My heart breaks living in southern Utah on the edge of America's Redrock Wilderness, witnessing what the Bush Administration's policies regarding oil and gas exploitation are doing to our public lands that belong to all Americans. Their policy is not about the public or the public's best interest. It is about the oil and gas corporations' best interests. The Secretary of the Interior is urging the Bureau of Land Management to support the gas and oil industry's most extreme drilling scenario in some of the American West's most pristine and fragile areas without proper legal and public input.

Watching the spontaneous acts of kindness, compassion, and generosity, courage, and bravery in the aftermath of the Boston marathon bombings was so deeply moving. It is in our nature to want to help, to serve, to be part of something larger than ourselves. We have a desire to connect with others. We want to make a difference in the world. I would call this a spiritual longing to be whole, interrelated, interconnected.

Storytelling awakens us to that which is real. Honest. . . . it transcends the individual. . . . Those things that are most personal are most general, and are, in turn, most trusted. Stories bind. . . . They are basic to who we are. A story composite personality which grows out of its community. It maintains a stability within that community, providing common knowledge as to how things are, how things should be -- knowledge based on experience. These stories become the conscience of the group. They belong to everyone.

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.

I wonder how it is we have come to this place in our society where art and nature are spoke in terms of what is optional, the pastime and concern of the elite?

I am a Mormon woman, I am not orthodox. It is the lens through which I see the world. I hear the Tabernacle Choir and it still makes me weep.

The mind creates those things that exist.