In 1999 I moved back to the high prairie (Valier, MT), the same year Putin started his rise to power. There doesn't seem to be any lesson to learn from that. But 20 years has changed everything — almost. Some things changed not at all. In the early years I still had a bit of money and the pickup ran well. I attended several conferences, notably one in Waterton Peace Park, a Canadian sib to Glacier National Park. Several significant writers were in this gathering of area people.
The formal title was “Waterton-Glacier International Writers Workshop — 2001 Agenda” Barbara Grinder was the “show runner” who handled this major event. I’ve kept my packet of notes and hand-outs. I see on the schedule a much bigger and more various weekend than what I remember, which is a room of intense individuals. I wish I’d kept contact with Barbara Grinder. If you know her, tell her so.
Here are some of the most memorable attendees whom I’ve followed ever since. Their interests are parallel to mine, but we haven’t necessarily kept in touch. On Twitter I do hear from Pam Banting. https://english.ucalgary.ca/profiles/pamela-banting I don’t recall that her husband, Fred Stenson, a prof and novelist, was there but he’s also on Twitter. http://fredstenson.ca He’s not what I’d call forgettable.
One of the most memorable was Andrew Nikiforuk, whose reputation as a research environmentalist has grown since then. His most recent article is at:
This is his personal website.
Another major and well-known writer present was Richard Manning, who began with forestry violation revelations and has continued through prairie issues to the traumas of Native American kids. He has written many relevant books, not least or less bravely than about his own family. He had to leave a panel because of his mother passing. It was before cell phones; the landline rang in a nearby room, someone came and whispered to him, and he rose, his face somewhere between stunned and . . . I don't know what. We sat in silence as he gathered his things and left, wondering how to help. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Manning
The simple list of writers in attendance is a valuable instrument, but so far as I know there’s no membership union nor any regular schedule of meetings. After I finished Bob’s bio I wandered for a bit until a correspondent took me back to my U of Chicago interest in religious matters without meaning to. More accurately, he triggered my near-obsession with what is “under” or previous to "religion" which most people see as institutional beliefs and practices. The reason was not what one might expect. I was trying to understand boys "at risk" in order to find something that could touch them. They were tough guys who stuck together because the world beat them nearly to death. I can’t quite describe their impact on me. Something like that of the rez in the Sixties.
I want to think about the primal sacred and holy, often related to experiences in nature, and how they become expressed in liturgy, even spontaneous improvised moments. My manuscript about examples is on Academia.com (https://www.academia.edu), entitled “The Bone Chalice,” meaning that a mind is a flame in the skull. Now I’m working on something I call —ponderously — “Patterned Tumult.” I’ll have to think of something more snappy like “Can You Have an Epiphany in an Elevator?”
Though the Waterton Writer’s Conference wasn’t about religion or even what is loosely called “spirituality”, it was a sustaining force behind what I’ve done since. The only event with more significance to me was the set of Bitterroot Valley conferences with Peter Matthiessen in about 1989. I saved those notes as well, but it was a far more limited and merchandized event. Still, these two conferences were far from touting the sentimental and conventional writing that is most popular and most focussed on the person of the writer, for purposes of sales. These two brief gatherings were highly expert and serious, and may well sustain the ideas that will save the world. This force is neither perceptible nor significant to the monsters who are now shaking the world down by extortion. Monsters always underestimate.
A writing problem, my own problem, is the tension between communicating with others and allying with them, versus getting impatient with other people’s agendas and indignant at their attempts to control me. This is easily related to — as they say — “organized religion” which on the one hand keeps people grouped up and acting as a whole, versus on the other hand — undoubtedly the left — the outlier with intense and often mysterious experiences of the Holy.
I haven’t paid much attention to political issues, because the incredible explosion of scientific knowledge has been so absorbing, transformative and full of wonder. But politics and science are deeply related, both of them life or death matters. The hegemony of nuclear bomb threats has been “blown away” by the greater effectiveness at killing people and destroying the land by rewriting the laws or playing eco-politics. Now pandemic and famine stalk us.
Writers like those in Waterton Peace Park in 2001 knew this and spent their lives in quiet but effective dedication to understanding, deflecting the greed and malice of the worst world exploiters. (As I sit here typing, I think I can hear the big C-series airplanes from Malmstrom Air Base in Great Falls, the home of the 341st Missile Wing of the Air Force Global Strike Command. Maybe they’re only practicing. They prefer moonlit nights.)
Some of these developments have been gradual and concerning but not an emergency. Businesses wink out but they seem to be as much about the owners as major trends. Then suddenly something as abrupt as this pandemic — though we’d all read Quammen’s books, esp. “Spillover,” — and we’re surprised, even those who write about it. https://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode/david-quammen-how-animal-infections-spill-over-to-humans/
As long ago as when I began circuit riding (’82-85) a nurse told a study group I was in that in nursing homes once in a while someone would be visited by a special doc, then “wrapped in tinfoil” and swiftly moved to some mysterious place, never to be seen again. Viruses are always with us. Sometimes they take charge. There IS a lesson to be learned from that.
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