Bearlodge Writers
Sundance, WY
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Featured Books
In The Shadow Of The Bearlodge
by Bearlodge Writers
Many Kites Press 2006. ISBN 0-9729002-8-7. 200 pp. $15 plus shipping and handling.
Now Bearlodge
Writers has published its first anthology. Inside the stunning cover
illustration of buffalo painted by renowned watercolorist
Sara Rogers
is a rich and full-bodied collection of writing.
Contained in this volume are reincarnations of historical personages as
well as entities who inhabit other worlds. Characters in this prose may
bid sad farewells to grandmothers or puzzled hellos to oriental mystics.
They find stories in their socks as well as in The Satisfy Café. Stained
glass windows and river rapids sing to them, and they find Rome's
Coliseum in a tipi ring, hear history in "the remembering wind."
Experienced, these writers gnaw every bit of flavor from the most
gristly details of their lives, and can still laugh and solve the
problems of the world while rolling hay into long, tight windrows. "Hang
on, hang on," they say in a dozen ways, because "lonely is a state of
mind." Each page offers a new treasure, a unique viewpoint, a glimpse of
what we might say about lives that might look ordinary to others. With
"a firm hand and a no-nonsense look," they give us reasons to go on, to
"sing on the waters" as we float through our lives.
These writers are, in fact, you and me, all of us: ranchers and artists,
teachers, lawyers, professors of English, musicians and librarians,
nurses and extension educators, a UPS driver, college students,
corporate and private business persons- and they all encourage and
support each other in their efforts to understand and capture what is
most important in their lives. These ordinary men and women, in creating
this writing collection, demonstrate in one more way their awareness of
the exquisite fragility of this world. They understand deeply that they
live and work "in the shadow of the Bearlodge."
Linda M. Hasselstrom
Publisher
Between Grass and Sky
I Quote
Excerpt from A Singular Notion
Foreword to A Singular Notion
In 1957 my father was assigned to NATO in France, where he served four years with the Allied Air Forces of central Europe. I was four years old. Another language beyond English or French informed my days, a kind of relating initiated—I have come to believe—by a visit to a certain rock in the forest of Fontainebleau, southeast of Paris. I later rediscovered this boulder, Le Rocher d’Hercule, in a letter written by Ralph Waldo Emerson, wherein he described a visit to the site, and had learned that it was important to the Druids. Today the boulder is popular with climbers, as is another great stone in northeast Wyoming, Devils Tower, one which American Indians venerate as wakan, or holy. This rock too begs a response—recognition—that we are no more, nor less, than the stones, that we merely express ourselves differently, that everything vibrates with that which we call “spirit,” and ultimately, that we as humans are responsible, or “able to respond.” This remains our greatest capacity and inclination.
There being many ways of knowing, and different values placed on different styles thereof, I set out to describe a less-valued, but nonetheless indispensable kind of “knowing,” one less apparent in our present culture, but not necessarily ignored by those heart—given one’s circumstances. Its communication is not expressed in words, but rather in the proverbial “signs, wonders and portents.” This kind of perceiving proceeds from attentiveness, and given our humanity, too often through its tragic opposite—thoughtless carelessness and disregard.
The following essays and notes evolved over the course of seventeen years, in an whom Kirkpatrick Sale calls “dwellers in the land,” whether geographically or in one’s effort to acknowledge my notions, whether deduced from the usual “signs and portents,” or gleaned from fellow wonderers and travelers. As a species, we seem to require contexts lest we become lost in life’s twists and turns; Truth, Beauty, Awe, Grace and Reverence inhabit this “divine milieu” as sign posts for me, to borrow Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s sublime expression for context.
A reminiscence of childhood anchors the theme of interconnectedness—love by any other name—between ourselves and this planet’s ground of being, where spirit and matter mingles, for me now, in this state of Wyoming. Alchemical and practical magic, weddings and wagons, monasteries and one-room cabins, forests and churches, painters and pragmatists; unconsciousness, consequence, mistakes, atonement, sacrifice and restoration—contrasts holding a tension that somehow manage to bear up under the weight of the contradictions, but still I wonder and dare ask, isn’t it more grand to be far out on the very end of the see-saw, legs and arms all flying akimbo, resurrected in a wild response to the equal but opposite motion?
Excerpt from A Singular Notion released October 2006
.