Page Lambert: All Things Literary & All Things Natural

When Bob Baron, who founded Fulcrum Publishing more than thirty years ago, asked me to write a chapter on the rural American West for Fulcrum’s new book, The Light Shines from the West, I knew that I wanted to start with the New Madrid Earthquakes. In the winter of 1811, a series of terrifying quakes struck the low-lying country between Missouri and Arkansas. The Mississippi River thrust her waters upward, left her banks, rose twenty feet into the air, hung suspended, then plunged to the earth. For a few terrifying moments, her roaring waters flowed backwards. “The earth was horribly torn to pieces,” wrote eyewitness Eliza Bryan. “The inhabitants fled in every direction to the country… the earth was in continual agitation, visibly waving as a gentle sea.” I felt an intimate connection with the New Madrid Earthquakes not just because of family history, but because of novel-writing history. What cultural upheaval, I had wondered, would cause my protagonist’s Cherokee ...

Author Hugh Howey “In the wake of losing my beloved dog,” author Hugh Howey wrote in his New Year’s blog post , “in one of my darkest of places, I began a novel that would eventually be about the redeeming power of hope. When I sign copies of WOOL for readers, I almost always write inside, “Dare to hope." Really? A mega bestselling apocalypse novel about life on earth reduced to a few thousand survivors living stifled existences inside a gargantuan buried silo, is about hope ? Yes, it really is. The novel propels us into a future where the earth is devoid of nature, and the only trees that grow are hot-house fruit trees living hundreds of feet below the earth. Paper is coveted. Books that tell the way life used to be are secreted away from the masses. Yet the people of the silo climb the spiraling central staircase, as if climbing a tree from its roots to its canopied upper branches, for the rare chance to peer out the silo’s grimy windows to a barren wind-swe...

  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 wh...

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...