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You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed.

For you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read.

Hello and welcome to Bookworm.

My guest today is Richard Shelton, the author of Going Back to Bisbee, as well as selected poems, 1969 to 1981.

Going Back to Bisbee was awarded the 1992 Western States Book Award for Creative

Nonfiction, and it's published by the University of Arizona Press. The University of Pittsburgh

Press publishes the selected poems. Now, when I got back from the Watershed Conference, there were legions of people, each of whom had their favorite books of, what would you say, transcendental nature or eco-fiction or country essays.

I mean, people were pressing on me the classics as well as all sorts of new writers.

But the book that I was drawn to because of its extraordinary humor and its willingness to see nature from the side of its nearly comic indifference to curious man

was the book going back to Bisbee by my guest Richard Shelton.

And so when he came to Los Angeles, I wanted to talk to him because there really is a certain

comedy of the idealization of nature that goes on. We need it. And yet the world is not as

transcendental at every moment as, say, Barry Lopez would like it to be.

So I thought that I would begin by letting you all hear a section from going back to Bisbee that celebrates one of the ardor of the apparatuses that populate the desert.

This is a description of the Jumping Choya by Richard Shelton from going back to Bisbee.

The name Jumping Choya, the official non-scientific name, found in all the respectable books,

was arrived at in the same way and is based upon close observation of the plant's structure and resultant behavior.

The Jumping Choyah is one of the great beauties of desert vegetation, and it is a true devil. Its trunk is a tube of

intricately woven wooden mesh, very strong and very light, often found transformed into ugly

...