How the Story of an Artist, a Painting, Two Presidents and a Contemporary Poet Unexpectedly Intertwines

The Truman Library is putting some significant American documents on display this spring (April 20–May 24) as part of the 250th anniversary of the nation’s founding. Along with such treasures as a broadside marking the Treaty of Paris (1983), which ended the Revolutionary War, the Louisiana Purchase, and numerous consequential Supreme Court decisions, the library is pulling out of storage one of its more unusual holdings—the painter Elaine de Kooning’s portrait of President John F. Kennedy. The president sat for de Kooning over the winter holidays in late 1962 and early 1963 and she spent much of the following year producing numerous sketches and more than 30 canvases. The Library acquired the portrait in 1965 and de Kooning was on hand to present it to Harry Truman himself in a photo op in Independence.

 The portrait doesn’t go on display very often. I had the chance to see it up close a couple of years ago when I was digging into the painting’s history and tripping over a parallel story that I couldn’t resist telling. I wrote a two-part series for KC Studio magazine, which appeared November-December 2024 and January-February 2025.

 I’ve combined the two texts (making some slight edits along the way) into a single piece here.

            While gathering material and sifting archival sands for the book project I’m currently immersed in, a digression presented itself, as they often and relentlessly do. If you are more laser-focused and on-task than I am, you might have let the impulse go. But that would be you. I couldn’t help myself. So I pinballed from one thing to another.

            The first thing I was searching for was a poem by William Stafford, the Kansas and Oregon sage, which he wrote following the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963. The second thing, united to the first by a random leap of mind and of digital data-mining, was a portrait of JFK made by the painter Elaine de Kooning. Sixty years ago, in January 1965, she presented the Kennedy portrait to former President Harry S Truman and his Truman Library in Independence.

            Now this bit of local history would most likely have led me to tell the straightforward story of de Kooning’s painting and the happy occurrence of its little-remembered residency in the presidential museum in our midst. (It’s not often on display.) That indeed was the plan. But, again, the underlining thread here is my old and comforting friend serendipity—how chance and coincidence manage to make our lives unpredictable if not ever-intriguing.

            It happened like this. At a late summer poetry reading, in a cozy Kansas City cocktail lounge, I listened to Jenny Molberg begin to describe her current interest in reclaiming the stories of female artists who happened to be overshadowed or ignored because they were married to artists who got all the attention. I wondered what she might have known about Elaine de Kooning. Flash forward a millisecond when she revealed that she knew much about Elaine de Kooning, because Elaine de Kooning was a friend of her family. Elaine de Kooning painted portraits of at least four of Molberg’s family members, including her beloved grandmother. That was merely the beginning.

            Jenny Molberg, Ph.D., is on the English and creative writing faculty at the University of Central Missouri in Warrensburg. She’s editor of the literary journal Pleiades and author of three books of poetry. (2026 updates, she now teaches at Emerson College in Boston and is editor-in-chief of its literary magazine, Ploughshares.) Most recent of those books is The Court of No Record (Louisiana State University Press), some of which she highlighted in September in the monthly Speakeasy poetry series at Swordfish Tom’s, the basement-level, hipster-magnet home of high-grade cocktails in the Crossroads. Her poetry is brash, bawdy, brutally honest about violence done to women, and has a self-defined bitchiness. It’s full-throated, 21st-century feminist, that is.

            Molberg is also in her second year of a writing residency at the Charlotte Street Foundation. While on sabbatical last spring she read the book Ninth Street Women, by Mary Gabriel, a group portrait of de Kooning and four other painter friends in her New York world. That jump-started her interest. Then, a chance discovery made while talking with a fellow Charlotte Street artist helped her decide that “Elaine was speaking to me.”

De Kooning was an accomplished though often less-regarded member of the circle of artists who defined the Abstract Expressionist movement of the 1950s, including her husband, Willem de Kooning. She carved out a specialty in figure painting and soulful portraits, making memorable canvases of artists and writers such as Alex Katz, Fairfield Porter, Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, and her husband. Porter once noted how portraiture liberated de Kooning and well served her unique talents as a painter. In 1963, the year she labored over her JFK project, she also painted a heroically scaled group portrait, stretching nearly 14 feet wide. It presented the figures of nine young, otherwise anonymous men—most were revealed to be patients in a drug rehabilitation facility—titled “The Burghers of Amsterdam Avenue.”

The Truman Library’s Kennedy portrait by Elaine de Kooning.

De Kooning met and painted Molberg’s family members beginning in the late 1960s, a few years after the Kennedy work elevated her market for commissioned portraits. A great aunt, Yvonne Collins, was married to a Texas insurance mogul and art collector, who commissioned his wife’s portrait in 1967. Grandmother Sue Deakins, of Tyler, Texas, sat for de Kooning two years later. She was a onetime English teacher who would instill in Molberg her love of reading and literature. Sue Deakins was deeply interested in the arts, and in 1972 she arranged an exhibit of de Kooning’s portraits at the Tyler Museum of Art. There was a memorable gathering at the Deakins home, Molberg tells me, of which stories are told that largely involve the fact that de Kooning had not yet given up drinking. 

            Molberg’s family members still possess many works by de Kooning, including several of the countless charcoal sketches, drawings and preliminary paintings she made in preparing for the final JFK oil portraits. Sue Deakins corresponded with de Kooning for years, until the artist’s death from lung cancer, at almost 71, in 1989. Deakins is alive and well, now 89 in Dallas, having moved there recently from Tyler to be closer to her daughter, Molberg’s mother. Molberg, of course, has the family scrapbooks and de Kooning’s letters to enrich her own work.

            All of that material evidence and intellectual energy have become Molberg’s passion as she works toward a book of personal essays and poems tracing de Kooning’s presence in her own life. Thanks to an Inspiration Grant from Arts KC she was able to travel earlier this year to de Kooning’s former home and studio, still largely preserved by a new owner, in the Long Island, New York, enclave of East Hampton.

            And she was pleasantly surprised—what? another coincidence?—to learn that de Kooning’s memorable portraits of John F. Kennedy include not only the full-length painting that hangs at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington and those in the hands of her family, but also the one right here at the Truman Library.

Former President Harry Truman with Elaine de Kooning and her JFK portrait, Feb. 11, 1965. (Harry S Truman Librrary)

Part II

            On Feb. 11, 1965, Harry S Truman met the painter Elaine de Kooning for the first time as she presented her new portrait of another American president, John F. Kennedy, to the Truman Library in Independence.

