Confluence Literary Festival

In the course of a twenty-year friendship Ed Abbey and Jack Loeffler shared hundreds of campfires, hiked thousands of miles, and talked endlessly about the meaning of life. To read Loeffler's account of his best pal's life and work is to join in their friendship.

"Ed Abbey and Jack Loeffler were like Don Quijote and Sancho Panza. Loeffler delivers his friend, warts and all on a platter full of reverence and irreverence and carefully researched factual information, interspersed with hearty laughter and much serious consideration of all life's Great Questions. Jack's story elucidates and demythifies the Abbey legend, giving us powerful flesh and blood instead." John Nichols

In the spring of 2008, Survival Along the Continental Divide by Jack Loeffler will be released by the University of New Mexico Press. In the autumn, Jacks latest book, Healing the West: Voices of Culture and Habitat will be released by the Museum of New Mexico Press. His latest radio series, The Lore of the Landhas recently been made available via the NPR satellite and Public Radio Exchange. Jack Loeffler is a writer, ethnographer, researcher, and radio correspondent.

Arizona is my native state, the Sonoran Desert my first geography, where I was born in 1967.

I have worked a wide variety of jobs including jazz musician, journalist, gas station attendant, beer bottler, college field instructor, and river guide - not necessarily in that order. These days I am mostly writing and speaking, and wandering in wild places when I can.

When I first began publishing books in the mid 1990s, I lived nowhere. For seven years I had no residence or phone number, slept in the back of a truck or in the wilderness, and worked seasonally as a guide and field instructor. My first few books were typed in bars, libraries, and laundromats.

Since then, I have written several other books and my work has appeared in a number of anthologies. I have written for the LA Times, New York Times, Natural History, Orion, Outside, Audubon, Sierra, High Country News, and Mountain Gazette. I am also a commentator for National Public Radio's Morning Edition. After a live radio report from lower Manhattan on September 11th, 2001, the Washington Post called me one of the only sane voices heard on that day. It is good to be called sane now and then.

I am deeply grateful that my writing has been well received. I won the Spirit of the West Award for my body of work, an honor I share with the likes of Wallace Stegner, N. Scott Momaday, Tony Hillerman, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Terry Tempest Williams. I am also recipient of the Colorado Book Award. Twice my books have made the Book Sense 76 list, and have been listed as top books of the year by the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times.

My writing continues at a frenetic pace, the cab of my truck littered with receipts and envelopes scratched upon with illegible words. But this a mere byproduct, verbiage left over from experiences had on the land, raw encounters among mountain lions, boulders, water holes, and drifting thunderstorms.

A sixth-generation Utahn, Amy is the descendant of Howard Egan--one of Brigham Young's righthand men. Alongside this notorious Mormon leader, Egan was one of the very first Latter-Day Saints to set foot in Utah, and one of the first to practice polygamy. Born into Egan's legacy in Salt Lake City, Amy spent her life divided between two worlds: her mother's rural ranching family--all devout Mormons--and her father's side--intellectual and aesthete apostates.

Amy made her own way--first for a brief stint at the University of California at Berkeley, before working as a ski guide in Europe and a National Park Service Ranger at Timpanogos Cave National Monument. Eventually Amy fell into full-time rockclimbing, and supported her nomadic climbing life by writing articles for publications such as "Rock and Ice" and "Climbing Magazine."

It was Amy's intensive time climbing in Utah's backcountry that ultimately provoked her decision to advocate for official wilderness designations, and this led her to take a full-time staff position with the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, one of the most effective public lands protection organizations in the nation. There she worked for 7 years--5 of which were served as the organization's director of development.

After her father's suicide in 2000, Amy moved to remote southeastern Utah, where she and her would-be husband continued to work for SUWA. It was this time in redrock country, attempting to defend lands she had loved all her life from people she considered to be her own, that spawned the writing of "Trespass: Living at the Edge of the Promised Land." In the month since its release, the book made the regional bestseller list and was named a Booksense Pick by the American Booksellers Association. The Los Angeles Times wrote that "Trespass may very well be Desert Solitaire's literary heir... as raw and stinging as a fresh burn . . . with its rigorously original prose (not a single cliche in 300-plus pages), emotional detail and bibliophilic departures into the musty caverns of American history." Robert Redford praised the book as "a flare shot up amid troubling forces and asks us not to imagine a new West, but instead to re-envision ourselves as its inhabitants."

