Harrisonburg Rotary Club Presentation
04/29/2024Oasis Gallery of Fine Art and Craft, at 103 S. Main Street, is the heart of art in Harrisonburg, VA, the closest city to my very rural home. The administrators of Oasis consider literature also to be an art, with shelves of books by local authors. On Friday, June 28, 2024, Oasis held a reception, free and open to the public, of short readings by several local writers. I was delighted to be one of them. Furthermore, there were refreshments, including wine!
Authors were asked to make the readings short, so I read from the book of photographs, Southern Appalachian Celebration. Photographer Jim Valentine was well known throughout the Southern Apps for hiking into Wilderness Areas with 50 pounds of cameras and film, and camping out for as long as it took for the light to get right. I was thrilled when he asked me to write the captions and the one page introductions to each of the 7 chapters. Jim organized the chapters around the famous essay by Aldo Leopold, “Thinking Like A Mountain,” in the book A Sand County Almanac, which emphasized the connections among everything. And Jim wanted Cherokee ideas, the thoughts and ways of the original Southern Appalachians, to be integral to the text. I read “Thinking Like A Waterway,” in the which Cherokee god of rivers, the Long Man, speaks.