            In the preserved video of the dedication ceremony, there is laughter during a photo opp when Truman is encouraged to move from where he stood on one side of the painting to join de Kooning on the other end.

            In the moment, Truman refrained from commenting on the painting per se, but he thanked de Kooning for the hard work and noted how the portrait would expand the institution’s holdings relating to the history of the U.S. presidency.

            De Kooning said she was honored to have her work in the vicinity of Thomas Hart Benton’s recent-vintage library mural, “Independence and the Opening of the West,” which she called “his masterpiece.” And she expressed hope that Truman would “get used to my portrait,” recognizing its expressionistic freedoms and jaunty colors as a departure from traditionally heroic, realistic renderings of important people.

            She went on to describe her painstaking process over many months to capture the radiant essence and dignity of the late president as a man ready to spring into action.

            The Truman Library’s painting—and all of de Kooning’s other JFK paintings and sketches she made at the time—began as a commission suggested in 1962 by a New York art dealer, Robert Graham. Graham was visiting the library that fall with Benton when the discussion began with its administrators. Graham had a school-boy connection with President Kennedy, which helped move things along.

            If Graham expected push-back from either Kennedy or Harry Truman on his promotion of de Kooning as the portrait artist, it never materialized, according to the gallerist’s correspondence in both the Archives of American Art and the Truman Library.

            And as Cathy Curtis, author of a recent biography of de Kooning, writes, “In a practical sense, her reputation for rapidly completing a portrait made her the ideal artist to paint a famously restless head of state.”

            At the time, when the subject was brought up at the White House, the president was too busy to sit for an artist, though an opportunity arose during the Christmas holidays while the Kennedy family would be at the winter White House in Palm Beach, Fla.

            De Kooning spent a reported 20 hours over nearly two weeks jumping from her sketchpad, where she put charcoal to work, to her easels, where she began oil paintings. Her sessions with the president were often informal but also took place when he was conducting business. During one meeting, a conference on Medicare, she sketched him while standing on a ladder. After the live sessions, she spent most of 1963 working on nothing else but her multiple canvases—“thirty-six canvases going at once,” she’d say.

            In the spring of 2024, Jenny Molberg, a Kansas City poet and teacher on a year-long sabbatical from the University of Central Missouri in Warrensburg, stood in the high-ceilinged, naturally lighted studio space in East Hampton, Long Island, where de Kooning eventually settled. Molberg has been following a trail that begins in the 1960s, when de Kooning painted portraits of Molberg’s grandfather and uncle, a great-aunt, and her beloved grandmother, who remained a friend of the artist for many years. De Kooning once gave a JFK sketch to her uncle as a memento, and it remains a cherished family possession.

            Molberg has been working on poems and essays springing from her exploration into de Kooning’s life and work, planning eventually to produce a book.

            “I've been really interested in what Elaine says about men as her subjects,” Molberg tells me, “especially in light of the fact that portrait painting may have seemed ‘domestic’ to her male contemporaries in the Abstract Expressionist movement (it was her way of making money when she lived beyond her means, which was...always). I think she thought a lot about the gender dynamics of a woman painter making portraits of men, when for so long men were the sole possessors of the muse/the nude female body/the sexualized body in art. Elaine once said, ‘Men always painted the opposite sex, and I wanted to paint men as objects.’”

            One day last fall, Mark Adams, the Truman museum curator, and John Miller, its registrar, brought de Kooning’s JFK portrait out of temperature-controlled storage and placed it on a chair in a conference room. I sat across from it to see what I could see, to see what doesn’t come across in photographs or reproductions as I’d been encountering them in books and elsewhere.

            I’d hoped to share the viewing with Jenny Molberg but our timelines didn’t mesh—my travels and deadlines, her travels and back surgery—and I knew she would have another opportunity during her own project’s trajectory.

            As I sat there with the painting, I thought about that horrible day, the one that for those of us alive at the time, can’t be forgotten—Nov. 22, 1963. I was 10 years old, sitting in the fifth-grade classroom in the Longfellow School, Sanford, Maine, where a black and white television was soon rolled in on a cart.

            I thought about Camelot, the promise of the “New Frontier,” the mythic aura of the Kennedy presidency with which de Kooning’s modern sensibilities aimed to connect on canvas. I thought, sorry to say, about the despicable caricature of a human being who has disrupted American life for a decade now in a narcissistic search to fill presidential shoes that have and will never fit him.

            My eyes searched the painting up and down—it’s about four feet wide and nearly five and a half feet tall—to finally focus on the four-ring binder where Kennedy’s hands seemed to rest in mid-executive action.

            I thought about the brilliance of de Kooning’s strategy to incorporate streaks of bright white, remnants of the Florida sun, which splashed through the patio where JFK sat and squirmed as she sketched and painted in early January 1963.

            The white space offers breathing room in the painting, as if the light from above were telling us something about her subject, as if she were inviting viewers to fill those open areas with their own memories, visions, thoughts, and feelings about the fallen president and their own lives. Others may see in it a sense of incompletion that rightfully accompanies a life cut short

            The writer Thurston Clarke, speaking a decade ago about his book, JFK’s Last Hundred Days, found a different conclusion in de Kooning’s experience. “I don't think you can ever get as far as you want to with Kennedy because he was secretive and so complicated, and he compartmentalized so much,” he told an audience at the John F. Kennedy Library and Museum in Boston. “In fact, if you look at the beginning of the book — I open with Elaine de Kooning, who was essentially driven crazy by trying to capture his essence into a single portrait for the Truman Library and ended up doing nothing but painting Kennedy for a whole year, doing 30 oil paintings, covering the walls of her studio with drawings and sketches and everything of Kennedy. So you can never get to the final thing.”

            We can certainly argue with Clarke’s phrase that de Kooning was “doing nothing.” The evidence in front of me, in the Truman Library conference room, happens to argue otherwise.

            In the end, the vectors of memory are unpredictable as they zing through that infinite universe between our ears. Artists and writers might be especially attuned to grasp those signals as they pass.

            Anxiety over de Kooning’s portrait project increased after Kennedy’s death. De Kooning felt a new obligation to get it just right, but was somewhat paralyzed to continue, according to some accounts. Within days of the assassination Truman Library officials were hoping her portrait could be in their hands to go on public display as soon as possible. Yet it would be another year before Robert Graham and President Kennedy’s inner circle agreed on which of de Kooning’s paintings they preferred to go to the Truman Library. Another one would soon be acquired by Jacqueline Kennedy, and other versions eventually landed at the Kennedy Library in Boston, development plans for which were already under way, and the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C.

