Well, Julie is trying to get a slide show set up,
but while she does that, and she's working on it,
I'll tell you-- because Gail asked me
and Eloise to talk about the imprints we
have through Red Hen Press.
Mine is called Boreal Books, and I bring out one book a year
by an Alaskan writer.
I put some of them over on the table,
and if you would like to make a donation to the Poetry Center,
you may take one of them home with you.
Yeah, there's also a--
That's a good fundraiser.
And there's also a brochure if you'd like to see.
I've found so many good manuscripts
that I couldn't just pick one, and so I
went to the University of Alaska Press
and did some fancy tap dancing, and now we
have the Alaska Literary Series, and so some of those titles,
they're there too.
OK.
So what happens in our imagination
when we're in a landscape that is completely unfamiliar?
Those of you will know, who grow up grew up here in the desert
as I did, that it has its own set of rules
and it has its own beauty, and so I'm
going to talk to you about being in a landscape that's
utterly unfamiliar.
That's what the view looks like outside my window
most of the time in Fairbanks, Alaska in the winter.
We went to Costa Rica in April.
That's what we left.
Here's what we came back to, the ice beginning to melt in May,
and it usually-- whoops.
Yeah, the ice beginning to melt in May and the swans coming
back.
Eloise Klein Healy, whom you will hear from tonight,
and her partner Collenn Rooney, used
to take people hiking and birdwatching.
And in 2009 they called up and said,
we'd like to do a creative writing component.
Will you come teach?
And I said, sign me up.
We entered the bower of strangeness.
I think that's a Buddhist temple.
Some of the things were kind of familiar,
but the scale was different.
These pieces of bamboo were about that big around,
and they sounded when they bonked together
like an arthritic pirate ship.
And some of the scale was unusual,
like the tiny bird [INAUDIBLE] inside the caldera
of a bromeliad.
So many bird [INAUDIBLE] This one is a [INAUDIBLE]..
I never found out what these are.
So if anybody here knows, I would be glad to know.
Liz, do you?
You do.
Liz knows, so we will find out.
Some of the bananas were bright pink and grew straight up.
The taxis, the little taxis, are red.
They have the finest collection of pre-Colombian gold
anywhere in the world.
This was a zoomorphic breastplate.
And I thought about the ancestors
of the people who knew how to mine that gold
and smelt it and make it into beauty.
Many of their descendants are not so lucky.
Eloise took us to the Talamanca Highlands.
We got to see the trogons.
We got to see branches so heavy with epiphytes that sometimes
they cracked off the trees.
I'd never seen trees upholstered like that.
This is to prove that my husband actually hiked.
[LAUGHTER]
We got to see, resplendent as promised, the quetzal