Thanks, Elizabeth.
And thanks for coming out on the first evening
after spring break, especially when people,
I guess, in Tucson, would think this
is some sort of winter storm that we've
been experiencing, which I can't really fathom yet,
having come from northern Utah just a few months ago.
But I want to especially thank Elizabeth for all of her help
with setting up the reading, and thank
the Poetry Center, of course, and the Department of English.
So this reading is part of the prose series.
But it's also the inaugural reading in a series
that I'm curating called, "The Next American Nature
and Science Writing," with support
from the Institute of the Environment,
support that I think demonstrates
the active commitment to bridging
the cultures of the humanities and the sciences
on this vibrant campus.
The name of the series really suggests
what we're after, what's next, what's new, what's different,
in a genre that's often seen as stuffy, moralistic,
and elitist, or, in the case of science writing,
too plainspoken and too journalistic.
So I'd like to invite all of you to help
me think about the edges of nature and science writing,
and bring to our attention any writers working in this genre
that you think would be exciting presences in this new series.
John Price is the perfect person to kick off the "Next American
Nature and Science Writing."
He's not stuffy or elitist.
He's smart.
When he draws a lesson, a moral, as it were,
for himself and for his readers, it's
after a journey of authentic exploration of self, family,
community, and the wider world.
I first met John Price several years ago,
when he was working on his first book, which is for sale here.
And I was told by Cybele that they're
20% off the cover price.
So, FYI.
I first met John Price several years ago,
when he was working on his first book, Not Just
Any Land, which grew out of his creative nonfiction
dissertation at Iowa.
And I was struck by the balance of the personal,
the environmental, and the scholarly.
I was struck also by his wit, by his self-deprecating humor.
And this humor plays a large role in John's work.
And his well-known readings at the Western American Literature
Association and the Association for the Study
of Literature and Environment conferences
have become legendary.
The sad truth is that a lot of nature writing
is dull, or, at least, so freighted
with self-conscious significance as to be of interest only to,
as we say, the choir.
Some of you have heard me rail against
the high moral seriousness of some of our most beloved nature
writers, writers I've admired and learned from.
But-- and I'm switching metaphors here--
their preachy groove has become a skipping record, the needle
of their righteousness playing the same notes over and over
and over again.
And it's gotten old.
The rhetorical gestures that helped
to clarify our predicaments in the last century
are not the gestures we need today.
We need today a flexibility of voice and subject
matter, less preaching, fewer epiphanies in the wilderness.
We need, actually, to laugh.
We need to walk around our neighborhoods
and touch the entire atmosphere.
We need streets and birdsong, dining rooms and spiders.
We need to find writers who find kinships everywhere.
We need to find the wisdom and energy
that joy offers, joy coming from the neglected, the undersung.
John Price gives us that, writing
from a house in Council Bluffs, Iowa,
with a family that's very much present,
in perhaps the most degraded bioregion
on the planet, the North American tallgrass prairie.
In John's essays, we find a man truly
ill-suited to the role of apartment maintenance
guy, as we'll hear in a moment.
We meet a neighbor of his offering
the vaguely threatening fact that male squirrels
will chew the gonads off of rival male squirrels.
And we encounter an errant pheasant
flying into the writer's head as he hurtles down
an Iowa highway.
Closer to home here, John recounts,
in "Man Killed by Pheasant," sitting in the control
council of the Titan Missile Museum
with a schoolgirl, a moment that becomes
a revelation of the importance of family and faith.
These two realms are crucial to John's work, as you'll see.
That he makes worlds such as this not only
accessible but lovely and necessary to someone like me,
a childless atheist, is a testament
to the grace of his vision and his voice.
The Iowan has said of John's work,
if David Sedaris and Annie Dillard had a literary love
child and raised him in Iowa--
I'm not sure what the adolescence of that
would be like, but it's not my quote--
he would write like this.
The landscape of Price's memoir is a grace-filled territory
of wit, wisdom, and most of all, great compassion.
John is the author of the memoirs Daddy Long Legs--
The Natural Education of a Father, which
is forthcoming from Trumpeter Books,
an imprint of Shambhala Press, Man Killed by Pheasant
and Other Kinships, which was published by De Capo,
and for which he won the Orion Readers' Award
and earned national praise in such venues
as The Boston Globe, and which is
just now out in a new edition from the University of Iowa
Press, and Not Just Any Land--
A Personal and Literary Journey into the American Grasslands,
published by Nebraska in 2004.
His nonfiction writing about nature, family, and spirit,
has appeared in many places such as Orion, The Christian Science
Monitor, Creative Nonfiction, Isotope, Best Spiritual
Writing, and so on.
He's a professor of English at the University
of Nebraska Omaha, where he teaches nonfiction writing,
now has his hands on a major endowment
there, which I'm quite jealous of,
and is fellow of the Black Earth Institute.
He also does a killer Austin Powers impersonation,
which you may not hear tonight.
I don't know.
Please welcome John Price.
[APPLAUSE]