            De Kooning recounted her experience making the portrait in her introductory remarks in Independence.

            “When I first laid eyes on President Kennedy, December 28, 1962, at ten o'clock in the morning, I arrived carrying the world's image of him. The one thing wrong with that image was that it missed the great color. The image was black, white and grey, and it missed the hoping great scale, the tremendous physical presence of the man. So for one split second I did not recognize him. He was bigger and more radiant than any reproduction had indicated.”

            She also summed up her idea as it evolved: “The colors were chosen, not to convey a realistic sense of a gray flannel suit worn by a man with a tan—but rather to attempt to communicate the brightness and high color of the man as I saw him. Also, I wanted to capture his quality of readiness, as though he was about to spring from his chair. And to get the frown and the smile at once—the sharp, appraising glance.”

            The day after the presentation in Independence, de Kooning’s painting took center stage in an exhibit for the public at the Kansas City Art Institute’s Charlotte Kemper Gallery. The sunny and striking portrait of Kennedy was accompanied by 38 other sketches and paintings and one abstract bronze sculpture. The exhibit ran for three weeks.

            Jenny Molberg joined me on a brief research visit to the library at the Nelson-Atkins Museum, where we paged through the catalogue of that KCAI exhibit. Here was a full-page reproduction of the Truman painting; here was a photograph of de Kooning beginning a sketch of the president in Palm Beach; here were sketches dated Dec. 28, 1962, the first day of her project and the same date as the one in Molberg’s family.

            Molberg’s reflections on de Kooning certainly embrace the JFK period, but she is traveling far beyond it.

            “I've started thinking about the lyricism in her abstract paintings,” Molberg says, “but maybe more importantly about the narrative aspects of her portraiture. How is she reaching back into the history of portraiture, engaging with the canon (as it were)? How is she flipping gender expectations?”

            Perhaps some of those questions will now come to mind whenever the public has a rare opportunity to view de Kooning’s JFK portrait at the Truman Library.

Postrcript: Jenny Molberg’s next book of poems, The Medium, will cover the ground she describes in this story, with Elaine de Kooning at its core. It is scheduled to be published by the Louisiana State University Press in February 2027.

From the Archives: Remembering the Literary Mastery of Daniel Woodrell (1953-2025)

By Steve Paul

This week we received the devastating news that Daniel Woodrell, the Missouri-based author of a superb series of novels produced over the last forty years, had died of pancreatic cancer. He was a mere 72. I regret even more that last March, when we were traveling to a conference in Alabama I failed to make an advance connection with him and I missed an opportunity to get together while passing through West Plains, MO. His reply to me at the time, included this: “I finally started reading Connell seriously and geez he's got it all.” I know we had crossed paths when I was working on my biography of Evan S. Connell, and I’m glad he got the urge to read more of Connell’s work.

I knew I’d written about Connell a few times over the years, and I was heartened to unearth some of those pieces. He would have come on my radar circa 1987 when, as book review editor at the KC Star, I assigned his civil war novel to another fine writer with a western bent, the late Lenore Carroll. My first interview with him occurred about five years later, in 1992.

I was pretty sure I’d reviewed the fabulous Winter’s Bone but I’d forgot that I paired that with Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. So that one turned out to be an interesting read and memory jolt. I’m not prone to quoting myself, but 20 years later I felt somewhat good about this piece: “Woodrell lives in the hills and absorbs their currents. He captures the acts and language of the disenfranchised, the downtordden, the mischievous. his characters tend to be aggressively anti-social or behavioral screw-ups, ‘scornful of town law and town ways, clinging to their own.’”

Two years after the novel came out, I used Winter’s Bone in a class I was teaching at Knox College, and I was surprised when the students turned out to be less enthusiastic about it than I was. Probably a combination of their rich-kid privilege and my lousy teaching. No big deal. But I also loved the movie version, wowed by its faithfulness to Woodrell’s story and the absolutely stunning presence of Jennifer Lawrence in the starring role as Ree Dolly.

I was also happy to be reminded that I heaped praise on Daniel’s later novel, The Maid’s Version, a remarkable example of his ability to mine and transform real, historic events from his native state’s hidden corners.

When I was putting together the short-story collection Kansas City Noir something like 14 years ago, i was eager to include Daniel. My recollection is his entry came very late in the process, but he was such a meticulous writer and his story, Come Murder Me Next, Babe, was so eerily fine (based on another true-crime tale), I didn’t care. If you’re looking for an entry point into Daniel’s work, you could start there and quickly move on to Winter’s Bone.

Each of the reproductions below come from the pages of The Kansas City Star — from 1987, 1992, 2006, 2013.

Me and Johnny McPhee: A Book Review, etc.

By STEVE PAUL

(c) 2023

Something like almost 50 years ago, I was in Boston (actually, Newton) and staying in the third-floor guest room in a friend’s family’s Victorian house. I had some time to myself, and found on a table next to an easy chair a book I knew nothing about. It was called Oranges. The author was John McPhee, whom I had not yet had the pleasure of reading. I opened it. It was about oranges! And, strangely, seductively, on the very first page, McPhee performs a sequence of citric facts in a narrative dance that became instantly mesmerizing. I read the whole damn thing that weekend and became something of a McPhee disciple.

            Years later, in the occasional class or workshop I led on non-fiction writing, I used the first chapter of Oranges as an example of the literature of fact. Some younger students didn’t get it, but maybe the problem was they didn’t get me or my class either.

            A few years after reading Oranges, while early in my career as a daily journalist, I thought I ought to polish my resumé and, rather foolishly, enrolled in graduate school. In economics. The university department emphasized a discipline of social thought rather than mere numbers, and I’d enjoyed those studies as an undergrad. Bad move. When I pitched a paper proposal on an environmental issue relating to Alaska’s Tongass National Forest, the professor wanted to know what my sources were going to be. Well, there’s this great book about Alaska and the environment, Coming into the Country, by John McPhee (1976). Well, no, I was told; that’s just journalism and not good enough for graduate school. I made a feeble effort to gather some proper economic data. Then, essentially, I gave up and never finished the paper. Or graduate school.

