[APPLAUSE]
Fenton warned me to wear heels, but it's not quite enough.
Thank you, Fenton.
I came to the non-fiction program
unsure about the complications of navigating fact and truth,
how to reconcile a journalistic impulse to observe and document
with a greater literary impulse to tell a good story,
to create art.
Fortunately for me, and with gratitude to Fenton,
I was introduced to Erik Reece's work my first semester.
And it has since served as a beacon.
In his book length works, as well as many of his essays,
Reece outlines a non-fiction gospel,
setting a standard of observation, research,
and storytelling that comes from a man who considers himself
a Jamesian pragmatist, a man who believes that a thought isn't
really worth having unless it can be converted
into an act of conscience.
Fittingly, Reece's work is a series of thoughts,
of questions, and curiosities rendered
into compassionate acts of conscience
through astute perceptions of irony
and tense observation of detail and thorough, patient
investigation.
Also fittingly, it is poetry, which
Reece speaks of as a prayer in some sense that calls back
to the world, that originally drew Reece
to Robinson Forest, a protected oasis in the midst of decimated
Kentucky state lands.
He went to write about the beauty of a place he knew
as home, but the violence inflicted by the coal mines
on the 300-million-year-old Appalachian Mountains
surrounding the forest called for something else.
So Reece spent the next 10 months trespassing
on state land permitted to the coal company,
dodging debris hurled from the mine sites,
and documenting the destruction both to lives and landscapes,
the changing contours caused by mountaintop removal mining.
In Lost Mountain: A Year in the Vanishing Wilderness,
Reece tells the story of that mountain, so ironically named,
revealing in the process a greater regional, national,
and global battle we face when it comes to coal energy.
In Lost Mountain, as in much of his writing,
Reece wrestles the origins of our hostile relationship
with the natural world, a question that leads him
to his own upbringing as the son and grandson of Baptist
ministers, both of whom preached what
Reece calls a particularly heavy and dogmatic reading
of the Bible.
In his most recent book, An American Gospel:
On Family, History, and the Kingdom of God,
Reece proposes an alternative, a gospel that celebrates the here
and now, this Earth as the kingdom of God
and us very much a part of it.
It is a gospel that brings together
voices of the likes of William Byrd, Leo Tolstoy, Thomas
Jefferson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, William
James, and Wendell Berry.
Through gorgeously efficient sentences,
Reece's work reminds us to be patient,
reminds us that a story often needs time to unfold,
and that our job is often to act merely
as a conduit for that story.
His writing bears witness and then demands
that the act of reading bear witness in return.
He says, "I don't have to get angry or at least convey
my anger about a little girl killed by an illegally
overloaded coal truck.
I just tell her mother's story the best I can."
His work belongs alongside Emerson, Leopold, Berry,
and his mentor, Guy Davenport, as essential, extraordinary,
relevant, and timeless.
Erik Reece is the author of five books of nonfiction and poetry,
including An American Gospel and Lost Mountain,
for which he won Columbia University's John B. Oakes
award for distinguished environmental journalism
and the Sierra Club's David Brower award.
His work appears regularly in Harper's, The Nation, and Orion
Magazine, among others.
He currently teaches environmental journalism,
writing, and literature at the University
of Kentucky in Lexington.
And forthcoming in August is his latest book, Utopia Drive:
A Road Trip Through America's Most Radical Ideas.
Let's give our attention and gratitude
to someone who reminds us that Sundays
are for spending time in the woods
and that when we go to those woods to write poetry,
our poetry should become a call for action.
It is my pleasure to introduce to you Erik Reece.