The Thank you. Thank you. You are a human animal. You are a very special dream. Or you are the only animal

Who can think, who can reason, who can read

Hello and welcome to Book World

My name is Michael Silverblatt

This is our last in our series, Writers, Nature, and Community

Shows taped in the NPR studios during the

Watershed Conference held in Washington, D.C. The Watershed Conference brought together

hundreds of people concerned with the environment, poets, essayists, educators, activists,

to discuss what is happening to the land and how to write about it, teach about it,

and how to affect change. The conference was sponsored by the Orion Society and the Library

of Congress and hosted by Poet Laureate Robert Haas. Today, I wanted to have a show whose form

is influenced by procedures in Washington. When I was a boy, social studies books would have diagrams of how a bill becomes a law,

going from the House and Senate to the Executive Office for Signature or Vito, and so today,

I want to discuss how an idea becomes an essay, how an essay gets published, and how, once it is published, it enters the world of

thought, discussion, and action. I have three guests, an agent, an editor, and a writer, activist.

The agent is Lizzie Grossman of Stirling Lord Literistic. She started out in Manhattan,

or as we said at Watershed, the Hudson River Valley, but now she lives and works in the Pacific Northwest in the watershed of the Willemite River.

The editor is George Russell, who has been, for the past 14 years, the editor of Orion Magazine.

He doesn't live in an actual watershed. He lives on Long Island,

which is, he says, a terminal moraine. The writer is Terry Tempest Williams, author most recently

of Desert Quartet. Her other books include pieces of white shell, coyote's garden, refuge,

and an unspoken hunger. She lives on the

...