Camas Magazine poetry editor Megan McInerney shares some thoughts after our reading "Wilderness and the Human Imagination," hosted in the Mansfield Library in collaboration with Cutbank Magazine.

Those of us here at Camas and the University of Montana are lucky to call Missoula home. It’s not just that we live in a spectacularly beautiful place. We live in a town full of people who appreciate some of life’s finest things: words and wilderness.

On October 8th, community members gathered in the Mansfield Library for a Wilderness Reading — hosted by Camas and CutBank Magazine — in celebration of The Wilderness Act’s 50th Anniversary and to kick off Missoula’s fifteenth annual festival of the book. Students from the University’s MFA and Environmental Studies programs shared stories and poems interwoven around a common theme: to explore the intersection of the human and wild.

What does it mean to be wild?
What’s our fascination with wilderness, and what’s our place within it?
How is it designated and managed?
Is wilderness still wilderness if we’re in it?

These were some of the questions raised during the reading, along with stunning moments and images left to linger in listeners’ minds:

A child faces a dusty terrarium, admires a beautifully spun silk cocoon. A human being realizes she’s just a speck, like the stars. A soul sermon in the wilderness, more powerful than any in church. The indescribable power of wilderness and a vow to love and preserve it, until its death, or ours. A poet discovers that emptiness in the air is the only thing that can fill her up. A city boy confesses he seldom goes to the wilderness, but he wants to know it’s there. Abandoned bird nests. Thick barked oak. Owls and alders beneath a speckled sky. An activist’s startling advice: the best way to save the natural world is to sit down in a city and refuse to get up. A wilderness prayer that brings wildness into the room, leaving the audience silent and shut-eyed.

Why do we need wilderness?
Why do we need words?
Can words be wild?

Whether it refers to an un-tame, unspoiled state in the natural world or a state of mind that refuses to be cultivated and controlled — we need what’s wild because it’s what keeps us alive. Gathering to hear spoken word and stories is a dying ritual within an American consumer culture that promotes entertainment as mindless (and often visual) distraction. Words, just like wilderness, are vanishing from our daily lives faster than we can figure out how to preserve them.

These kinds of readings matter because they generate hope.

I remember what Rick Bass said when he read to a packed audience at the Badlander last spring: “Missoula ought to be the place to show the rest of the States how to resist the bullshit.”

It’s why we do what we do at Camas. The world needs these voices, these stories.

(Click on image below for more images)