Confluence Literary Festival

Jack is one of those poeple who says, "I met with my friend Gary Snyder about a month ago and we recorded some of his poetry" or "I did an interview with Stuart Brand last week" or "my old buddy Ed Abbey said something interesting about this." He is a man with wide-ranging friendships, a wicked sense of humor, and an incredible mind.

Confluence is happy to have talked Jack into returning to Confluence again in 2009. He is piecing together an interesting presentation on sacred habitat, bioregionalism, and community using audio material from his hundreds of interviews with artists, scholars, story tellers, and shamans.

New addition to Saturday's Readings and Ramblings, Oct. 24th, Star Hall. 7 pm. $10

BIO: Jack Loeffler, Lore of the Land Board Member, is a bioregional aural historian, producer, writer, sound collage artist, and musician. Since 1964, he has conducted field recordings west of the 100th meridian, founding the Peregrine Arts Sound Archive in 1967 to be the repository for his professional work. His archive now holds thousands of hours of recordings of interviews, music and natural habitat, and contains well over 3,000 songs of indigenous and traditional peoples. His primary concern is restoration and preservation of habitat focusing on the relationships of indigenous cultures to respective habitats, and the role of cultural diversity in attempting to solve the dilemmas now facing humankind.
Loeffler has produced over 300 documentary programs for radio, plus scores of soundtracks, albums of music from diverse genres, films, videos, folk music festivals, museum sound collages, and books. Selected radio series include: La Musica de los Viejitos; Southwest Sound Collage; Navajo-Hopi Land Dispute; Bioregional Folklore and Music of Tohono O'odham, Yaqui, Anglo, and Mexican Folk Musicians; Moving Waters - The Colorado River and the West; and The Lore of the Land.
He has authored five books: Headed Upstream: Interviews with Iconoclasts, 1989; La Musica de los Viejitos including 3-CD set, with Katherine Loeffler and Enrique Lamadrid, 1999; Adventures with Ed: A Portrait of Abbey, 2002; Survival Along the Continental Divide, 2008; and Healing the West: Voices of Culture and Habitat, 2008. He is currently working on several projects, including the Thinking Like a Watershed aural history project.
He is the recipient of a 2008 Governor's Award for Excellence in the Arts, and the 2009 Edgar Lee Hewett Award for Outstanding Public Service from the New Mexico Historical Society.