Amy now lives and writes in southwestern Colorado, right at the edge of redrock country, with her husband Herb and three-year-old daughter Ruby.

Photo by Susie Grant.

Doug Peacock is the author of Grizzly Years, Baja, and Walking It Off: A Veterans Chronicle of War and Wilderness a book in part about his friendship with Edward Abbey. His latest book, co-written with Andrea Peacock, is The Essential Grizzly: The Mingled Fates of Men and Bears. A Vietnam veteran and former Green Beret medic (who served as the model for George Washington Hayduke in The Monkeywrench Gang), Peacock has published and lectured widely on wilderness issues. He was named a 2007 Guggenheim Fellow for his work on a new memoir about archeology and the peopling of North America. He lives south of Livingston, Montana.

Andrea Peacock is a journalist who has covered Montana politics and western environmental news for alternative newsweeklies across the West, as well as Mother Jones, Amicus Journal, Counterpunch and High Country News. A former editor of the Missoula Independent, Peacock is the author of Libby, Montana: Asbestos and the Deadly Silence of an American Corporation and the co-author of The Essential Grizzly: The Mingled Fates of Men and Bears with her husband Doug. She lives south of Livingston, Montana.

Eric Temple has been a film and videomaker since he was a high school student back in the 1970s. A native of California, Temple graduated from Northern Arizona University and began a 17 year career as a producer/director for television stations in Phoenix, Salt Lake City, Baltimore and San Francisco. In 1992 he formed his own production company, Canyon Productions, Inc. In addition to producing the award-winning documentary Edward Abbey: A Voice in the Wilderness, Temple co-directed the PBS documentary The Mystery of Chaco Canyon, and most recently directed the spiritual documentary With One Voice. Temple is currently working on a several new documentaries about the environment and the West.

Executive Director of Orion Society and Editor-in-Chief of Orion Magazine, Chip Blake was trained as a biologist but has worked in the field of publishing, editing, and nonprofit administration for almost twenty years. He has worked at The Orion Society since 1992 and has served as its Executive Director since 2005. Chip has been with Orion Magazine since 1992, when he was hired as an Associate Editor. He served as the magazine's Managing Editor from 1993 until 2003, when he left to become Editor-in-Chief of Milkweed Editions, a nonprofit book publisher. In 2005 he returned to Orion to serve as Editor-in-Chief and Executive Director of The Orion Society. He has been the editor of hundreds of magazine articles, as well as many books of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Work he has edited has been nominated for or won many awards, including the National Magazine Award, the Pushcart Prize, the PEN Literary Award, the John Oakes Award in Environmental Journalism, the Minnesota Book Award, the Oregon Book Award, and The New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Chip has also served as a panelist for several literary awards. He lives in a tiny house in Great Barrington with his wife Lisa and son Jay.

Katie Lee has emerged as one of the Southwest's most outspoken environmental activists. Like David Brower and Ed Abbey, Katie has taken up the torch they left burning when they died to sing, write and lecture about the importance of preserving and restoring wilderness refuges; the lonesome characters the West still breeds; and the histories of ancient races embedded in its sinuous sandstone canyons. Today, her unwavering commitment to her principles and feisty eloquence are primarily directed at draining Powell Reservoir and letting the Colorado River once again run wild.

According to the late Ellen Meloy, author of Raven's Exile, in her foreword to Katie Lee's third book, Sandstone Seduction, Katie is: "Outrageous, mischievous, and never shy about calling a shithead a shithead, Lee is a woman so far ahead of her time, we are still catching up. She writes with fists and flesh to the wall, rendering an acid hatred for the canyon's destroyers and a near perfect sense of the deep pleasure that comes when a few companions float downriver and share beauty by instinct rather than conversation."

