2020 books

Books I read in 2020:

Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer (2013)

Existence by David Hinton (2016)

Autumn by Ali Smith (2016)

Fire Making by Daniel Hume (2018)

Great Plains by Ian Frazier (2001)

Uncertain Path by William Tweed (2010)

Grass by Joe Truett (2010)

Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng (2017)

Six Degrees by Mark Lynas (2008)

Art + Objects by Graham Harman (2019)

The Progress of This Storm by Andreas Malm (2018)

Coyote America by Dan Flores (2016)

Hunger Mountain by David Hinton (2012)

20,000 Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne (1872) (read aloud with H)

Eventide by Kent Haruf (2004)

The Call of the Wild by Jack London (1903) (read aloud with H)

Prairie: A Natural History by Candace Savage (2011)

Bringing Nature Home by Douglas Tallamy (2007)

Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH by Robert C. O’Brien (1971) (read aloud with H)

Nature’s Best Hope by Douglas Tallamy (2020)

The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch (2011) (re-read from 2019)

The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway (1952) (read aloud with H)

A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold (1949)

My Antonia by Willa Cather (1918)

Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson (1883) (read aloud with H)

O Pioneers! by Willa Cather (1913)

Alien Oceans by Kevin Hand (2020)

American Cosmic by D.W. Pasulka (2019)

This Is Water by David Foster Wallace (2009)

When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi (2016)

East of Eden by John Steinbeck (1953)

A New Garden Ethic by Benjamin Vogt (2017)

The Spell of the Sensuous by David Abram (1997)

The Prairie World by David Costello (1969)

The Book of the Bivvy by Ronald Turnbull (2001)

Why We Can’t Sleep by Ada Calhoun (2020)

The Wooing of Earth by Rene Dubos (1980)

Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe (1719) (read aloud with H)

PrairyErth by William Least Heat-Moon (1999)

Black Elk Speaks by John Neihardt (1932)

The Long Winter by Laura Ingalls Wilder (1940)

North American Prairie by J.E. Weaver (1954)

Caste by Isabel Wilkerson (2020)

The Planet Remade by Oliver Morton (2016)

Artist residencies of the Great Plains

[Updated October 28, 2020]

Below is a list of artist in residence programs on the Great Plains, as defined by the green area on the map below (excluding urban settings). The longer I live in Denver, the more I appreciate the beauty of the the Great Plains and how undervalued this region is aesthetically.

If you have one to add please leave a comment below!

Agate Fossil Beds National Monument, Nebraska

Art Farm, Marquette, Nebraska

Badlands National Park, South Dakota

Brush Creek Foundation for the Arts, Saratoga, Wyoming

Cedar Point Biological Station, Ogallala, Nebraska

The Chinati Foundation, Marfa, Texas

Fort Union National Monument, New Mexico

Homestead National Monument, Nebraska

Jentel Artist Residency, Banner, Wyoming

Prairieside Outpost, Matfield Green, Kansas

Roswell Artist-in-Residence Program, Roswell, New Mexico

Tallgrass Artist Residency, Matfield Green, Kansas

Ucross Foundation, Clearmont, Wyoming

Photo captions for Whatever Moves or Makes Noise

In Whatever Moves or Makes Noise, my photo essay of the McMurdo Dry Valleys of Antarctica, I decided to leave photo captions out of the book. I wanted to focus on the beauty and ambience of the place, less like photo journalism or documentary photography. But understandably many people asked for this info! So here they are: captions for each picture in the book. If you have any questions, leave a comment below!

1. Looking across Taylor Valley over Lake Bonney (steep glacial valley; the lake occupies the valley floor)

2. Rocks buried in sand dunes, wind action on the sand, Victoria Valley dune field

3. Ice stalactites in an ice cave in Taylor Glacier, Taylor Valley

4. Aerial view of an ice field/glacier, McMurdo Dry Valleys region

5. Rock wall in Upper Wright Valley, within "The Maze"

6. "Moat ice" on the edge of Lake Bonney, Taylor Valley; the perimeter of each frozen lake has several meters of this smooth, transparent ice

