This week, we’re departing from our usual format to celebrate beloved poet and essayist Gary Snyder and two of his books, Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems and The Practice of the Wild, the former from the start of his long career and the latter from its midpoint. We’re thrilled to welcome the following luminaries to the California Book Club to discuss Snyder’s work with host John Freeman. The gathering will also feature a special appearance by Snyder himself, as circumstances allow.
Rick Bass
Rick Bass is the author of more than 30 books and an environmental activist. He has received a PEN/Nelson Algren Award Special Citation for fiction and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He won the Story Prize in 2016 with his collection For a Little While and was a finalist for the same award for his collection The Lives of Rocks, also named a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice. His memoir, Why I Came West, was a finalist for the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography/Memoir. Various of his books have been named New York Times and Los Angeles Times notable books of the year.
Peter Coyote
Peter Coyote is an actor, director, screenwriter, author, advocate for wildlife, and, since 2015, ordained Buddhist priest. He’s performed in more than 160 films and narrated over 200 audiobooks and documentaries, among them The Pacific Century, a 10-part documentary about Pacific Rim economies. Other films he’s worked on include E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Erin Brockovich, and A Walk to Remember. He is the author of Zen in the Vernacular: Things As It Is. Coyote was a cofounder of the Diggers, a community anarchist group that conducted guerrilla improv and performance art, among other activities, in the Haight-Ashbury from 1966 to 1968.
Robert Hass
Robert Hass is one of the most lauded, widely read poets of our era, as well as an essayist and critic. He served as poet laureate of the United States from 1995 to 1997 and chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 2001 to 2007. You may have noticed that he wrote the thoughtful introduction to The Practice of the Wild. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Time and Materials: Poems 1997–2005 and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism for Twentieth Century Pleasures: Prose on Poetry, a collection of previously published essays and reviews.
Will Hearst
Will Hearst is a businessman, a philanthropist, and the producer of a beautiful documentary about Gary Snyder and Jim Harrison called The Practice of the Wild. If you haven’t seen it yet, it’s well worth watching before Thursday. Hearst is the editor and publisher of Alta Journal, which he founded in 2017. He has long served as the chair of Hearst, one of the nation’s largest diversified media and information companies. He is the grandson of company founder William Randolph Hearst.
Brenda Hillman
Acclaimed for her innovative, risk-taking work, Brenda Hillman is a poet and translator. Her books are White Dress: Visions and Re-Visions, Fortress, Death Tractates, Bright Existence, Loose Sugar, Cascadia, and Pieces of Air in the Epic. She won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry with Practical Water. She received the Northern California Book Award for Poetry for Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire and Extra Hidden Life, Among the Days. She’s the recipient of many other awards and honors, including fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Academy of American Poets, as well as the William Carlos Williams Award.
Jane Hirshfield
Recipient of numerous awards and author of 10 poetry collections, Jane Hirshfield is a poet, essayist, and translator who’s known for her penetrating, sometimes philosophical poetry. Her collection The Beauty was long-listed for a National Book Award; Come, Thief was a finalist for the PEN America poetry award; and Given Sugar, Given Salt was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her essay collections are Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry (1997) and Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World (2015). She studied at the San Francisco Zen Center for nearly eight years.
Wang Ping
Wang Ping is a poet, writer, multimedia artist, and translator whose own work has been translated into multiple languages. Her books include the poetry collections and short story collections The River Within, The Last Communist Virgin, The Magic Whip, Of Flesh & Spirit, and American Visa. Her memoir, Life of Miracles Along the Yangtze and Mississippi, won the 2018 AWP Creative Nonfiction Award. She is also the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bush Foundation, the McKnight Foundation, and the Lannan Foundation. She founded the Kinship of Rivers project, which gathered 100 artists from the Yangtze and Mississippi Rivers in a celebration of water.
Jack Shoemaker
Jack Shoemaker is Gary Snyder’s editor and the founding editor of Counterpoint Press. He was among the first American publishers of Thich Nhat Hanh, a widely read and followed Vietnamese Buddhist monk and peace activist who was then little-known. Before Shoemaker was a publisher, he was a bookseller in the Bay Area; he worked in that capacity until 1979, when he cofounded North Point Press. He has served on numerous awards panels and recognition panels, including for the National Endowment for the Arts. He has helped shape the literary and poetry scenes in the Bay Area over the course of the past half century.
Kim Shuck
Kim Shuck is a San Francisco poet, beadwork artist, and member of the Cherokee Nation. She is the author of a chapbook, Sidewalk Ndn, and several collections, including Deer Trails, Pick a Garnet to Sleep In, Rabbit Stories, Exile Heart, and Murdered Missing. She’s also the editor of a poetry anthology released last year, This Wandering State: Poems from Alta. She was San Francisco’s seventh poet laureate and was named an Academy of American Poets laureate fellow. In 2019, she was awarded an inaugural PEN Oakland/Gary Webb Anti-Censorship Award, and she is a member of California Poets in the Schools.•
Join us on May 16 at 5 p.m. Pacific time, when an array of panelists and CBC host John Freeman, with an appearance by Snyder, will gather to discuss Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems and The Practice of the Wild. Register for the Zoom conversation here.
POETIC SEA CHANGE
Read Hamilton Cain’s essay on the link between the prosody of disparate poets Gary Snyder and Sylvia Plath. —Alta
TERROIR
Oral historian and author Shanna Farrell suggests a yuzu gin and tonic to drink while reading Snyder’s poems or joining the CBC gathering on Thursday night. —Alta
UNTOLD STORIES
CBC editor Anita Felicelli interviews author Lisa See for the print quarterly, discussing See’s latest novel, Lady Tan’s Circle of Women; women’s writing; and Los Angeles. —Alta
CROWDSOURCING AN ATROCITY
Alta books editor David L. Ulin reviews Frank Abe and Floyd Cheung’s The Literature of Japanese American Incarceration, which he describes as “a literary collection and a historical one, interweaving poems and stories, as well as manga and even a scene from a radio play, with official documents.” —Alta
MISSING THE WRITERS’ ROOM
Film and television writers have struggled to find work in the 12 months following the writers’ strike in Hollywood. —Los Angeles Times
TOPLESS
Los Angeles writer Mieke Marple reviews Tits Up, which “explores the worlds of five different breast experts.” —Zyzzyva
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