A conversation with Lucy Moore, one of the Southwest’s premier environmental mediators
Profiles
Posted inJanuary 21, 2013: Special issue: Natural resources education
Great Old Broads for Wilderness laugh and learn
The pro-wilderness group teaches elders how to engage in public lands management, while having a great time.
Posted inArticles
Protecting culture in the ancient Sky City
About an hour west of Albuquerque, N.M., a sandstone bluff rises above the high desert floor. For more than 800 years, the people of Acoma Pueblo have lived there, protecting their culture, language and many traditional ways. Archaeologist Theresa Pasqual, the director of the Acoma Pueblo’s Historic Preservation Office, works with state and federal agencies […]
Posted inNovember 26, 2012: Casting for Common Ground
Seattle-based artist paints portraits of a melting world
We only see what we look at. To look is an act of choice. — John Berger, Ways of Seeing Maria Coryell-Martin wants us to dance the horizon. We are in the Seattle Art Museum’s sculpture park, beneath a hunk of orange steel (The Eagle, by Alexander Calder), but she is looking past the art, […]
Posted inOctober 15, 2012: Are you a local?
Inside the orchard: A conversation with novelist Amanda Coplin
Amanda Coplin spent the first years of her life in Wenatchee, Wash., the self-proclaimed “Apple Capital of the World,” and was indelibly shaped by its rolling acres of fruit trees, and by her frequent visits to the apple and apricot orchard owned by her grandparents. Those sights and smells are powerfully evoked in her debut […]
Posted inOctober 15, 2012: Are you a local?
Already gone: a profile of Muscogee (Creek) poet Joy Harjo
The author of She Had Some Horses and In Mad Love and War discusses her new memoir, Crazy Brave.
Posted inOctober 15, 2012: Are you a local?
Three Nevada fiction writers make their debut
This year, three accomplished and innovative fiction debuts by young Nevada-raised writers will hit the bookstores, including two novels –– Tupelo Hassman’s Girlchild and Ben Rogers’ The Flamer (reviewed in HCN on Aug. 6) –– and a short story collection, Claire Vaye Watkins’ Battleborn. Girlchild tells the story of Rory Dawn Hendrix, who at the […]
Posted inOctober 15, 2012: Are you a local?
Existential nomad: A profile of author Ruben Martinez
In Rubén Martinez’s new memoir, Desert America: Boom and Bust in the New Old West, the author examines the fertility kit that he and his wife had ordered, taking particular interest in its clean hypodermic syringes and needles. It is 2007, and the couple is living beneath northern New Mexico’s famed Black Mesa, in Velarde, […]
Posted inOctober 15, 2012: Are you a local?
The West in my blood: A profile of Eddie Chuculate
Two years ago, on a cool October evening at Santa Fe’s Institute of American Indian Arts, Native author Eddie Chuculate read his story “Dear Shorty” aloud. He spoke with a rolling rhythm, peppered by alliteration. With his head cocked, glasses in one hand and the book almost touching his nose, Chuculate held his listeners entranced. […]
Posted inJuly 23, 2012: The Hardest Climb
Save a chimney, save a swift
Doesn’t look like it’s going to be a great night,” Larry Schwitters says, sitting in his car outside the Old Selleck Schoolhouse, about 40 miles southeast of Seattle. It’s nearly sunset, the sky is cloudless and warm. “It’s too nice for swifts,” he grouses. “If there were going to be a lot of them, they’d […]
Posted inArticles
Afield with a vegan gas man
“I probably don’t look like a typical oil and gas guy,” says Eric Sanford. Wearing clogs — his “driving shoes” — and a wide cloth belt that looks right out of the 1980s, he sure doesn’t. Sanford, 39, who jokingly describes himself as the “vegan son of Nebraska farmers,” grew up in a town of […]
Posted inFebruary 20, 2012: How Arizona's culture helped shape the shooting of Gabrielle Giffords
Environmental warrior Martin Litton is still fighting at 95
Martin Litton, 95, wastes no time on proprieties. “I’m supposed to be dead, you know,” he growls on a January morning, leading me through a thicket of potted plants into his home in the hills near Palo Alto, Calif. A towering presence with a booming voice, Litton has spent his life battling developers, extractive industries […]
Posted inFebruary 6, 2012: Can evolution help snowshoe hares adapt to climate change?
