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Author Gary Ferguson first answered the call to adventure at age 12, loading up his purple sting-ray bike with camping gear and riding with his brother across the central Midwest. By age 18 bicycles had given way to boxcars and backpacks, as he made his way across North America by rail and by thumb - more often than not, heading west, and heading for mountains.
Gary Ferguson began writing full-time at age 25. Since that time he has written hundreds of articles for national magazines including Vanity Fair, Men’s Journal, Field & Stream, and Outside, and he’s the award-winning author of 15 books on nature and science. He is also a regular contributor to the book division of National Geographic. Gary’s goal as a writer is to chronicle the impact of the natural world on human lives. His critically acclaimed 2003 title, Hawks Rest: A Season in the Remote Heart of Yellowstone, profiles crucial environmental issues in the most remote place in the lower 48, and is the winner of both the 2004 Pacific Northwest Literary Award and the 2004 Mountains and Plains Nonfiction Award. Through the Woods: A Journey Through America's Forests, was a starred selection in Kirkus Review, as well as a winner of the prestigious Lowell Thomas Awards. Spirits of the Wild: The World's Great Nature Myths, was selected by the New York City Public Library as one of the best books of 1996. Gary has been featured on NPR’s Living on Earth, and his nature-related essays, as well as interviews, have been heard on NPR affiliates across the country.
Ferguson believes that strong writing grows out of strong experience. Hence, Gary has hiked and skied thousands of miles through high deserts and forests, canoed countless miles of wild rivers, and explored some of the remotest corners of the earth. He trekked 500 miles through Yellowstone to write Walking Down the Wild, spent a year in the backcountry following the first 14 wolves released into Yellowstone National Park for The Yellowstone Wolves: The First Year, and bicycled with his wife Jane from Canada to Mexico for his very first published book, Freewheeling. "What I'm looking for," he says, "what I'm celebrating, is the power of story. Tales of people finding their voices. Of life outside the box. And always, stories of the tracks nature leaves in the human heart."
In addition to a busy writing schedule, Gary somehow finds the time to be regularly on the road speaking, teaching at universities, and sharing his love of writing at writers’ workshops. The book he is currently working on is a biography of the ideas of the late John Ripley Forbes, a remarkable conservationist who was responsible for starting many of the country’s children’s museums as well as “semi-wilderness” preserves in metropolitan Atlanta – work that remains today at the cutting edge of urban space planning.
Selected Books:
- The Great Divide: The Rocky Mountains in the American Mind (2005, W.W. Norton)
- Decade of the Wolf: Returning the Wild to Yellowstone (2005, Montana Book of the Year – Lyon's Press)
- Hawks Rest: A Season in the Remote Heart of Yellowstone (2005, National Geographic)
- The Worlds Great Nature Myths (1996, Crown Publishing)
- Shouting at the Sky (1999, St. Martin's Press)
- Through the Woods (1998, St. Martin's Press)
- Walking Down the Wild (1993, Simon & Schuster)
- The Sylvan Path (1997, St. Martin's Press)
Saturday, February 9, 5:30 -7:00 pm, Crossroads Center
The Land Within: Wilderness and American Identity. Few aspects of our culture offer more striking clues about who we are as a people than our relationship with wild places. It was in America, after all, where pundits of the 18th Century predicted we would produce more writers, artists and musicians than anywhere in the world - simply because we spent so much time rubbing elbows with the woods. It was here that preachers from Boston and New York roamed the outback of Maine, gathering inspiration for their Sunday sermons; here that in 1913 a middle-aged artist became a major celebrity, touring Vaudeville with for two years with top billing, after having stripped down to his underwear to live for two months as a wild man in the North Woods. This presentation chronicles the inspiring, humorous, and often passionate history of Americans coming to understand themselves through nature. In addition, it addresses the critical issue of how we might re-ignite our relationship to the land underfoot, embracing yet again the value of wild places.
Keynote Workshop
Sunday, February 10, 9:00 - 10:50 am, Crossroads Center
The Stories of Place. The role of myth in fostering personal identity and sense of place.
Here is the history of our past keynote speakers and also an archive to all colloquium schedules.
Last updated February 28, 2008
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