The View from Ape Cave

December 28, 2011 -- The view from Washington's Ape Cave, a 2.4-mile basalt labyrinth tunneled by molten lava, which also helped to form nearby Mount St. Helens.

Photo of the Day

November 27, 2011 -- The light changes on Highway 81 outside South Branch, Nebraska.

Photo of the Day

November, 23, 2011 -- The light changes on the 1600 block of Wazee Street in Denver.

The View from Danforth Chapel

October 29, 2011 -- The University of South Dakota's biennial John R. Milton Writers' Conference has just concluded with a generous reading from Mark Spragg (above, in a coat), whose work as a ranch hand in Wyoming began at age 11 and paid $30 a month, plus three squares a day. That boyhood, and an education from the likes of Robert Roripaugh (in denim), now a professor emeritus and a former Wyoming poet laureate, has inspired three novels, a memoir, and a feature film.

Earlier conference highlights included readings from David Marshall Chan (in black) and six other featured authors. RBM moderated two panels and on Friday read from a manuscript, Zen and the Art of Conquest, at USD's Danforth Chapel (also pictured above).

The View from Dakota Hall

September 30, 2011 -- RBM (reluctantly!) leaves one journal's nonfiction staff for another as a double issue of South Dakota Review departs the Great Plains for a mailbox near you. On the front cover: Sacro Wi (Sundancer, 1967) by Oscar Howe, whose artwork is on display at SouthDakotaReview.com and in a permanent collection of the University of South Dakota. On the back cover: 30 poets, 7 authors of fiction, and 2 essayists, Dionisia Morales ("Blue Means Water") and Yelizaveta Renfro ("Song of the Redwood Tree").

Speaking of the Bigger Stuff

via "Remembering Osh"

RBM's essay "I'd Like to Talk About the Bigger Stuff," which won Phoebe's inaugural nonfiction contest and appeared in print earlier this year, is now available online. Another excerpt:

To the west, through the helicopter’s tea-colored portals, I can see Uzbekistan; the cotton fields and cherry trees of the Fergana Valley; and a long, maniacal border severing one village from the next. I imagine, for a moment, an engorged Stalin, dragging a fountain pen down a wide gray map. Skirting his line, as though his hand ignored the topography, march row after row of mountaintops. They look cold and lifeless from on high. They divide Bishkek from the farmlands and become impassable in winter. Reminding the Russified Kyrgyz, who prefer white rice, of those hotheaded Uzbeks, who prefer red. But that’s enough imperial history.

To read this and more from Phoebe 40.2, as well as other debut nonfiction, visit PhoebeJournal.com.

What Happened Yesterday in Baghdad

via WLAJournal.com

RBM's essay "What Happened Yesterday in Baghdad," presented last fall at the U.S. Air Force Academy's War, Literature, and the Arts conference, is soon to be out in print. An excerpt:

Once, when I was young and intent on becoming a Texas cattleman who also apprehended bandits, my parents commissioned a sepia portrait at the county fair. For about $25, families could select frontier costumes and stand inside a saloon as flashbulbs illuminated the scene. My mother, pictured wearing ostrich feathers and a broach, refused to distribute the photo the following Christmas on account of liquor bottles visible in the background. But the original has hung for years in our hallway. The visage of the boy at her side is somehow indelible: my pudgy, adolescent jowls expressionless beneath a top hat, one small hand gripping a cane, the other pocketing a revolver. I hadn’t examined it closely until recently. Then, late one August night, I saw what looked like the same boy online, in another portrait titled Great Times Together.

To read this essay in full and others from Teri Carter, Leila Levinson, and Joseph Bathanti, as well as fiction and poetry, you can access WLA 23 via Google Books.