Bill Holm was a frequent participant at Writers Rising Up’s workshops. He often read and lectured with fellow Minnesota author Carol Bly at Writers Rising Up’s events held at the Minnesota Landscape Abroretum. Carol and Bill would listen intently to each other. Bill overflowed with stories and memories,  wisdom and experiences in the retelling of every day life.  Recollections  filled with humor, pathos and the realities of misfits and loosers,  Holm still tells us through his writing how Holidays measure the passing of our lives from birth to death.  Garrison Keillor called Bill, “the tallest radical humorist in the Midwest.”

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In 2016 Bug City: Make a Bug poetry submission will be a lot more fun for kids. Poems will again focus on the species at the Elizabeth Fries Ellet Interpretive Trail at the Richard T. Anderson Conservation Area. Poems must be in the shape of a bug. Examples of Shaped Poems can be found here at Pinterest. Shaped poems can also contain words that are written side-ways or in circles. As long as the poem is easy to read, printed or typed it’s acceptable.

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To Walt Whitman America was a place where grass was “hopeful green stuff.”Prairies left a lasting impression on writers who visited the Great Plains in the 19th century, often describing them in terms of vast waves of wind swept blades surrounded by boundless sky. On his first trip west Whitman wrote in Specimen Days, #179 Prairies, “…stretching out on its own unbounded scale, unconfined, which there is in these prairies, combining the real and ideal, and beautiful as dreams.” Three of Whitman’s poems on prairie grass: “The Prairie-Grass Dividing,” “The Prairie States,” and “A Prairie Sunset.”

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What's happening at the EFEIT/RTA this season?  Don't miss the final event planned for 2014.

 

Join us for the final  Wilderness in the City Fall Colors at the EFEIT October 19 at 10AM to 12Noon. Bring a camera and pad of paper to press leaves. 

Meet up at the Richard T. Anderson Conservation Area  1/6 mile past Lions Tap Restaurant on Flying Cloud Drive. This will be our final event until 2016 because of construction on Hwy 101 and Flying Cloud Drive in 2015.

In 2106 we will partner with the city of Eden Prairie on excursions including an entomologist with a look at the four and six-legged creatures who habitate in the RTA, wildcrafting with native American Indian herbalists,  a visit with the Minnesota Zoomobiles critters and more…

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Wilderness in the City: Summer Writing Tour: Ellet’s Ramblings & Thoreau’s Notes

 

“The Minnesota River is always a bender. Long may she wave.”  A reporter aboard the Franklin Steele, 1861

 

Ellet’s journey in 1852 was arranged by a New York newspaper whose interest was in a series of articles with a sensationalist telling of the expansion of the Western Territories, its habitat, natives, settlers and the rail and river journey, getting there and back. Her trip was described as Fashionable Tourism, resulting in an expose of the new western expansion printed in newspaper and journal articles and her book, “Summer Rambles in the West,” published in 1853.

 

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