John Mionczynski: naturalist, accordionist, and Bigfoot expert
ATLANTIC CITY, WYOMINGOn an overcast August afternoon, John Mionczynski is crouched underneath an aspen by the porch of his one-room log cabin, attending to his motorcycle’s broken headlight. Over 30 years ago, he assembled this machine using pieces from four different BMWs — a 1951, ’53, ’63 and ’65. He named it “Serendipity.” “Whenever I […]
Posted inDecember 12, 2011: Out on a limb
The man beneath the hat: Ken Salazar’s search for middle ground
Nearly every story about Ken Salazar mentions his cowboy hat. It’s hard not to; there aren’t a lot of politicians or bureaucrats — particularly Democrats — in D.C. who can get away with wearing one and not come off as a wannabe. Today, though, Salazar’s white hat and blue, pearl-buttoned ranch shirt fit right in. […]
Posted inNovember 28, 2011: Growing a Revolution
Hersh Saunders’ transformation from prosthodontist to kosher slaughterer
In a barn on his 400-acre ranch south of Pueblo, Colo., Hersh Saunders sharpens a long blunt-end knife called a halaf. A blue crocheted kippah, a Jewish skullcap, covers the bearded rabbi’s silver hair. Outside the barn, sheep graze and chickens peck near a small synagogue and rows of organic vegetables. Saunders has spent the […]
Posted inNovember 14, 2011: Possessing the Wild
Daniel Marlos shares his knowledge and love of the insect world
In early June, Daniel Marlos, an eccentric, cherubic-faced Los Angeleno, received an intriguing message from a friend: “If there weren’t two little, scrawny legs, I wouldn’t think it was a living thing!” she said, describing a creature loitering on her porch. She emailed Marlos a photo of a tawny, wingless insect, its legs cartoonishly splayed […]
Posted inSeptember 19, 2011: Redemption
A part of something old: writer Kim Stafford’s storied places
In southwest Portland lies a strip of untamed land, bounded by busy roads in a dense, urban landscape. It is not a park, simply a tract of woods that developers missed. It is also not pristine nature, but it is what writer and Portland native Kim Stafford calls a “scattered Eden.” Those woods are just […]
Posted inSeptember 19, 2011: Redemption
Cody Cortez: A faux-file of the West’s most mysterious writer
As fiercely reclusive as he is enigmatic, Cody Cortez is probably the most compelling Western writer you’ve never heard of. He lives off the grid and loathes the trappings of the literary life, spurning bookstore readings and appearances on National Public Radio. Among devotees, though, the pages of his books-in-progress, especially his memoir-in-the-making, Cowboy Rinpoche, […]
Posted inSeptember 19, 2011: Redemption
Don’t tell her she can’t: a profile of author Mary Clearman Blew
Author and professor Mary Clearman Blew grew up on cattle ranches outside Lewistown, Mont., in the ’40s and ’50s, the great grand-daughter of homesteaders. She’s written about her family’s legacy and the changing West in nonfiction (All But the Waltz: Essays on a Montana Family), short stories (Runaway), and a novel, Jackalope Dreams, about ranchers […]
Posted inSeptember 19, 2011: Redemption
The turn of the wheel: the many lives of writer H. Lee Barnes
“A lot of the themes that I work with are within the context of the lives I have lived,” says Nevada author H. Lee Barnes. “My characters are grassroots people who struggle to make it to the next day.” An Army brat who grew up “all over the Southwest,” Barnes was a Green Beret in […]