Wannabee's Words

Meeting Robert Michael Pyle

Twenty-five years ago, I discovered some beautiful hand-crafted stuffed sasquatches at a toy store in Gig Harbor, Washington. I promptly snatched up three of them to take home with me, and they have been with me ever since. In 1992 my very first Volkswalk was the “Bigfoot to Baker,” held in conjunction with a bigfoot festival and parade in Glacier, Washington, and I got a very nice patch shaped like a bigfoot, with a friendly, waving sasquatch on it, for finishing the Volkswalk.

Given my interest in these legendary creatures, it is no surprise that when I came across a book called Where Bigfoot Walks: Crossing the Dark Divide, I promptly snatched that up, too, and hungrily devoured it. Thus began my acquaintance with nature writer Robert Michael Pyle. Since then I have added many of his books to my bookshelves: Wintergreen: Rambles in a Ravaged Land, Chasing Monarchs: Migrating with the Butterflies of Passage, The Thunder Tree: Lessons from an Urban Wildland, Sky Time in Gray's River, Walking the High Ridge: Life as Field Trip, and his latest, Mariposa Road: the First Butterfly Big Year.

But I had never met nor seen Pyle read until this fall at Wordstock in Oregon.

(See posting for February 6, 2011.) Pyle was there to read and discuss Mariposa Road. As it turned out, he was scheduled into the last slot on Sunday, and Wordstock itself closed immediately after the final readings, so there was really no time to talk to Pyle, though I would have liked to.

Imagine my delight when I discovered that he was going to be in Corvallis at the start of November, doing another reading from Mariposa Road.  Pyle is a very friendly, genuine, and fascinating person, with a wonderful sense of humor, not to mention being an incredible writer.  He has been nominated for and won numerous awards for his writing, yet he is amazingly accessible and down to earth. While everyone else was off buying his book at the sales table, I raced up to where he was sitting at another table - my pre-purchased copy of the book in hand-  and not only did I get it personally autographed, I got to talk with him for a good five minutes and got not one, but two big hugs, along with a sincere comment that he’d love to read some of my writing some time. Needless to say, I was walking on Cloud Nine when I left the reading.

And to top it all off, when I went back outside, there it was across the street – the famed Powdermilk, the 1982 Honda Civic hatchback that I have read about in his books and which has taken him on so many of his trips around the Northwest and the U.S.  Since I have always named my cars and kept them for a long time, as Pyle has done, I knew, from the first moment I “met” Powdermilk in Where Bigfoot Walks, that I had met something of a kindred spirit in Robert Michael Pyle. Meeting him in person only confirmed that.

William L. Sullivan

In mid-October I was fortunate to see author William Sullivan at the Corvallis-Benton County Public Library in Corvallis. Sullivan is well known in the Pacific Northwest for a series of hiking guidebooks he has written, and he was there with a slide show to go along with his new book 100 Hikes in Southern Oregon, which I already had. Since I had just moved from southern Oregon to Corvallis, it was like being back home is southern Oregon again as he talked about and showed slides of places I was quite familiar with.

Sullivan is very down to earth and a good presenter. The standing room only crowd received him eagerly and rushed to the sales table afterward to buy books and maps. I already had Cabin Fever: Notes from a Part-Time Pioneer and Trips and Trails Oregon, and I had just purchased his other new book Trails of Crater Lake National Park & Oregon Caves National Monument when I had been at Crater Lake in August. But I purchased and had him autograph his classic Listening for Coyote: a Walk Across Oregon's Wilderness and Oregon's Greatest Natural Disasters, as well as his superb Oregon Topo-Travel-Reference Map with Travel Guide.

All of his guidebooks feature good maps and excellent, detailed descriptions of the routes. His latest two books, 100 Hikes in Southern Oregon and Trails of Crater Lake National Park & Oregon Caves National Monument have many beautiful  color photos shot by Sullivan, including identification guides to wildlife and wildflowers.

Sullivan’s website is www.oregonhiking.com.

Oregon Poet Laureate Paulann Petersen

Last November I was lucky enough to catch Oregon Poet Laureate Paulann Petersen doing a reading in Port Orford. It happened to be a weekend I had already planned on going to Port Orford, and I was very excited when I found out she’d be reading while I was there. I was even more excited when she called to book a room at the motel where I was then working as assistant manager, and I got to talk with her a little more.