Maria Melendez has published two collections of poetry: the chapbook Base Pairs (Swan Scythe Press, 2001) and How Long She'll Last in This World (University of Arizona Press, 2006), which received Honorable Mention at the 2007 International Latino Book Awards and was named a finalist for the 2007 PEN Center USA Literary Awards. Her essays and features appear in Altar, Orion Afield, and Isotope, and several of her essays on arts and activism have been broadcast as part of NPR's American Democracy Project. She co-coordinates Poetas y Pintores: Artists Conversing with Verse, a traveling exhibition of contemporary Latino art and poetry. Her own poetry and fiction appear in such magazines as Barrow Street, International Quarterly, and Ecological Restoration, and she has edited two anthologies of poetry by poet-teachers and K-12 students for California Poets in the Schools. She received her M.A. in English/Creative Writing from UC Davis in 2000. From 2000-2003 she was awarded grants from the California Arts Council in support of her work as writer-in-residence at the U.C. Davis Arboretum, where she taught environmental writing workshops for the public. In 2003, Saint Mary's College in Notre Dame, Indiana, appointed her Research Fellow at the Center for Women's InterCultural Leadership. She currently lives in Logan, Utah, where she teaches creative writing and American literature at Utah State University.

John Macker lives in Northern New Mexico in an old roadhouse on the Santa Fe Trail that is currently in the last throes of an aggressive, decade long restoration. Books and broadsides of poetry include For The Few, The First Gangster, Burroughs At Santo Domingo, black/wing (cd with John Knoll), Adventures In The Gun Trade, his opus about Billy The Kid, Rimbaud & Cochise and most recently, Woman Of The Disturbed Earth (Evergreen, CO.: Turkey Buzzard Press,2007) A new cd, Reading At Acequia Booksellers, is produced by Bruce Holsapple/Vox Audio, Magdalena, NM.

Over the last 20 years, has given public readings & conducted workshops throughout the West. He conducted workshops & read his work at Sparrows Performance Poetry Festival in Salida, Colorado, 2005 & 2006. Essays, reviews and poems have been published in journals and magazines throughout the U.S. including, most recently, ONTHEBUS, Sin Fronteras (Writers Without Borders), underground voices, Black Ace Book 7, Mercury Reader, Pinyon Poetry, mad blood #s 2 & 3, Harwood Anthology, Pilgrimage, Wandering Hermit Review & A Peoples Ecology: Explorations In Sustainable Living.

In 2001, he won the James Ryan Morris Memorial Tombstone Award for poetry in Denver. In 2004 he won mad blood magazines (Evergreen, Colo.) first annual literary arts award & publication for the long poem, Wyoming Arcane. In 2005, he wrote ithe ntroduction to Harvey Keitel, Harvey Keitel, Harvey Keitel, a book of poems by Scott Wannberg, S.A. Griffin and John Dorsey. In Glenwood Springs, Colorado, in the early-mid 90s edited the award-winning literary arts journal, Harp. In 2006, he edited the inaugural issue of the poetry anthology Desert Shovel Review. In 2007, he co-edited with S.A. Griffin & Marsha Getzler, Black Ace Book 8, an anthology tribute to Los Angeles poet Tony Scibella. He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. He continues to hike across deserts, navigate rivers swollen with runoff, sleep on the ground & explore the west with two aging but agile hounds.

Gary Duncan is a fifth generation regional native, author of several hundred journalistic and technical articles (particularly dealing with the environment, sustainability, environmental illness, land stewardship) along with digital/web-published creative fiction including the Gonzo Literati, The New Millennium, various poetry pieces...and will be debuting two new works at this year's Confluence Writer's Symposium (Paperless Literature Workshop-Sunday): "Revisiting Ed" (reminiscences of the influence of Ed Abbey, the role of fathers, the Moab desert and the future of environmentalism) and "Memoirs of a Matriarch" (a slightly different take on polygamy by some early Moab pioneers...including the mysterious and hitherto unknown Mary Jane).

He is a performing poet and story teller and toured for 6 years as a singer/ songwriter. He founded the Telluride Writer's Guild (1979), Telluride Bluegrass Academy (1980-87) and doesn't own a cell phone.

Gary will head off the 9am Sunday Open Mic (Moab Arts and Recreation Center) with story and song...mostly about Abbey and the Moab desert and will be the presenter for the Sunday afternoon Paperless Literature Workshop...exploring our transition out of deforestation and into the incredible explosion of artistic freedoms delivered by the digital age...especially for authors on the fly.

"Revisiting Ed" and "Memoirs of a Matriarch" will be published on the Smart Shelter Network web site (www.smartshelter.com) at the beginning of Confluence. You will also find many of the other publications mentioned here on the site...which is a 15 year old encyclopedia of regional environmentalism, sustainability, natural building, environmental allergenics, land stewardship and the Desde La Terra art forms.

Contact and questions are welcome. Email Gary at: gd@smartshelter.com