--Nonfiction, including Winter, Oil Notes, Platte River,
In the Loyal Mountains, The Ninemile Wolves,
Wild to the Heart, and The Lost Grizzlies.
His most recent books are The Book of Yaak, a nonfiction work,
and The Sky, The Stars, The Wilderness,
a collection of three novellas, both
out from Houghton Mifflin in 1997.
There are certain writers and they
are as few and far between as wilderness areas, who
can convince a reader on the very first page
that they have the authority to guide you into what follows.
This happens to me every time I pick up
a piece of Bass's writing, whether it
is a short story, an essay or a letter of political advocacy
on behalf of the Yaak Valley, where he and his family
live in Northwest Montana.
What gives his voice such authority?
Among other things, a clarity of language
that is sharpened like a blade, a fusing of lyrical
abandon with scientific restraint, born perhaps
of his roots as a geologist, and a passion of purpose
that fuses form and subject in that mysterious alchemy we
know to be art.
When Bass first saw the Yaak Valley,
he stopped driving and settled.
In reflecting about that choice he wrote:
it was the gravity of the place that caught my heart,
and he has inhabited that gravity,
giving it a voice in his writing,
and working politically to preserve
what is distinct, beautiful, and mysterious
about that wild place.
And he has enlarged the frame of our concerns
about wilderness by connecting them
to our most private concerns about how we live and love.
And to our most public ones, as he
said in a letter that went out about advocacy for the Yaak,
we are talking about what values, what treasures shared
by the republic we intend to take
with us into the next century.
Please, welcome, live from Picacho Peak, Rick Bass.
[APPLAUSE]