I realized I could easily get this blog going again, what with all the writing I'll be doing over the next three years (in Iowa State's MFA Program in Creative Writing & Environment. Here are a few pieces I've written so far for my favorite class of the semester: Rewriting the West with Ben Percy, and unBELEVIably talented writer who I love (Language of Elks and Refresh, Refresh, his short story collections are very worth checking out).

Each week, we have to read a book, and respond in two ways: one critical, and one creative. These are my first two (completely unrevised) creative responses. The first is a response to Charles Portis' novel, True Grit, and the second is a response to The Virginian by Owen Wister. Let me know what you think!

“The stone which the builders rejected, the same is become the head of the corner.”
~ Psalm 118, Douay-Rheims Bible


In Bozeman, Montana, there was a wetland I passed every day. It was a small marsh, blooming with cattails through the winter, their thin straw stalks poking through the snow, home to squawking fowl in the spring, ducklings tottering behind their brown mallard mothers. One day I saw a great blue heron there, perched, still, on a sideways branch; it looked as if his eyes were closed. Wetland is such a simple word, just a little corner of nature stuck behind the buildings growing downtown, taken for granted. This marsh sat quietly adjacent to cattle ranching land, drinking in pollutants, breathing the particles of nitrogen and phosphorous through a complex life-cycle, protecting the water in our table glasses, our bathtubs, our washing machines, absorbing into the sediment on our behalf.

A developer named Mike Delaney diverted the water that flowed and fed the marsh, because the city couldn’t get the money together to buy it s a park. The wetland has become “The Village Downtown”, a brick strip of shops, home to a grocery store where the people of Bozeman can purchase filtered, bottled water.

***

The first white explorers of North America faced a wide ocean of tall grasses in shaded and muted colors like overcast sunny days, yellows and blues. Indiangrass brushed their legs as they walked, forbs and coneflowers bursts of color explosion over the miles of whispering grasses. A prairie is a living thing, buzzing with insect life, swarms of grasshoppers and crickets feeding, great bands of birds whirling overhead, diving and dancing, singing. The accumulation of loess and organic matter made the soil of the tallgrass prairie some of the deepest ever recorded. John Deere invented the steel plow, enabling farmers to dig for gold, turning and turning this lush resource, tearing out tall grasses and planting vegetables instead. Over 99 percent of North America’s tallgrass prairie is now farmland.

The blossoming prairie digs deep into its soil, hundreds of plant species providing a primary food source for the birds that eat agricultural pests. The higher the concentration of plant life, the greater the possibility for carbon sequestration; prairies would inhale our gases.

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The Pacific Yew is a Western conifer, with craggy, gnarled bark, in tones of red like the clay soil of Wyoming, spotted with bone white lichen. But there is magic in that innocuous bark, the power of healing; when peeled gently off the trunk, exposing a yellow-white heart of wood, and transformed through lab-coat alchemy, Pacific Yew bark becomes Paclitaxel, one of the world’s most successful chemotherapy drug treatments. The Pacific Yew’s thin and delicate bark contains a treatment for cancer. Already scarce by the time this discovery was made, this promising Yew was never commercially harvested. Scientists scrambled to mimic the bark’s properties in a lab, to write its secrets down before they disappeared.

Current estimates suggest that between 35 and 100 species go extinct every day.

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A settlement was recently reached between the corporation in charge of highway transportation in California to reduce the amount of toxic storm water runoff in Los Angeles and Ventura Counties. Previously, more than six million gallons of oil ran into California’s waters, in addition to trash, rubber, brake dust and microscopic bits of metal that killed or poisoned marine species, including fish in waters where commercial fishing is legal. The water reaches us all.

One of the newly implemented storm water runoff control mechanisms will be freshly-planted strips of absorbent vegetation.