Meet our Guests: Graham Chisholm and Jon Christensen

Graham Chisholm

Senior Policy Advisor, Conservation Strategy Group

San Francisco, CA

Jon Christensen

Professor of Environmental Humanities, UCLA

Los Angeles, CA

11/12/18

Next to a stone house in a small canyon in southern California, buffeted by wind, Semester in the West met with Jon Christensen and Graham Chisholm, an author and environmentalist, respectively.  Graham Chisholm has spent much of his life in the conservation world of California, working as the head of conservation for the California branch of the Nature Conservancy, and now as an independent consultant helping small environmental non-profits get established.  One of the biggest lessons which he has taken with him through his work in the conservation sector, has been that “to be human, you have to think that things can get better”.  It is with this optimism that Graham sees the future of the environmental movement: green spaces in cities are as influential as our national parks in informing a person’s view of what nature is. 

Jon, tall and wearing an inquisitive smile as he speaks, has spent much of his life as a writer.  With a writing history including a stint as a contributing writer at High Country News, he is currently a professor of Environmental Humanities at UCLA.  There he tries to tell his students to find stories that don’t close in “dead-end standoffs”, a lesson he learned at HCN, and that the most important thing your writing can do is to have an impact.  He explains one of the most important lessons he gained from a lifetime of writing: you have to let things have a point of view, and an agenda in order for their impact be felt.       

Both Graham and Jon, though past middle age, and having worked in their respective fields for many years, remain positive in their thoughts for the future. And as they both said, we should look forward to the future as well. 

By David Dregallo

Photos by Jessie Brandt

Meet our Guests: Amy Irvine

Amy Irvine

Author

Norwood, CO

10/5/18

“We’re not going to survive if we think we’ve already lost”.

Amy Irvine, 6th generation Utah native and author of the books Trespass and Desert Cabal, joined us for a three-day writing workshop during our stay on Comb Ridge, a central location to the Semester in the West program. On Amy’s first night with us, we discussed our hopes and fears with one another and felt the gravity of the environmental crisis on our hands. The concerns held but previously unstated by the group washed over us harder than the night’s pelting rain.

Using the consuming guilt and fiery passions held by everyone, Amy harnessed our drive, and helped us uncover the potential of 21 driven individuals, allowing us to regain a sense of power in a moment of vulnerability and despair. “Every one of your voices counts in a way you can’t imagine”, Amy announced after giving us our cumulative project: writing a comment letter on Bears Ears National Monument’s precarious fate. “Can you say the thing that nobody has said in a way someone might listen?” she asked. The comment letters we wrote were designed to be different than the typical letters sent in comment periods, focused on place and moments within the place that had inspired us to write a letter. The goal of the letter was to invoke a similar feeling of familiarity with the location to readers who may have a part in the decision-making process regarding Bears Ears.

Amy helped us gain confidence in nature writing, focusing deeply on our location at Comb Ridge and bringing to mind the late author Ellen Meloy’s “Deep Map of Place.” Bright colorful sunrises and sunsets falling across the sandstone ridges, along with sneaky cacti and black sagebrush growing in small stone cracks provided bountiful inspiration. As our visit with Amy went on, many members of the group became increasingly self-assured, sharing pieces with the group which evoked a new sense of hope and confidence. Each of us submitted a final comment letter to the BLM, hopefully guiding the agency as it struggles with how to best manage the unique resources of this remarkable place.

By Kate Dolan

Photo by James Baker

Meet our Guests: Ann Walka

Meet our Guests: Ann Walka

Poet/Author

Bluff, UT

9/30/18

When Ann first arrived to our camp, the sky was pink, and the sandstone a golden glow. I watched as she strolled, her eyes scanning the horizon in every direction. She paused to look up at Comb Ridge and the big sky all around. In this moment, her calm presence, and deep connection to this place were already palpable.

Ann Walka is a poet who splits her time between Bluff, Utah and Flagstaff, Arizona. During our time with her, she encouraged us to investigate this place with the full depth of our senses. Under Monday morning’s blistering sun she brought us down to the shade of a canyon, with Tuesday morning’s rain she brought us to the shelter of a grotto. From each of these bases she encouraged us to disperse off and find a place of solitude from which to explore our language. Each day she gave us loose assignments to encourage this exploration. We made maps, wrote weather reports, personal essays, list poems, and imaginative place-based stories. We sat in observation and free wrote, returning with philosophical quandaries, poems, personifications of the land and much more. With each assignment, she gave us time to ourselves, time to wander and enter the writing from our own place of curiosity.

In our final chair circle with her, underneath the starry sky, she commended how each of us had such distinct, individual voices. I wonder though if she realized the role she played in reminding us how to access this voice. Ann placed herself, a published poet, on a practically equal level with us, a group of students, some of whom couldn’t even remember the last time we wrote creatively. This humble presence, in combination with the space to wonder made it natural for us to put pen to paper and let our voices come through.

By Aliza Anderson-Diepenbrock

Meet our Guests: Ben Goldfarb

Ben Goldfarb

Author/Journalist

Spokane, WA

9/2/2018

Ben Goldfarb talks with his hands almost as much as with the words emanating from his expressive mouth. Enthusiasm comes in many forms, and while his animated gestures and beaver-themed hat are a giveaway, Ben’s excited, curiosity-inspired storytelling about beavers in his latest book, Eager, is as infectious as his goofy laugh. When challenged to write the next beaver Bible, Ben, only a few years out of graduate school at Yale School of Forestry and still dressing like an Amherst undergrad, tracked down the most fascinating characters needed to tell and enrich the esoteric story of beavers and their ecological and political significance.

I’m not sure whether it’s because he reminds me of my brother or the fact that he remembered my name after I spoke it only once during our group introductions, but Ben feels familiar. As a journalist for High Country News and a recently published author, he naturally wants to know all about you, but goes about doing so with an ease and facility in conversation that reminds one of catching up with an old friend.

Sitting beneath ponderosas of the Methow, among 21 students hoping to one day be half as eloquent as he, Ben probably had no idea that he has humbly become one of the very individuals -- passionate, unique, obsessive, smart -- that he respects as the stars of his own stories.

By Nina Moore

Photos by Abby Hill