Page Lambert: All Things Literary & All Things Natural

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 ...

Our father died on the Spring Equinox, twenty-two years ago. On my first trip to the Grand Canyon for the Writing Down the River book project, three months after his death, our raft flipped going into notorious Lava Falls. A motor boat had taken up a rescue position downstream and a few of its passengers pulled me out of the water. A woman from the South Dakota Humanities Council was on the rescue boat. She invited me to come to the capitol and give a program at the Cultural Center. The following March, under a clear blue prairie sky, on the Equinox and anniversary of my father’s death, I drove to Pierre. The Missouri River flows along the outskirts of town. The 2300-mile river is the longest river in North America, flowing from its headwaters in Montana where the Jefferson, Madison, and Gallatin rivers merge. One-sixth of the North American continent drains into the Missouri.   I had heard of it all my life. I grew up fly fishing with my father on the Madison. ...

Adventure novels, at least the memorable ones like Peter Heller's THE RIVER, Take up a permanent home in our imagination.  They rise up from a literary jungle of suspense, following a path cut by the best adventure books of all time. Some of my earliest childhood friends helped to beat down this well-trodden path: Twain’s Huck Finn, Keene’s Nancy Drew, Crusoe’s Jim Hawkins, Kipling’s Mowgli, Uncas, the last son of the Mohicans, Gibson’s Old Yeller. These heroes didn’t have to be my age or gender, or even human. I was as eager to sail across the ocean after a whale with Ishmael, as I was to traipse across London’s harsh and bitter Yukon with Buck, the regal sled dog. The imaginary worlds I inhabited with these characters left me breathless. I slipped into their uncharted landscapes as easily as I slipped under my bed covers, book in hand, each evening. The writing always spoke of darkness, and water, and of the relentless grip of the unknown, like this passage f...