WEBVTT

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Well, Julie is trying to
get a slide show set up,

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but while she does that,
and she's working on it,

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I'll tell you--
because Gail asked me

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and Eloise to talk
about the imprints we

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have through Red Hen Press.

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Mine is called Boreal Books,
and I bring out one book a year

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by an Alaskan writer.

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I put some of them
over on the table,

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and if you would like to make a
donation to the Poetry Center,

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you may take one of
them home with you.

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Yeah, there's also a--

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That's a good fundraiser.

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And there's also a brochure
if you'd like to see.

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I've found so many
good manuscripts

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that I couldn't just
pick one, and so I

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went to the University
of Alaska Press

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and did some fancy tap
dancing, and now we

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have the Alaska Literary Series,
and so some of those titles,

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they're there too.

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OK.

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So what happens
in our imagination

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when we're in a landscape
that is completely unfamiliar?

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Those of you will know, who grow
up grew up here in the desert

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as I did, that it has
its own set of rules

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and it has its own
beauty, and so I'm

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going to talk to you about
being in a landscape that's

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utterly unfamiliar.

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That's what the view looks
like outside my window

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most of the time in Fairbanks,
Alaska in the winter.

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We went to Costa Rica in April.

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That's what we left.

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Here's what we came back to, the
ice beginning to melt in May,

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and it usually-- whoops.

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Yeah, the ice beginning to melt
in May and the swans coming

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back.

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Eloise Klein Healy, whom
you will hear from tonight,

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and her partner
Collenn Rooney, used

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to take people hiking
and birdwatching.

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And in 2009 they
called up and said,

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we'd like to do a creative
writing component.

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Will you come teach?

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And I said, sign me up.

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We entered the bower
of strangeness.

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I think that's a
Buddhist temple.

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Some of the things
were kind of familiar,

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but the scale was different.

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These pieces of bamboo
were about that big around,

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and they sounded when
they bonked together

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like an arthritic pirate ship.

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And some of the
scale was unusual,

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like the tiny bird
[INAUDIBLE] inside the caldera

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of a bromeliad.

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So many bird [INAUDIBLE]
This one is a [INAUDIBLE]..

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I never found out
what these are.

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So if anybody here knows,
I would be glad to know.

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Liz, do you?

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You do.

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Liz knows, so we will find out.

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Some of the bananas were bright
pink and grew straight up.

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The taxis, the little
taxis, are red.

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They have the finest collection
of pre-Colombian gold

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anywhere in the world.

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This was a zoomorphic
breastplate.

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And I thought
about the ancestors

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of the people who knew
how to mine that gold

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and smelt it and
make it into beauty.

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Many of their descendants
are not so lucky.

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Eloise took us to the
Talamanca Highlands.

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We got to see the trogons.

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We got to see branches so heavy
with epiphytes that sometimes

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they cracked off the trees.

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I'd never seen trees
upholstered like that.

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This is to prove that my
husband actually hiked.

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[LAUGHTER]

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We got to see, resplendent
as promised, the quetzal

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