Category: Social Commentary
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Flying home on 9/11.10
Flying home on 9/11.10 This year, my route home from residency in Vermont took me to the skies on the 10th anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Center. Last year, my route home was on 9/12, metaphorically the day after. Last year, I sat in the Burlington airport and watched two families await…
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A Wolf’s Eye
I became interested in the history of Oregon’s wolf bounty—a sanctioned act to eradicate—kill off—the wolf population to make way for ranching—while reading and teaching Molly Gloss’s The Jump-Off Creek. I’d just moved to Redmond, a farm town in Central Oregon, and liked the idea of an Oregon author writing the story of the early…
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Sing your story
“…and we sail into the mystic…” I’m sitting in the winery at Edgefield, listening to Raina Rose sing. I’m here with Kate, Kate’s parents, and Raina’s dad. I am trying to define what I am sensing and observing. The generation of parents, now dressed in button-downs and Docker khakis, members of that special generation in…
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Conversations about the environment
So, I’m just beginning my last class at Green Mountain College. The core of the program has been conservation biology–everything about keeping the natural world intact. This included ecology, law and policy, bioregionalism, leadership, and conservation biology itself. All of this coursework, all the hours on the couch reading and at the computer researching and…
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Blog Post No. 1—Alabama Chanin, Textile Arts, Oral Tradition, and Celebrating the Everyday…
April 14, 2010 By Neva Knott I. I am a denizen of Powell’s Books. Last night, I attended the lecture about the vintage quilts hanging on the gallery wall there, given by Natalie Chanin of Alabama Chanin, a sustainable design firm. In the hour that Chanin spoke, she warmed my heart with the reminder of…
The Diary of Beautiful Enchiladas 