Page Lambert: All Things Literary & All Things Natural

When women gather at the river, something rather wonderful happens. Like eagles, we have  been gathering at the river for thousands of years. To bathe our children. To wash our clothes. To gather water for drinking, for ceremony, for cleansing. Even, like the eagles, to catch the fish we will feed our families. Six years ago, 18 of us gathered on the Colorado River with Joy Harjo. We laughed. We bathed. We danced. We wrote in our journals. We asked, "How do we know when a story ends?" In "Eagle Poem," Joy writes about eagles that soar over rivers, sweeping our hearts clean with sacred wings. She writes about the eagles that "round out the morning" in each of us. On Day 2 of the river trip, we hiked to the top of a steep rim above the river. "Rocks calm me," I wrote in my journal, "because of their stillness. The wind is speaking a gentle language, whispers...." Joy sat on the edge of the rim with her flute, her notes rounding...

Hidden beneath the enthusiasm most writers profess for writing , is an underlying belief that what we do does not matter. Not really. Not in the larger scope of things. Think of what else we could be doing with our time? Things with tangible results that others not only appreciate, but yea gads , might even pay us to do!   When I first encountered Yuval Noah Harari’s book, SAPIENS: A BRIEF HISTORY OF HUMANKIND , it was obvious that the Israel author and professor had hit the motherlode. By 2018, Sapiens had sold over 10 million copies, and had been published in 50 different languages. His agent has probably paid off his mortgage on speaking fees alone. What was the draw? According to Harari, 70,000 years ago, our human ancestors were insignificant animals.   Our impact on the world was not much greater than jelly fish or woodpeckers. Yet modern human beings want to believe that we are special—that our bodies, minds, and hearts are unique in the animal kingdom. We...

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. ...