I think Barack Obama has been a terrible disappointment environmentally. It's very sobering to realize, as a westerner, that under the Obama administration, we now have more active oil and gas leases on public lands than Americans ever did. Obama has been worse.

If you know wilderness in the way that you know love, you would be unwilling to let it go.... This is the story of our past and it will be the story of our future.

People talk about medium. What is your medium? My medium as a writer has been dirt, clay, sand--what I could touch, hold, stand on, and stand for--Earth. My medium has been Earth. Earth in correspondence with my mind.

The world is holy. We are holy. All life is holy. Daily prayers are delivered on the lips of breaking waves, the whisperings of grasses, the shimmering of leaves.

What I mean by "An Unspoken Hunger." It's a hunger that cannot be quelled by material things. It's a hunger that cannot be quelled by the constant denial.

I was extremely close with my mother and my grandmothers, we shared our lives - fully, honestly - and it was heightened as each succumbed to cancer. Little was hidden between us. No time. And what was hidden, turned inward. I made a vow to speak. Speak or die.

I believe the personal is the collective. One of the ironies of writing memoir is in using the "I" it becomes an alchemical "we." This is the sorcery of literature.