2 of Dan's favorite writers

I was elsewhere and didn't attend, but thought I would post this from The Capital Times regarding Rick Bass and Terry Tempest Williams.

WISCONSIN BOOK FESTIVAL When: Festival runs through Sunday. What: Book discussions, readings, lectures, workshops, spoken word, events for children and youth. Where: Venues throughout the Madison area and beyond. For schedule, see www.wisconsinbookfestival.com

Noted environmental writers Rick Bass and Terry Tempest Williams kicked off the Wisconsin Book Festival by agreeing that its theme of "domestic tranquility" is elusive in today's United States.

"Domestic tranquility is domestic violence in the American West," Williams told the audience Wednesday night at the Overture's Capitol Theater. "Violence to the land and to each other."

"I don't understand domestic tranquility right now," Bass said. "It eludes me." In particular, he said the Bush administration's "desperate lust for power and control" is the antithesis of tranquility.

Williams, who lives in Utah, and Bass, who lives in the remote Yaak Valley of Montana, both write searingly of threats to wilderness, especially in the western states, and of the fragile but essential link between human nature and wild nature. Williams, a naturalist and vocal free-speech advocate, is an essayist whose best-known work is "Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place." Bass, author of novels, nonfiction essays and short-story collections, including "The Hermit's Story," has won the Pushcart Prize and an O. Henry Prize.