            As a journalist, my admiration for McPhee extended to a magazine project I organized—as an editor, not a writer—which borrowed from McPhee’s Encounters with the Archdruid (1971). One part of his story involved a rafting trip down the Colorado River alongside a federal land agency official and an outspoken environmentalist. The framing of McPhee’s three-part book made it a quasi-biography of David Brower, who would go on to prominently [found?] lead the Sierra Club. In our version of the story, we sent a reporter and photographer down the Missouri River for three days along with an environmentalist and an official of the Army Corps of Engineers. The two sides often clashed over river and channel management and the preservation of wild lands and natural eco-systems, and we hoped to capture conversations about some of those issues while boating down the Big Muddy. One of my principal roles on this journey was to transport the river travelers by van in between stretches on the river. All of us camped on a mid-river sandbar one night, and I recall waking early and watching the enveloping morning fog slowly dissipate.   

            In recent decades, while still working in daily journalism, I’ve referred to my extra-curricular activities in Hemingway studies as my own private graduate school. My self-directed program suits me just fine. If I suffer the consequences of not having the proper credentials or training in the research and writing I do, then so be it. I’ve raised the private grad school bar even higher following my newspaper career by completing two literary biographies and recklessly rolling into a third. And, as a longtime book critic and a lifelong reader, I continue to spend each and every day among books and at a keyboard.

            I know that’s a long ramble toward mentioning my delight as I was reading John McPhee’s new book, Tabula Rasa. It’s a memoir of sorts and a book about writing and not writing. It offers a collection of brief, miscellaneous pieces reflecting dives into McPhee’s old files to recount how and why a particular story idea didn’t pan out. Or did. Deep into the short book, he writes about the origins of Oranges. He’d noticed an orange-squeezing machine at Penn Station, and one question led to another. Then he dropped into the office of William Shawn, the editor of The New Yorker, where McPhee at the time was still pitching ideas on contract while teaching and hoping to become a staff writer. One idea or another failed to spark Shawn’s interest. Sometimes, McPhee realized, Shawn might have been protecting the turf of another New Yorker scribe. Then McPhee offered one word. “Oranges.” And he got Shawn’s classic green light: “Yes. Oh, my, yes.”

            McPhee’s Tabula Rasa is engaging, charming at times, surprising, humorous, typically masterful and typically dense with detail—the annals of Princeton, New Jersey, for example—that might not appeal to every reader. Still, he manages to turn some of the raw driftwood into intriguing sculpture. He recalls, for instance, how he once thought about exploring one or more of the dozens of towns named Princeton across the nation. Ultimately he dropped the idea as the equivalent of the uninspired journalism practice of anniversary stories, or “of wilderness camping by Jeep Cherokee, of psychoanalyzing the Mummers Parade.”

            We learn about the Leaning Tower of Pisa, the monkish pharmalinguists at drug companies who invent unintelligible names for generics, a Hemingway aficionado who happened to be a mediocre journalist he once spied around the bull run at Pamplona, and how certain travels and failed projects may have influenced McPhee’s two younger daughters, both of whom became writers.

            The book made me want to go back to some early McPhee pieces—especially one about Kentucky bourbon—that eluded my attention or a place on my book shelves. And it reminded me to marvel again at the depth of McPhee’s reportorial memory and achievements in science and history; at the curiosity that takes readers into the lives of interesting people we might not otherwise meet; and at his ebullient mastery of language and the craft of story.

From the Archives: A Chat With Robert Bly

As I’ve been delving into the life and work of William Stafford, on the way toward a possible biography, I couldn’t help but take a new interest in Robert Bly, who became an important champion of Stafford’s poetry. I was sorry to learn of Bly’s recent death. I’d been reading a new book about Bly’s raucous period as the argumentative editor of a small-press poetry journal, serially called The Fifties, The Sixties, and, finally, The Seventies (only one issue under that title). The book is Born Under the Sign of Odin, by Mark Gustafson. I had a few memories of hearing Bly read his work and presiding over a men’s workshop in Kansas City many years ago. Until I dug out an old file, I’d forgotten that I’d actually interviewed him, by phone, in 1992, in advance of one of his Kansas City events. This was at the height of Bly’s fame in the Iron John era, the work in which he explored the power and necessity of myth. So, here’s that piece, which first appeared in the Kansas City Star on October 15, 1992. It ran under the headline “Men's work: Poet Robert Bly uses yesterday's stories to touch today's lives.”  

By STEVE PAUL

Two years ago this fall Robert Bly underwent an unexpected rite of passage. 

  The Minnesota writer, author by then of more than a dozen volumes of poetry and prose, translator of 15 others by European and South American poets, and editor of a handful of anthologies, issued a book that, in the course of its long and still-beating shelf life, not only exceeded sales of all the rest but turned its thoughtful, white-maned author into a pop-culture personality. 

  The poet as media sensation! Unheard of.

  But Bly's book, Iron John: A Book About Men, captured the imagination of hundreds of thousands of readers. It also inspired widespread and vigorous discussion of the meaning of men's lives ("What Do Men Really Want?," Newsweek's cover eventually blared) and put Bly into the thick of a talk-show and speaking-tour whirlwind.

  But once you've seen the mountaintop of fame - People magazine chose Bly as one of the 25 most intriguing people of 1991 - how can you slip back into the contemplative and relatively unnoticed valley of the poet? 

  Bly says it's not at all difficult. The attention finally has waned, and he says he's sticking to his vow to take a year off from speaking and teaching and furthering his "men's work." His hiatus has been interrupted only by some prior commitments, including a speaking engagement Friday at Johnson County Community College and a daylong workshop for men Saturday at Avila College.

  "In general I've been wonderfully at home and lying down and reading and doing some poems," Bly says by telephone from his cabin - he calls it his writing place - at Moose Lake, Minn. "So I'm enjoying it a lot." 

  Bly says he wasn't totally unaccustomed to being in the public eye. He was an outspoken opponent of the Vietnam War, and with Kansas City poet David Ray, helped organize poets against the war through public readings and publications. That was a similar public expression of feeling, he says - an example, like Iron John, of "someone saying things that needed to be said." 

   "But," he adds, "it's no trouble to drop out at all and go back to writing poetry. Thoreau said, `When you give a speech, there's usually an occasion for it, and you give it to those who can hear.' Then he said, `When you write, you write for those who can understand, and the occasion is your whole life.' Isn't that wonderful?"