7. Eroded boulders near the summit of Mount Falconer, Taylor Valley

8. Footprints and wind action on sand dunes, Victoria Valley dune field

9. Air bubbles in frozen lake ice

10. Sun (lower left) and upward-cast shadow on Mount Falconer, Taylor Valley

11. Silhouette of my friend Cliff inside one of the huts operated by New Zealand in Wright Valley

12. Cracks in lake ice

13. Sand over lake ice, various cracks and ripples

14. Lens flare looking down at moat ice

15. Sand and gravel slope with, trails of moisture and/or rocks, Bonney Riegel (a sort of ridge exposed by glacial erosion), Lake Bonney, Taylor Valley

16. Rock buried in gravel in an area called the “Zen Garden" above Lake Bonney, Taylor Valley

17. Don Juan Pond, Wright Valley (stays liquid water at 40 below due to high salinity)

18. "Popcorn ice,” nickel-size snow balls, Garwood Valley

19. Silhouette of Cliff walking at dusk, Taylor Valley

20. A vertical wall of ice, actually the end of a glacier, with a baseball-size rock, exposed to the light, melting the ice around it

21. Another rock in the Zen Garden, eroded and sculpted by wind borne particles

22. Ice cave, Taylor Glacier, Taylor Valley (look closely, it is occupied!)

23. Boulder, Wright Valley (what's interesting is the top of the "face" is titled 60 degrees toward the camera)

24. Sand waves, Bull Pass, Wright Valley

25. Aerial view of glaciers and exposed rock/soil on the edge of the McMurdo Dry Valleys

26. Cracks in lake ice

27. Bonney Riegel, Lake Bonney, Taylor Valley

2019 books

The books I read in 2019:

Desert Cabal by Amy Irvine (2018)

Spiral Jetta by Erin Hogan (2008)

Ulysses by James Joyce (1922; 1986 “Gabler edition”)

The Revenant by Michael Punke (2002)

Encyclical on Climate Change and Inequality by Pope Francis (2015)

Staying with the Trouble by Donna Haraway (2018)

Running After Antelope by Scott Carrier (2002)

Survive the Savage Sea by Dougal Robertson (1973)

21 Lessons for the 21st Century by Yuval Noah Harari (2018)

We Are the Nerds by Christine Lagorio-Chafkin (2018)

Path of the Puma by Jim Williams (2018)

Florida by Lauren Groff (2018)

The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien (1937) (read aloud with H)

The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch (2011)

The Sun is a Compass by Caroline Van Hemert (2019)

Horizon by Barry Lopez (2019)

The Unpassing by Chia-Chia Lin (2019)

Old in Art School by Nell Painter (2018)

She Wants It by Jill Soloway (2018) (audiobook)

The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle (1999; 2004 edition)

How to Love the Universe by Stefan Klein (2017)

Genesis by Edward O. Wilson (2019)

Falter by Bill McKibben (2019)

Boom by Michael Shnayerson (2019)

Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens (2018)

Wild at Heart by Alice Outwater (2019)

Journey to the Centre of the Earth by Jules Verne (1864) (read aloud with H)

Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution by Lee Smolin (2019)

You & A Bike & A Road by Eleanor Davis (2017)

Deep Creek by Pam Houston (2019)

Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist and Other Essays by Paul Kingsnorth (2017)

Commander in Cheat by Rick Reilly (2019)

The Absent Hand by Suzannah Lessard (2019)

Thru-Hiking Will Break Your Heart by Carrot Quinn (2015)

Underland by Robert Macfarlane (2019)

What Art Is by Arthur Danto (2014)

The Strange Order of Things by Antonio Damasio (2018)

Making Rocky Mountain National Park by Jerry J. Frank (2013)

A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle (2005)

The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells (2019)

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain (1875) (read aloud with H)

No One Is Too Small to Make a Difference by Greta Thunberg (2019)

Carrying the Fire by Michael Collins (1974)

Blowout by Rachel Maddow (2019)

Recycling by Finn Arne Jorgensen (2019)

Symbiotic Planet by Lynn Margulis (1998)

The Future of Packaging by Tom Szaky (2019)

Down to Earth by Bruno Latour (2018)

Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann (2019)