Journey into earth’s soul

“I think that the most vital writing manages to go back and forth between the comfortable and what we’re afraid of. It means honoring our best parts as well as the shabbiness that our hearts can be surrounded by.”

“There’s a theme to all of this: We use up the earth in our generation, and we use up the women in our generation. They’re tied together for me.”

“If I had two goals as a writer, it would be to break the readers’ hearts and get them off their asses,” says environmental activist Mary Sojourner.

With her abrasive criticisms of human greed and indifference, she seems to do just that. But the rushing undercurrent beneath Sojourner’s goals and her writing is the desire to seek retribution on behalf of the earth and its rock, its light, its silences and songs that never cease to inspire wonder, grace and sadness.

Sojourner pays tribute to the earth the best way she knows how in her new book, Bonelight: Ruin and Grace in the New Southwest. The book is a collection of essays about what humans are doing to what might be considered one of the last untainted areas of the United States. People still maintain the notion that the West is a frontier, that it still holds some secrets, some mysteries, something wild, but Sojourner points out that many areas are being covered with asphalt, golf courses, housing developments and strip malls just like every other place in America. There is nothing new about what is happening; it is only the place that’s new, a place that has been untouched by the destructive forces of man for millions of years.

Sojourner writes in Bonelight: “To write about the New Southwest is to write about hunger and greed, emptiness and searing beauty. To write about the New Southwest is to be humbled again and again.”

Sojourner, a regular commentator on NPR and a columnist for High Country News, will bring her candid voice and talents to this year’s Great Basin Book Festival. She will be part of a panel on gambling—one of her vices, she admits—and will also offer a workshop titled, “Writing from Shadow and Neon.” The workshop will focus on the oppositions that are inherent in human life.

“I think that the most vital writing manages to go back and forth between the comfortable and what we’re afraid of,” Sojourner says. “It means honoring our best parts as well as the shabbiness that our hearts can be surrounded by. I’m excited with helping people write about contradictions. That’s where the richness is, where the stories lie.”

The dichotomies of “shadow” and “neon,” “comfort” and “fear” can be seen in Sojourner’s own writings about single moms, Vietnam survivors, friends, lovers and the disappearing wilderness.

She tells me she was recently in Yellowstone National Park and experienced a marked difference between this visit and a past one. On a previous trip to Yellowstone, Sojourner had felt as though she were “hearing the earth for the first time.” But on her most recent visit, she was shaken by the change. There were many more people than before, as well as huge motor homes and mobile home trailers. These unnecessary “destroyers of Earth” pained and angered her. She even wrote a note that she placed on a gigantic king cab truck that said, in her not-too-gentle way, “Gas-guzzling Earth rapists, get a life.”

And it was not just the people’s equipment, but also their attitudes that bothered her.

“I was looking at geysers and mineral pools, and people’s first responses were to get their cameras out before they had even experienced it.”

Experiencing “it” has been both a blessing and a curse in Sojourner’s own life. Talking to her, you realize she has a connection with earth more profound than many others do. She admits she asked for it.

“I prayed to feel as the old ones must have felt. And ever since then I’ve been given the gift of connection. Few people have it. It’s very bittersweet. But I wouldn’t trade it for anything.”

This gift makes Sojourner feel like her best friend is being tortured every time she sees bulldozers or surveying stakes or signs that say, as she phrases it, “This land will soon be home to—insert trite and yuppie word—housing community.”

“It’s not about a beautiful scene being gone, but about chunks of earth being in perfect balance until we came along,” she says. “That’s the pain.”

Sojourner was born and raised in a farming town near Rochester, N.Y., that ended up falling prey to the same horrific transformations she sees every day in the Southwest. She moved to Flagstaff, Ariz., in 1985 at the age of 45. She has always been an activist and a writer—she submitted her first poem for publication at the age of 12—but never had much time to write, considering she was busy raising three children by herself.

“I’ve often written for comfort, in both pain and joy. I spent a lot of years running from doing it.”

But when her children were finally grown, Sojourner committed herself.

“My decision to come West meant moving, writing and becoming an activist.”

Sojourner is not just an activist on behalf of the earth, but also on behalf of women. She does not shy away from talking about femininity or aging. Some of her most beautiful essays are those in which she talks about menopause and how she fears it, reclaims it and is revolutionized by the newness of it.

“It’s painful to see so many women my age who have backed away from their own power. I flinch every time a woman doesn’t want to tell her age. How are younger women going to get older?”

Her view of women is analogous to her view of earth.

“There’s a theme to all of this: We use up the earth in our generation, and we use up the women in our generation. They’re tied together for me.”

Sojourner’s passion comes

across as very profound. Many of her favorite writers—Terry Tempest Williams, Edward Abbey, John Muir and Mary Austin—respect the earth, love the earth, pay homage to it, but not many of them—or many members of the human race, for that matter—can speak as brazenly, powerfully and with as much conviction as she can.

In an essay in Bonelight, Sojourner writes about walking through a meadow that is being ravaged as it undergoes development. She spelled out “No” with the limbs of a tree that has been killed and cut up. “I thanked the place, told it that I would be back till the gate went up and locked me out,” she writes.

And then she spoke to the earth directly.

“My walking here will be your hospice … my heart, your grave marker; my writing, your revenge."