There’s an old Albanian story about a dragon that rose from the Blue-Eyed Spring and devoured the land, until it was burned out, in a track that flames with this amazing sumac, smokebush, even […]
Smoke Bush, The Dragon Slayer
The Purpose of Education and Indigenous Identity
Welcome to the Wallula Gap. That’s the impounded Columbia River, in its old bed there. The gap between the cliffs is so narrow that the 300 foot deep flood wave from the melting ice age that […]
Smarter, More Ethical Water for the Okanagan
Here’s a great idea about water… …which the Vernon newspaper graciously printed for me. You can find it in the February 26 edition of the Vernon Morning Star, here. If you page […]
Creativity and Environment: The Story So Far
THE CREATIVE ENVIRONMENT This post collects the 17 sections of a discussion on creativity, identity and environment which I have posted over the past 5 weeks. It is the first half of […]
Byzantine Creativity
Byzantium! The eastern roman capital, that survived until the Turks made it Istanbul. Early Christians in the Thousand Year Empire In Twentieth Century Poetry, it holds a beloved place. At midnight on the […]
Book, Man, Woman, Land, God
A long time ago, there was an attempt to speak the language of the world. Ultimately, it came to look like this: Gutenberg Bible of 1455 The idea was that that book […]
Welcome to the Land of the Big Heads
It’s called the Okanagan Valley now, north of the 1846 border that divided this land into two. South of that line, it’s known as Okanogan County, Washington, USA — hardly a valley. Early […]
History and (Dis)Respect on the Clearwater River
Here’s Curtis’s 1910 photo of a Nez Perce dugout canoe. This was the low point in Nez Perce life. Over the previous century, they had lost over 90% of the territory, much of […]
For the Love of Birds
My mother, who died a week ago on Sunday, did not like starlings. This was not because she did not like birds. She loved those. As a girl in the 1930s, she […]
The Great Tractor Show
In November, the poet Howard Brown and I are giving a show about tractors. He has the long poem. I have gallery walls. Somehow we’ll make this work. We’ve been taking photos. […]
Okanagan Okanogan 