  Through a combination of ancient mythology, contemporary psychology, poetry and, especially, a deep reading of the "Iron John" fairy tales collected by the Grimm brothers early in the 19th century, Bly's book gave men and women an understanding of a great "father hunger," as Bly puts it, that has beset the lives of boys and men since the Industrial Revolution. 

  He touched many lives bound in confusion over the role of men in society. And, perhaps, he presented a moral touchstone to those set adrift in the greedy fervor of the 1980s.

  Long a student of ancient storytelling, Bly helped point readers to the archetypal lessons of mythology. "Mythology," he writes in Iron John, "helps to give weight to our private wounds Without the weight given by a wound consciously realized, the man will lead a provisional life."

  The book helped to bare the soul of a burgeoning "men's movement." For a decade Bly had been conducting weekend "wild man" retreats in the woods. The concept accelerated in early 1990 when Bill Moyers presented Bly and his men's work in a PBS special and hit warp-drive when Iron John appeared in November of that year, on its way to spending nearly 60 weeks on the hardcover best-seller lists.

  Ever since, books about men and their grief have proliferated, including, just this month, The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart, a collection of 300 poems "for men," which Bly co-edited (HarperCollins; $25).

  Bly is gratified that his workshops, such as the one he'll conduct here Saturday, have opened up a new audience for poetry. 

  "Some of the complicated grief that men have is best described by poems," he says. "Poems make it more clear. Sociological language can't do it. Psychological language can't do it."

The emerging poet

  Bly's journey to the upper ranks of American poetry began on the farm in western Minnesota that his great-grandparents settled after immigrating from Norway. He served two years in the Navy in World War II, and it was there, he says, that he discovered the power of the poem. 

  "I met the first person I knew who wrote poetry in the Navy," Bly says. "He wrote a poem in front of me. I was stunned. I'd never seen anyone write a poem. I thought the books wrote them. It went something like, `The south side of Chicago is like a running sore on a large body.'

  "What did I know? To me, that was wonderful. The idea that someone could make up an image like that was amazing." 

  Bly then applied to Harvard University and got in. There he studied with Archibald MacLeish and joined what is now an impressive list of fellow writing students, including Donald Hall, Kenneth Koch, George Plimpton, John Hawkes and Adrienne Rich. 

  Bly opted against graduate school and chose instead "the old route of the person in the garret."

  "So I went to New York and made my living as a file clerk one day a week, a typist one day a week and, toward the end, a house painter. 

  "Those were wonderful years, because in a way I escaped graduate school and I had time to read and time to brood and be depressed."

  There was something wonderful about it, because here I had been at college and suddenly I was at the bottom of the whole heap and people could look at me and instantly understand that I was not very far away from being a bag man. 

  "In a way it took away my fear of falling. A lot of people think that if they don't do the right thing, the safe thing, they'll fall through their class."

  By 1962 Bly had published his first book of poems, Silence in the Snowy Fields. He came to prominence later in the decade with his opposition to the Vietnam War and his book The Light Around the Body (1968).

  In the wake of Iron John, several of his best-known poetry collections were reissued last year, including The Light Around the Body; The Man in the Black Coat Turns (1981), which explored father-son relationships; Loving a Woman in Two Worlds (1985); and Selected Poems (1986).

  This year HarperCollins published a collection of Bly's prose poems, What Have I Ever Lost By Dying? That book draws together work spanning more than 20 years, largely observations of nature, family and love. Because of the straightforward, detail-packed style of the prose-poem form, the work tends to be more immediately accessible than the more surreal dreamscapes of his lyrics.

  Bly says he plans another book like Iron John that will deal with several fairy tales. Before that will come a new collection of poems that he has been working on for some years. Many of the poems are about his father.

Easily misunderstood 

  Bly recognizes that his recent work and the movement it has fed are not universally admired.

  "Women have received so much depreciation from men," he says, "that they are justifiably afraid that when men get together they are liable to do something to women."

  The media is to blame, he says, for its oversimplifications and tendency to focus its images on the drum-beating extremes. Bly's metaphors of the inner wild man or soul warrior are easily

misinterpreted. ("Warrior doesn't mean you go to the gulf war," he has said elsewhere. "It means you fight inside your community for what is good.")

  "Most women get the big picture out of the media," he says, "and there's a lot of false pictures of it floating around  But some of the same things that are now being said about the men's movement were said about the women's movement when it began." 

  Typical of the criticism is April Bernard's recent assessment in The New Republic. Reviewing The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart and another book of men's poetry, Bernard wrote: "While it would be unfair, of course, to fault men as a group for exploring their feelings, it could be argued that they have already done that, in what is loosely known as The History of Civilization."

   Bernard characterizes Bly as something of a huckster and particularly disingenuous, betrayed by his language, in his "claim to embrace women, or feminism."

  "For some of those young women feminists," Bly counters, "they are not writing about the book. They are attempting to establish themselves in the eyes of their women peers, and for that they've got to hit it hard."

  Bly has gone beyond the men-only approach by presenting workshops for both sexes in collaboration with Marion Woodman, a Jungian analyst in Toronto. A year ago he and Deborah Tannen, the popular author of You Just Don't Understand, a book about how men and women fail to communicate, gave a joint program in New York on "Men and Women Talking Together."

  Bly is adamant about the value for men and women in such soul-searching work.

  "I'm not a separatist in any way," he says. "I think that many women who participated in the women's movement 20 years ago did marvelous things. They helped to bring out pain and anger that hadn't been expressed, which really is important. Women now feel that something else is needed - it's time to stop attacking men and see if we can get along.

  "The people in the media seem to want more anger between men and women. They are always trying to get us to say something inflammatory. Men and women themselves want less anger and more reconciliation."

From the archives: Let's toast Roger Angell

Some FB chatter erupted today about the great Roger Angell, now 99, inspired by Joe Bonomo’s recent book about him (right) and a new Q&A posted this week at the New Yorker. All that sent me in search of a baseball column I wrote a few years ago as the Kansas City Royals were heading for the post-season (and ultimate victory in the World Series). I’d name-checked Angell, and I’m pretty sure I sent a copy to him, with thanks for a truly inspiring career, though I never got a response. In searching for the piece, I discovered that the NewsBank archive, accessed via the Mid-Continent Public Library, has an odd flaw—an apparent adversity to anything with embedded hyperlinks or fancy text coding. I think I’ve filled the resulting gaps accurately. In addition, I tripped over an earlier blog piece I wrote about Angell for The KC Star website, including a list of three of my favorite Angell pieces, and I’ve tacked on a copy of that at the end of this post. This first piece—yes, I can feel an Angellic tilt to some of the writing—appeared in print in the Kansas City Star on Sept. 27, 2015. If anyone finds it online, you’re a better sleuth than I am. The Star’s website often sucked.

