With writers, artists, scholars, and scientists, in keynote addresses, conversations, a gallery talk, and panel discussions, we will investigate the idea and the incidence of ecotones, on a literal and metaphorical level, as they occur in both the natural world and the creative imagination.  An ecotone is a transitional zone between two ecological communities, as between a forest and grassland or a river and its estuary. An ecotone has its own characteristics in addition to sharing certain characteristics of the two communities.

          Maybe children wake to a love affair every other morning or so; if given any chance, they seem to like the sight and smell and feel of things so much.  Falling for the world could be a thing that happens to them all the time.  I hope so, I hope it is purely commonplace.  I’m trying to imagine that it is, that our childhood love of things is perfectly justifiable.  Think of light and how far it falls, to us.

                           --William Kittredge, from Hole in the Sky    

          It is this mix of festivity and danger, sparkle and dread that draws me so close to winter, to mountains, to Montana.  When you can see your breath, you know you are alive.

                       --Annick Smith, “The Rites of Snow”

  SYNOPSIS OF PLANNED EVENTS:
  
•    Keynote address and reading by Montana writer, William Kittredge, author of Hole in the Sky: A Memoir; Who Owns the West?; Balancing Water: Restoring the Klamath Basin; among other books; and co-editor of The Last Best Place: A Montana Anthology.

•    Keynote address and reading by filmmaker/writer Annick Smith, author of Homestead and In This We are Native; editor of The Wide Open: Prose, Poetry, and Photographs of the Prairie; and co-producer of the feature length film based on the Norman Maclean novel, A River Runs Through It.
  
•    A tribute to ISU ecologist, Paul Errington with scholarly papers and dramatic readings of Errington’s work.

•    Panel Discussions on “The Artist as Environmental Activist” and “The Ethics of Writing Across International Boundaries,” and a presentation of "Hiddenscapes," uncovering the evidence of the geological history of the landscape of Iowa.

•    A Gallery Talk by David T. Hanson, a photographer whose work is included in Imaging a Shattered Earth, currently on exhibit at the Brunnier Art Museum.

Download PDF Brochure of Full Symposium Schedule

SHORT BIOS OF INVITED KEYNOTES

JENNIFER KWON DOBBS was born in Won Ju Si, South Korea. Her debut collection, Paper Pavilion, received the White Pine Press Poetry Prize and was published in 2007. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in numerous journals including 5 AM,Blackbird, Cadences, Crazyhorse, Cimarron Review, Cream City Review, MiPOesias, Poetry NZ, Tulane Review, and  she has been anthologized in Echoes Upon Echoes and Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia, and Beyond.  Her work has been featured on radio and in film and translated into Greek, Korean, and Turkish.  Dobbs’ music collaboration with Steven Gates, Among Joshua Trees, won the New York Youth Symphony´s First Music Series Award and debuted at Carnegie Hall. She is also the librettist for Anemone, a chamber opera about Korean comfort women.  She holds a Ph.D. in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Southern California.  Currently she is an assistant professor of creative writing at St. Olaf College and lives in Minneapolis.


WILLIAM KITTREDGE  taught at the University of Montana for 29 years, retiring as Regents Professor of English and Creative Writing in 1997. Kittredge’s books include a memoir, Hole in the Sky; two collections of essays, Owning It All and Who Owns the West?; Balancing Water:  Restoring the Klamath Basin, The Best Stories of William Kittredge; and The Willow Field, a novel published in 2006.  The Next Rodeo: New & Selected Essays was published by Graywolf Press in fall 2007.  Kittredge and Annick Smith edited The Last Best Place: A Montana Anthology and were co-producers of A River Runs Through It. Kittredge received the Montana Governor’s Award for the Arts, was co-winner of the Montana Governor’s Award for Humanities and co-winner of the National Endowment for the Humanities’ Charles Frankel Award for service to the humanities, awarded by President Clinton. In 2006 he was given the Chiles Award for Service to the Great Basin, and in 2007 the Robert Kirsch Lifetime Achievement Award from the Los Angeles Times. In 2008 he will receive a Lifetime Achievement award from the Western Literature Association.


ANNICK SMITH is a writer, editor, and filmmaker who lives in Montana’s Blackfoot River valley.  Her books include the memoir, Homestead, as well as a collection of essays, In This We are Native; a natural and human history of the Oklahoma tallgrass prairies, Big Bluestem, Journey into the Tallgrass, written for The Nature Conservancy; and The Wide Open: Prose, Poetry, and Photographs of the Prairie.   Smith was the co-editor with William Kittredge of the Montana anthology, The Last Best Place, and her work has appeared in Best American Short Stories, Travel & Leisure, The New York Times, Audubon, OUTSIDE, Orion and other magazines and anthologies.  She was a founding member of the Sundance Film Institute, the executive producer of the feature film, Heartland, and a co-producer of Robert Redford’s production of A River Runs Through It.  Smith is currently finishing a travel-memoir-dog book, Crossing the Plains with Bruno, about traveling with her chocolate Labrador, Bruno.