The reading was quite well attended, as Port Orfordians, living in a rather remote location, but having a great love for the arts, are very enthusiastic about any arts events that find their way there. (They also generate a lot of their own arts events within the community.)

Paulann is possibly the best reader of poetry that I have ever seen read. She read a number of selections from her five books: The Wild Awake, Blood-silk, A Bride of Narrow Escape, Kindle. and The Voluptuary. Her poems are full of imagery, lush and sensual, grounded in the earth and yet soaring in the stars. I came away with all five of her books, individually autographed.

Paulann is coming to Corvallis, where I now live, in April to do a reading and give a short workshop, and I am excited to see her again and this time be able to take a workshop from her.

For anyone able to attend, the date is Wednesday, April 6^th. The reading will be from 12:00 to 12:50 pm, with the workshop from 1:00 to 1:50 pm in the Library Reading Room, Lane-Benton Community College’s Albany Campus.

Paulann Petersen was named to a two-year appointment as Oregon’s sixth Poet Laureate by Governor Ted Kulongoski on April 26, 2010. She has received several awards, including Stanford University’s Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Poetry, two Carolyn Kizer Poetry Awards, and Literary Art’s Stewart Holbrook Award for Outstanding Contributions to Oregon’s Literary Life.

You can find out more about her on her website www.paulann.net.
                                                                                                                                              

                                              

Discovering May Sarton's Journals

It is often true for me that something on one website or in one book will lead to another website or book, and that one to another one, and so it was that I recently discovered May Sarton’s journals in a rather round-about way.

 

An English major, I had never heard of Sarton before, but I have been thoroughly enjoying reading her journals.

 

Her works, which include novels, books of poetry, and journals, were written and published between 1932 and 1995, when she died.

 

Checking out what was immediately available at the library, I necessarily ended up starting toward the end of her series of journals, with At Seventy (1984) and After the Stroke (1988), then read The House by the Sea (1977), and May Sarton: A Self-Portrait (1982), which is a transcript of the film World of Light: A Portrait of May Sarton and which also includes some of her poems and her commentary on them. I have just finished Endgame: A Journal of the Seventy-Ninth Year (1992) and have started Encore: A Journal of the Eightieth Year (1993).

 

In the next few months, I plan to read all the rest of her non-fiction: I Knew a Phoenix: Sketches for an Autobiography (1959), Plant Dreaming Deep (1968), Journal of a Solitude (1973), A World of Light (1976), Recovering: A Journal (1980), and At Eighty-Two: A Journal (1995).

 

The idea of Sarton as a single woman living alone most of her life, loving her solitude, needing to write as much as she needed to breathe air appealed to me and still does. I find that she and I share some things – a love of flowers and nature, never being able to keep up on correspondence and other things that need to be done, a fierce independence, a strong love of home, the need for plenty of time alone.

 

One of the most valuable things for me is watching her age and become ill and dependent on others to help her, as I went through much of this when I had a serious surgery several years ago, and as I am getting to an age where I can expect to have more health problems. She paints a realistic portrait of old age and how she feels like a stranger in that land, feels she is not herself anymore, yet manages to adapt and go on. Her friendships sustain her as much as her cherished solitude does. At times she seems whiny and self-preoccupied, at others her open-heartedness comes clearly through, as well as her vulnerability. I watch her hope – even as she has cancer – that she will be well again, suffer through a solid year of at times debilitating pain, pull in the borders of her world to the home and small town she lives in after a life-time of traveling, and complain about not getting the recognition she feels she deserves, even while giving standing-room only readings of her works and receiving many honorary degrees and too many fan letters to answer them all.

 

What shines through her work is her total honesty, her ability to present herself as a complete person, flaws and all. She shows us the difficulties of aging and illness and the need to accept becoming dependent on others. Throughout it all, she strives to hold on to who she is and gives the reader much food for thought about how they will face old age and/or illness.

 

Sarton was certainly not one of the very best writers of her time, which may be why she didn’t receive the critical acclaim she felt so strongly that she deserved, but her journals are definitely a worthwhile read and worth a re-read as well.