A Fan’s Notes Emerge as the Anxious Season Peaks

By Steve Paul

I'll admit it: I left Wednesday night's Royals game at Kauffman Stadium before it was over.

It was the ninth inning. Relief pitcher Luke Hochevar had gone to a full count with three straight batters and let the third get on base. I had another one of those feelings that we've had so often in this crazy baseball September. Not tonight. It was already a given that the Royals wouldn't have clinched the division title that night, but still there was faint hope though not much optimism that the team would catch enough spark to get the job done.

On the way out of the stadium, I caught Hochevar on a monitor, luckily, closing out the top of the ninth with no further damage. On the drive home, we heard the Royals tie the game. Nevertheless the frustrating inability to get runners home — 14 batters stranded through nine innings — bode ill for this game. The agony lasted into the 10th.

It's hard to criticize the wussy people who had left the stadium even before my partner and I did. We'd sat in those hard plastic seats for four hours already. We're just real people with day jobs, and perhaps everyone else had an early appointment the next day, too.

Don't get me wrong. There were bits of exciting, scratch-it-out baseball; Yordano Ventura, the fiery and floppy hurler, looked fairly effective; and a big beer and a footlong brat helped fill the time and distract us from the goofy goings-on between innings on the giant scoreboard.

Even the newly minted fan in my house — to some faithful readers, that's the former She Who Is Not Easily Pleased — noticed the subtly intriguing dynamics of the game. "There was one moment when fans rattled Seattle," she texted to a friend. "Lots of drama. Guys talking behind gloves."

We got home just in time to turn on the radio broadcast and hear new closer Wade Davis shut down the Mariners in the top of the 10th and — at long last — the return of Royals ecstasy, when Lorenzo Cain drove home the long-legged Brazilian, Paulo Orlando, for the game-winning run.

In case you're wondering, I am not trying out for a spot on the sports page. But I am trying to get in touch with that thing about baseball that stirs in many of us even if our team weren't heading for another string of post-season battles.

I was glad that Wednesday night's game began with a moment of silence for Yogi Berra, whose death at 90 was reported that day. Sure he was one of those hated Yankees, but he was one of the very few who transcended that ancient rivalry to enjoy a kind of historic, heroic esteem. "That he triumphed on the diamond again and again in spite of his perceived shortcomings was certainly a source of his popularity," Bruce Weber wrote in The New York Times' lengthy obit.

My personal history with Yogi goes back to my ancient and brief days as a Little League catcher, like him, when all those Yankees were my heroes. This vivid passage last week from another hero, Roger Angell, The New Yorker's 95-year-old deep observer of baseball, stopped me in place: "I think of him behind the plate as well: a thinking bookend, a stump in charge."

Yogi's St. Louis heritage and school-dropout past meant nothing to me then or now, but I can't quite get over a sense memory that his visage always reminds me a bit of my grandfather, who hasn't been with us for 50 years now. He was something like a thinking bookend, too. Or at least that's how I remember him.

One thing we learned during the Royals' magical season last year was how intensely the game binds the generations. Will Salvador Perez endure behind the plate like a Yogi Berra for tomorrow?

I have watched or listened to almost every game this season, including the division clincher on Thursday. I'm ready to plan for October success. And to celebrate more baseball, which can make us anxious, break our hearts and, ultimately, lift our spirits.

There is that other thing about Yogi. I should've thought about it Wednesday night as we debated whether to stay or go. "It ain't over till it's over." One of the most classic Yogi-isms. And one of those Royals things we've been holding onto all season long.

—-

The following appeared online on Dec. 12, 2013, on the occasion of Angell’s receipt of a lifetime award from the Baseball Hall of Fame.

Roger Angell in the Hall: A real home run

BY STEVE PAUL

With drug scandals, end-of-season disappointments, and winter-meeting, team-building hiccups, the sport of baseball could seem like it’s in the doldrums.

But now comes news of a real grand slam: The Baseball Hall of Fame will honor Roger Angell with its J.G. Taylor Spink Award, which goes to those who chronicle the game in words.

Angell, who has long served as the fiction editor of The New Yorker, has also written classy, intelligent and deeply felt long-form pieces for the magazine over the last 50 years. Many of his pieces have been anthologized (see, for example, “Once More Around the Park.”)As his editor, David Remnick, opined the other day, “Roger Angell is the greatest of all baseball writers.”

Period. Underlined. No question about it.

Angell embodies two important passions in my life — baseball and writing — though I’m a relative newcomer to his work, given that I’ve only been reading him for three decades or so.

What makes Angell special is how he tells stories and how he always manages to find heart and humanity in the game.

For evidence, I’d offer up a triple-play of Angell’s classic pieces (and The New Yorker has helpfully posted one of them):

• “Down the Drain,” the aching tale, from 1975, of Steve Blass, a pitcher for the Pittsburgh Pirates who inexplicably went from top-of-the-game, World Series success to inexplicable oblivion (read it here).

• “Before the Fall,” another career-end story of a pitcher, the Kansas City phenom David Cone, then pitching for the Yankees (2001). “I was writing a book about Cone,” Angell writes, “but almost from the beginning he was aware that it wasn’t going to turn out the way we’d hoped.”

• “In the Country,” probably my all-time favorite Angell piece (I’ve used it in non-fiction writing classes). This one comes from 1981, and it starts with letters Angell receives from the girlfriend of a semi-pro pitcher named Ron Goble. Before you know it, you are witness to the pain and joy of these people, as baseball, cancer and sheer determination course through the lower levels, but entirely human stations of the game.

From the Archives: A Mamet Discovery Prompts Unearthing This Piece About Hemingway and TV Writing

           While researching another project recently at the Harry Ransom Center, on the campus of the University of Texas in Austin, I followed a digression into Hemingway territory and learned something I’d never encountered before. The playwright David Mamet (right) had once set out to write a screenplay based on Across the River and Into the Trees, one of Hemingway’s most problematic novels. Problematic because most critics hold it up as one of Hemingway’s worst. That may or may not be true, but despite its flaws, the book, like several of Hemingway’s lesser works, does serve up some elegant writing here and there. So, Across the River, published in 1950, is at least approachable on a prose, or sentence-by-sentence, level.

