne Swentzell from the Santa Clara Pueblo is my featured guest so we'll be sculpting with river clay and words! And my daughter Sarah Mease is coming--yoo hoo!! I'll be back in touch in September, writing about Robin Wall Kimmerer's beautiful book, Braiding Sweetgrass. 

Sometimes, deep inside a good novel, you feel the throbbing lifeblood of its author—an agony that shines at the edges with a certain ecstasy, like gazing at the ceiling in the Sistine Chapel and feeling the anguish of Michelangelo in every brushstroke. The hand of the artist has become one with the hand of God, and our own lives are touched by both. I come late to the books of Ojibwa writer Richard Wagamese, but his novel Medicine Walk touches the reader with this same authenticity—the bittersweet pain and joy of the human experience—as lived by the author and expressed through his characters. In the essay “Returning to Harmony” (appearing in the collection Speaking My Truth), Richard Wagamese writes of his own childhood: “When I was born, my family still lived the seasonal nomadic life of traditional Ojibwa people. In the great rolling territories surrounding the Winnipeg River in Northwestern Ontario, they fished, hunted, and trapped. Their years were marked by t...

I often smile when walking past Maggie’s garden shed here in our mountain community. A brown fiberglass bear hangs on the shed door, poised in greeting and dressed (based on Maggie’s artistic mood) in various clever outfits. He might be wearing a fishing hat and be outfitted with rod, reel and creel. Or, if the Denver Rockies are winning, a purple baseball cap might be perched between his ears, a catcher’s mitt in his paw. If tennis’s grand slam season has arrived, he might be swinging a tennis racket. Last fall, a black bear bullied Maggie’s brown bear (and the garden shed) into submission, ripping off a hand and strips of wooden trim. Perhaps the black bear was reminding all of us not to trifle too lightheartedly with the real nature of Bear. Reading Priscilla Stuckey’s new book, Tamed by a Bear: Coming Home to Nature~Spirit~Self, you might ask what is a bear’s real nature? You might also ask about the word “nature,” arguing (as I’m about to do) with Oxford’s primar...