There was a time when I wanted to be a park ranger when I grew up. My family usually spent our summer vacations walking sun-dappled trails beneath pin oaks, slippery elm and loblolly pines, cooking over a kerosene-powered Coleman stove, and sleeping in a pop-up camper. For a writer, maybe the next best thing to being a ranger is the national parks' Artist in Residence programs.
I've been selected to be an Artist in Residence - we're called AIRs for short - at Mesa Verde National Park. For two weeks in September I get to live in the park, explore archeological sites and stare up at the stars at night. While I'm there I'll teach a writing workshop combined with a reading of my work, on Friday, September 16 at 7 p.m at the Chapin Mesa Museum. Everyone is invited and you don't have to have any prior writing experience. America's public lands are an important part of our cultural heritage, and the human history of Ancestral Puebloans in what we now call the Four Corners region is long and deep. I'll spend my time getting to know both through my writing practice, with a particular eye to the impact of climate change. As a lead-up event to my residency, I held the #ParkLit Hashtag Book Festival on August 20, which as far as I know is the first book festival ever to take place entirely on a hashtag. If you missed it you can catch the proceedings on the festival page or read my writeup on the popular travel blog WeSaidGoTravel. My reading list for the residency keeps growing, including everyone from Wallace Stegner and Edward Abbey to Terry Tempest Williams, Simon Ortiz and Craig Childs. So if you're looking for me, I'll be the one with the notebook, pen and battered paperback, somewhere in the vicinity of this cliff palace.
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Last Sunday in Vista Hermosa Natural Park three other local LA writers and I each read original short stories about The End of Water. In their stories we met a weatherman who tells uncomfortable truths, a species of whale that may be extinct (and may always have been), a carwashero seeking justice for his father, and a scientist testing her theory that we can solve the problem by turning wine into water. These stories were originally read by actors as part of the 2015 LitCrawl in LA. The participating authors were Chris Iovenko, Henry Hoke, A.R. Taylor and me, Bronwyn Mauldin.
The End of Water wasn't an ordinary literary event, though. I organized this reading to be part of VisionLA '15 Fest, a climate action festival that brought together artists across Los Angeles to demand our leaders take meaningful action to stop climate change at the UN COP '21 negotiations in Paris. After the reading the four of us had a chance to talk on video about climate change, what we expect from our leaders and what artists have to offer in this struggle to slow the warming of our planet. That last question is a particularly important one. People tend to think of artists in terms of the final product: a book, painting, dance or play. But what we really have to offer is in the way we think. We have the ability to imagine a world that doesn't exist. We are constantly in a state of combining ideas and materials that don't obviously fit together, thereby reinventing the world. For example, imagine if we replaced our planet-harming industrial-scale infrastructure - especially around transportation and energy - on a human scale? If we can build a network of small farm-to-table food systems, why not a network of small roof-to-laptop electrical grids? Vista Hermosa Park was a beautiful location for the reading, and holding outdoors turned out to be perfect. The park is almost hidden on the edge of downtown LA. It was designed as a watershed, complete with green roofs, native landscaping and a cistern under the parking lot to capture any runoff. If you've never visited, I highly recommend it, as a break in the middle of the work day or on a lazy weekend afternoon. Here are a few photos from the reading. Enjoy! Three years of Los Angeles LitCrawls, and I'm still batting a thousand. This year, a story I wrote about a carwashero in search of justice called "Beans and Rice" appeared in the LitCrawl session called Water, Water, Anywhere?, co-sponsored by the New Short Fiction Series and City of LA's local Metropolitan Water District. Actor Holger Moncada, Jr. read the story and did a great job bringing it to life. Here's a pic of him reading live at Pitfire Pizza during our round of the LitCrawl: Last year at the LitCrawl I read a poem on the topic of guns, with the LA Word group. Things were a little lighter at the first LitCrawl, where I read a true story about a run-in with a kind-of-creepy Santa Claus.
All the stories in our session this year were on the theme of water and drought, a topic that's top of mind here in LA. The other three stories by Chris Iovenko, Henry Hoke and A.R. Taylor were terrific. We're planning to reprise our session as part of the upcoming VisionLA '15 Climate Arts Action Festival in early December, so stay tuned for more details. |
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May 2018
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