            Mamet recognized the novel’s reputation but once noted in an interview that great plays often lead to lousy movies and perhaps the reverse may have been true for a bad book. I’m not sure his logic on paper was quite that clear, but I think that was what he was trying to say.

            Mamet has often been creatively compared to Hemingway, which, in that same interview (with Playboy, in 1995) he deflected: It would be a “heavy, impossible burden. You know, you can’t play Stanley Kowalski without being compared to Marlon Brando – even by people who never saw Marlon Brando in the movie, let alone on stage. He revolutionized that role and the American notion of what it meant to act. The same is true of Hemingway and writing.”

            That said, the discovery of these Mamet notes sent me back to a newspaper piece I wrote – yikes, sixteen years ago -- that connected some dots between Mamet and Hemingway through the craft of television writing. That piece also made a nod to the likes of Aaron Sorkin and Amy Sherman-Palladino, the creator of a TV series of the day called “Gilmore Girls” and now the creative spirit behind one of the most popular and lauded new streaming series, “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” (on Amazon Prime). Again, Hemingway. I watched a few more episodes of “Mrs. Maisel” the other day, which gave me further impetus to repost this piece.

The following article first appeared in The Kansas City Star in November 2002.

Motor mouths: Smart and savvy TV writers figure it out: Papa knew best

 

“Wall Street Journal says people are talking really fast on

television.”

  “You don't say.”

  “No, really. Especially on `West Wing.' “

  “Smart show.”

  “That's right. Mostly written by a guy named Aaron Sorkin.”

  “All that politics _”

  “Ripped from the headlines!”

  “And real-life drama.”

  “It's nice that Bartlet and his wife are getting closer.”

  “Illness will do that.”

  “I suppose. But it's about -- “

  “Power and powerlessness.”

  ”Good way to put it, but I've been thinking about this TV thing for a

long time. And one thing the Journal didn't mention -- “

  “Only one?”

  “Well, a few things, but one important one was the real source of that

dialogue.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Straight out of Hemingway.”

  “Howzat?”

  “Sun.”

  “Sun?

  “The Sun Also Rises. All that Paris banter. All those young hipsters.”

  “All that drinking -- “

  “That, too, but I first noticed this a few years ago on another show

Sorkin did -- `Sports Night.' “

  “That ESPN thing.”

  “Something like that. But it was great. Behind the scenes at a sports

talk show that had virtually nothing to do with --”

  “Sports.”

  “Yeah. It was all about the people. And they talked fast, and they

talked on top of each other and they completed one another's --”

  “Sentences.”

  “You've got it. And for some reason that's why I put two and two

together.”

  “And came up with Hemingway.”

  “Listen to this. It's when Jake Barnes invites a passing woman to sit

down and have a drink. He's the narrator:

  “What's the matter?” she asked. “Going on a party?”

  “Sure. Aren't you?”

  “I don't know. You never know in this town.”

  “Don't you like Paris?”

  “No.”

  “Why don't you go somewhere else?”

  “Isn't anywhere else.”

  “You're happy, all right.”

  “Happy, hell!”

  “I see what you're talking about.”

 “Things happen fast on TV comedies, and even some dramas, and this

article I read said it had to do with cramming lots of scenes in a show to

keep people laughing. Wears some people out. ‘Lucy’ was funny. But

‘Seinfeld’ was faster. Just like those old screwball comedies from way back

when.”

  “Yeh, yeh, yeh.”

  “I might add that ‘Frasier’ is just as clever, more urbane, but

slower.”

  “It takes time to make a latte.”

  “And you know `Seinfeld,' that show about nothing.”

  “Yada yada yada.”

  “Exactly. Know where that comes from?”

  “I'm getting a feeling --”

  “Yep. ‘A Clean Well-Lighted Place.’ Seinfeld did yada yada. Hemingway

did nada nada. Read it and weep.”

  “Will do.”

  “These really good TV guys -- Sorkin, David Chase --”

  “ ‘Sopranos.’ “

  “Yup. And Matt Groening _”

  “ ‘Simpsons.’ “

  “Roger.”

  “Homer?"

  “No. Roger. As in `Roger that.' You're right. ‘Simpsons.’ But what I was

trying to say -- “

  “Before I interrupted --"

  “Was that the best of this stuff seems to be so aware of things. Aware

of the world. Aware of pop culture.”

  ”Uh huh.”

  “I mean, some of these guys even love books.”

  “I'll never forget that Jack London episode of ‘Northern Exposure.’ “

  “Brilliant. That's what I mean. Or Amy Sherman-Palladino.”

  “Who?”

  “She writes `Gilmore Girls.' There's some media-savvy dialogue, for you,

even though it feels a little forced.”

  “She's no Hemingway, you mean.”

  ”Well, I don't think I'm too far out on a literary limb with that

theory. Surely Sorkin read `Hills Like White Elephants.' “

  “Who hasn't?”

  “One thing you hear a lot is wordplay. Repetition. You accent something

by repeating it two or three or more times.”

  “Repetition.”

  “It's like ping-pong words. Not sing-song to put you to sleep. Ping-pong to

keep you alert.”

  “Back and forth you mean?”

  “Words ping-ponging, or pinballing. Like one time on `Gilmore Girls'

Rory and a friend were riffing on the word ‘wing-it.’ They didn't know they

were riffing, they were just saying what the writers wrote. But ‘wing-it’ as

a compound verb and an adjective, meaning just the opposite of ‘Zagat,’

meaning you'd look it up in the restaurant guide rather than wing-it. The

friend was having a date and she was worried about not looking

at Zagat and they'd be forced to wing-it. Zagat. Wing-it.”

  “Wow.”

  “It's like action poetry.”

  “Poetry? On television?”

  “TV is literature, you know. I mean look at ‘Sports Night.’ “

  “It's a shame they killed it.”

  “Yeah, that really torqued my chili.”

  “Peter Krause was great.

  “Just like he is on `Six Feet Under.' And now one of those `Sports

Night' guys is on ‘West Wing.’ “

  “The guy with glasses.”

  “But Felicity What's-Her-Name -- she played the lead character, the

talk-show producer -- was married to William H. Macy and they were great,

too.”

  “Great character -- Macy. The ratings consultant.”

  “Huffman. Felicity Huffman. And they're theater people.”

  “Really?”

  “They do Mamet. I mean they're friends with Mamet.”

  “Mamet?”

