Wilderness Interface Zone

Make
like a tree* and
grow, bloom and bear fruit,
give shade, give shelter, sow seed,
weather storms, dig deep,
breathe deeper.
Be useful
in your
death:
frame
well,
burn
bright,
enrich
the soil,
and,
mulch
made,
resurrect
a tree.
____________________________________________________________________________
*This is, of course, a variation on the common adage to “make like a tree and branch out,” and the less common adage, used primarily among canines (the dogs, not the teeth), “make like a [...]

Coming soon to a mailbox (or computer) near you: Dialogue’s environmental issue.  Several Wilderness Interface Zone contributors are included therein–congratulations, friends! Frequent WIZ contributor Steven Peck guest edited this issue.
Table of contents:
Page     Author     Title
Mary Toscano     Front Cover
Inside Cover, Title Page
v     Edwin Firmage, Jr.     Letters
1     Steven L. Peck     Why [...]

On the warm late Spring shore, late
in a lunar glow,
he stood looking at the waves
trooping slowly, relentlessly into the cove
He stood wondering about the strings
of which some say he was made
Of what tidal forces were they drawn?
What sort of other moon forced him
into existence by its orbit around . . . what?
He placed his foot [...]

He walks slowly, his back more straight than not,
his gait timeless. Strong.
Still, there is something hesitant and
questioning about his steps, as though
he were feeling his way through the stony-bottomed
stream of a shallow river. The wide path allows him
to cherish his granddaughter’s hand as they walk
abreast at a pace that suits them both, supporting one
another in [...]

Existence was
worth it
if only for
the timbre
of untamed
water
splashing
beneath the fragile
white-crystal coating
of mid-winter ice.
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Steve Peck is an ecologist at Brigham Young University. Creative works include a novel: The Gift of the King’s Jeweler (2003 Covenant Communications); a self-published novella A Short Stay in Hell (reviewed here and here), a short science fiction story: The Flaw in the [...]

The twentieth century has gone down in history for a number of ignominious as well as heroic events, but certainly one of its more troubling legacies is its treatment of rivers. As agriculture gave way to industry and massive development of cities, water was victim to an increasingly private and individualistic conceptualization of property. Consequently, [...]

Mormon Artist Magazine has published a fun interview they did with me for their current issue.  I’ve not often been interviewed–just one phone interview where I wound up misquoted–so I appreciate Mormon Artist’s interest in my work and attention to detail during this process.
The pics accompanying are unfortunately not as fine as I’d like, but [...]

“Look, here’s Fezzika,” my mother said, bending down to point out the Woodhouse toad tucked under the garden stone. We had discovered the amphibian’s house a few days earlier, and I was fascinated by the placement choice. She had dug into the soil under a cornerstone edging the flowerbed beside the main path through the [...]

I would like to thank personally each participant in the 2010 Spring Poetry Runoff Celebration.  You helped make the Runoff a very successful event this year, not just for me but for readers and other participants.  I hope everyone enjoyed the poetry and all-around gathering of talent as much as I did.  The list of [...]

Today the secret names of everything
come back, the ancient names.
Tribe-of-the-morning names
call to me from the wind, which I know
as shut-your-eyes-breath,
hands-over-your-ears, gone-with-the-ice-song,
hymn-rising-out-of-cottonwood-sap.
Smell-of-dogwood; it is called,
smell-of-willow.
Daffodil has become again
small-pusher-of-earth-and-snow,
light-out-of-stone,
seawater-turned-sunshine.
This morning has its own name,
separate from all other mornings,
fire-in-the-clouds
waking-in-the-folds-of-mountain,
joy-of-long-shadows.
And now spring has brought
mist-in-my-breath,
shining-on-the-rocks,
quick-and-noisy-in-the-canyon,
to make soft soil in the garden
where I kneel for the first time
on the almost-warm-gift-to-growing
and work [...]