February is a big month on Wilderness Interface Zone. First, in honor of Valentine’s Day, all month long we’ll be soliciting poetry, essays, blocks of fiction, art, music (mp3s) or other media that address the subject of love while including references to nature. Also, we’re interested in works about nature that include references to love. [...]
As deeply as I feel the charge from hearing a coyote call close by or catching the wood-and-water chuckle of wild turkeys, as fully as wind flittering through cottonwood leaves inspires me to listen and to breathe, I appreciate the sing-sound of the well-turned human tongue.
Sometimes, in lonely canyons, when there’s no one else there, I’ve heard [...]
If you’re doing the human being thing with any gusto, you’ve more than likely experienced moments of awakening, of not only feeling more alive yourself but of feeling the lives of others around touching your life, dancing through, affecting and changing who you are, entwining into your being (you can read about some of my [...]
I’ve decided to officially declare August Homo narrans month on WIZ. Throughout the month, I’ll post narrative prose and poetry that’s people-centric in nature. Homo narrans (”storytelling man”) is John D. Niles’ provocative turn on our self-assigned scientific designation Homo sapien:
Only human beings possess this almost incredible cosmoplastic power, or world-making ability… Through storytelling, an otherwise unexceptional biological species [...]
I’m getting ready to crack the spine on Terry Tempest Williams’ latest book, Finding Beauty in a Broken World. Over a year ago, I heard her read a little from the pre-publication draft and attended a workshop she conducted. It was apparent to me that she had changed her approach to her audience somewhat as well [...]
The welcome post for WIZ stated the following:
We launch Wilderness Interface Zone knowing nature literature is something of a spiritual and artistic frontier for Mormons…and yet not. With Joseph Smith’s First Vision, Mormonism certainly stakes a defensible claim in the tradition of finding God in the wilderness. Couple this claim with belief in eternal progression, [...]
The Ellen Meloy Fund has awarded their grant of $2000 to Amy Irvine, author of Trespass: Living at the Edge of the Promised Land, to support her work on her upcoming book, Terra Firma. This is the fund’s fourth annual grant.
She competed for this grant last year, too, when the award went to Joe Wilkins.
Since then, [...]
In honor of spring’s arrival, Wilderness Interface Zone will over the next two weeks post poems celebrating the arrival of “the boyhood of the year” (Tennyson).
If you have a favorite poem about spring or one in which spring figures prominently or have written one that fits WIZ’s themes and content, e-mail it to us at wilderness@motleyvision.org. Please review [...]
The Salt Lake Tribune reports an annual event to document magnitudes of light pollution across the planet. This project invites public participation.
Every year, Globe at Night asks teachers and students, parents and their children, and stargazers located internationally to observe the constellation Orion, specifically his belt. The website linked above provides all the tools and information needed, although people [...]
There’s something about walking out of the desert or other wild or marginally wild area that you don’t get walking into it. Something that you feel in your return to others sharing the fire or that comes from sliding into your vehicle to head home at the end of a hike or campout. Something about completing the journey on foot, walking [...]