  “The F-word guy. Plays. Movies.”

  “Yeah, I know, I know. But did you just say, ‘It really torqued my

chili’?”

  “Did.”

  “Where'd that come from?”

  ”People talk that way.”

  “C'mon --”

  “No, they do. The beauty of language. I love it. ‘Torqued my chili.’

Some guy from Oklahoma says it. I heard it at a diner.”

  “A diner?”

  “You know, like in `The Killers.' “

  “Ernie again?”

  “Short story.”

  “Kind of like television.”

  “Except without the ads.”

  “Another reason they talk fast, right?”

  “Yeah. To squeeze in more -- “

  “Commercials."

Flash Fiction: My First Noir

Fiction — writing fiction, that is — has never worked very well for me. This year I’ve been making another run at it. In the crevices around the larger project and a few smaller ones I’ve managed to turn out one story still in progress, one story that felt done enough to submit just recently, and a piece of flash fiction that editors at Akashic Books were kind enough to include the other day in their online series Mondays Are Murder. Akashic is the house that published Kansas City Noir, the fiction collection I edited featuring 14 writers, in 2012. My story here (follow the link) is in Akashic’s Noir anthology style, set in a specific place (Midtown Kansas City). Locals may well recognize the opening setting, daytime in Milton’s Tap Room. And squeamish readers might be aware there’s a NSFW moment near the, uh, climax.

http://www.akashicbooks.com/blue-is-the-color-of-night-by-steve-paul/

"Hold the Ground": An Evening With Terry Tempest Williams

     It has been way too long since I’ve given myself the gift of a quality road trip out West. Yellowstone. Colorado. New Mexico. Big Bend. Those wide open, mysterious and treasured landscapes have framed indelible encounters with earth and sky over the last four decades or so.

     Fourteen years ago, I led an odd post-modern trek along the Lewis and Clark Trail. After a rough-water encounter in the middle of the Missouri River in Montana, I lived to tell about it in a newspaper series. That two-week journey went from Missouri to the Oregon coast and back. On the trip home, I convinced my traveling companions to go along on a brief detour so I could take a look at the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge in Utah. For me it was a pilgrimage, paying a debt I owed. Terry Tempest Williams first introduced me to Bear River by way of the written word. The refuge plays a prominent role in her deeply moving and provocative memoir Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place (1991). In the book, Terry wove together three threads – an intimate account of her mother’s death by cancer; the troubling parallel story of the rising waters of the Great Salt Lake and the precarious fate of the Bear River refuge and the millions of birds that rely on its place along their seasonal flyways; and, third, the disturbing theme that questioned how American nuclear bomb tests in the desert in the 1950s very likely affected the health and lives of downwinders, especially of women in her devoutly Mormon extended family. There’s the chilling moment when she learns that one of those enormous flashes went off as her father drove in the desert and her mother sat in the passenger seat pregnant with the future writer and activist.

     I heard Terry read that aching essay, fresh out of the typewriter, in 1989 at a writer’s workshopin Ranchos de Taos, N.M. Later, I reviewed her book, and followed her travels and her work over the next quarter of a century. Whenever my own travels take me to wilderness, to natural landscapes, or even when I’m only a spectator flying over those brown and rolling deserts of the west, I always feel I am carrying Terry’s spirit of openness, awe, and love for the wild. A sense of native identity and energy also imbues her regard for those lands, as well it should.

     In recent years I’m mostly the armchair schlub who reads about wilderness more than he enters it. From time to time I make a winter excursion into the desert of New Mexico, to the Jemez Pueblo, where the annual Three King’s feast day Buffalo Dance undulates for hours in a ritual of patterned motion and spirit sounds. The dance and its continual drumming amount to an expression of identity as authentically American as anything one could think of. (See my column of football, healing and the Buffalo Dance.)

     Well, the point of all this is that Terry came to Kansas City last week for a library talk about the making of her most recent book, The Hour of Land: A Personal Topography of America’s National Parks. Originally imagined as a “love letter” to our wild lands on the 100th anniversary (in 2016) of the National Park Service, the project became far more challenging, she confessed. At first it seemed somewhat beyond her grasp. She had to figure out which of the 59 parks to write about and then how to do it. In the end, Terry being Terry, the book she turned in was far more political than her editors had expected. As she hikes the contours of, say, the Theodore Roosevelt National Park in North Dakota or Acadia in Maine, she is never far away from vital and threatening issues such as fracking, land use, and encroaching development. She confronts controversy head on, including a scandal a few years ago over construction and desecration at the Effigy Mounds National Monument in northeast Iowa, which prompted a period of distrust among numerous tribes.

     Also that night at the Woodneath Library Center she expressed the deep disappointment brought about by the fossil-fuel priorities of the current administration. Currently under way is a plan to erase or severely diminish the Bears Ears National Monument in her native Utah. The 1.3-million-acre expanse had gained federal protection in the last months of the Obama administration, and, like almost everything passed by the 44th president, it swiftly became a candidate for repeal. Terry had been a vocal advocate for the Bears Ears designation, siding with the five Indian tribes – Navajo, Hopi, Zuni, Ute Mountain Ute and Ute Indian – who sought to forestall looming energy production on what they consider to be sacred space.  In the long debate over Bears Ears, Terry said, Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch, the crusty Republican, once declared the indigenous people did not know what they were talking about. “That’s not patronizing,” she told the 100 or so people in the audience. “It’s racism.”

     She also brought us up to date on the oddly ironic legal case the federal government brought against her and her husband, because they had the audacity to purchase two oil and gas leases covering about 1,000 acres in Utah without any intention of drilling. The Bureau of Land Management rejected the purchase, and their appeal is pending.

     Terry mission is to be a storyteller, and she closed the evening with two compelling anecdotes. One, which she recounts in the book, involved a harrowing afternoon at Glacier National Park when three forest fires converged and blew past the inn where she and three dozen others huddled inside. The other was a sight she witnessed with her husband, Brooke, at Yellowstone. Coyotes were feeding on a bison carcass in the near distance. A white wolf emerged from the trees and took control of the blood-soaked remains. Soon, after the wolf left, a procession of bison lumbered into view and encircled the fallen creature in what felt like a miraculous ritual of animal spirit. “We are not,” she said, “the only species that loves and grieves.” To Terry Tempest Williams, the large-hearted naturalist, evocative writer and fiercely active defender of nature, the spirits were sending a message: “Hold the ground. Hold the ground. Hold the ground.”