Main Library

Rick Bass, the 2019 Visiting Distinguished Writer at Boise State University, will give a reading with his graduate students. Bass is currently teaching the fiction workshop in the MFA Program in Creative Writing with Professor Mitch Wieland. Rick and his students will be reading from their work as the culminating event of the semester.

Rick Bass has written over 25 books of fiction and nonfiction, including The Watch, For a Little While, and Why I Came West. His fiction has appeared in the Atlantic, Esquire, The New Yorker, and The Paris Review, as well as The Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Awards, The Pushcart Prize, and New Stories from the South. In 2016, he was awarded the prestigious Story Prize in Los Angeles. In addition to writing, Bass is a well-known environmental activist who lives in Montana.

We typically hear that American environmentalism was born in late-nineteenth-century America from a nostalgia for wilderness that accompanied a rampantly expanding industrialism. We also typically hear that American environmentalism is the intellectual legacy of a handful of white, educated men (Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, Teddy Roosevelt)–and that it emerged from their experiences of uniquely American landscapes (Walden Pond, the Sierras, Yellowstone). The life of Susan Fenimore Cooper (1813-1894) enriches this intellectual legacy, illustrating additional origins of environmental thought in the United States. While less familiar today, in the nineteenth-century Susan Fenimore Cooper gained wide recognition as an important natural historian and a prescient environmental thinker—one noted by the likes of Spencer Fullerton Baird, who directed the Smithsonian, and Charles Darwin. Little known is that, as a young girl, Cooper traveled to Europe with her world-famous father (the author James Fenimore Cooper), and her experiences of European cultural sites and historic landscapes profoundly impacted her later groundbreaking environmental writing. This lecture explores Cooper’s early European experience in light of her prescient recognition of the fragility of her new nation’s landscapes. We come to see that American environmental thought emerged in the minds of both men and women, based on experiences both inside and outside of the nation’s bounds. Cooper’s particular contributions to early American environmentalism reflect deep engagements with various civilizations throughout history, and they grew from her witnessing firsthand how various human cultures had altered the physical world over time.

The Community Library, in partnership with Seventh Generation Institute, is excited to bring a free screening of the Institute’s film “Rethinking Beaver: old nuisance or new partner?” to the Wood River Valley.

Through unscripted interviews with ranchers and others, this film will explore in-depth the real-life pros and cons of using of beaver as a tool to restore streams, adapt to climate change, improve fish and wildlife habitat, repair erosion and increase forage on ranches and other large land areas in the West.   Featured in the film are Brian Bean of Carey ID, Chris Black of Mountain Home ID, Lew Pence of Gooding ID, Jon Griggs of Elko NV,  Julia Davis-Stafford, Cimarron NM, Michael Bain of Ocata NM, and Christa and David Franklin of Guadalupita NM.

Please join acclaimed poet and translator, Michael Bazzett, for a reading from his new translation of the ancient Mayan creation story, The Popol Vuh, his translation of which has garnered many awards, including NEW YORK TIMES BEST POETRY BOOK OF 2018 and WORLD LITERATURE TODAY NOTABLE TRANSLATION.

In the beginning, the world is spoken into existence with one word: “Earth.” There are no inhabitants, and no sun—only the broad sky, silent sea, and sovereign Framer and Shaper. Then come the twin heroes Hunahpu and Xbalanque. Wielding blowguns, they begin a journey to hell and back, ready to confront the folly of false deities as well as death itself, in service to the world and to humanity.

This is the story of the Mayan Popol Vuh, “the book of the woven mat,” one of the only epics indigenous to the Americas. Originally sung and chanted, before being translated into prose—and now, for the first time, translated back into verse by Michael Bazzett—this is a story of the generative power of language. A story that asks not only Where did you come from? but How might you live again? A story that, for the first time in English, lives fully as “the phonetic rendering of a living pulse.”

Thank you to Dr. Mac Test and the Boise State University English Department for providing this special event!