The View from Mystic Lake

March 23, 2013 -- This year's Native American Literature Symposium wraps up today at Mystic Lake, a casino, hotel, convention center, golf course, and RV park outside Minneapolis. The complex is owned and operated by the Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux community. NALS 2013 featured a conversation with filmmakers Alex Smith and Chaske Spencer, a performance by world champion fancy dancers, and screenings of video essays, among other events. On Friday, RBM read excerpts from "The Land of Infinite Variety," a critical essay on tourism and travel writing in the Dakotas. Here's one of those excerpts and two slides from the presentation:

A scenario charged with appearances and a certain sense of wonder—that's where I want to begin this inquiry, recognizing that the men who hold sway On the Rez (2000) and across the Infinite West (2012), like their predecessors in “Indian Warning,” cannot help but regard the Other, to some degree, with ambivalence, that “troubled dream” which haunts Conrad, Naipaul, and Homi Bhabha’s other exemplars. I am to examine the traveler’s gaze, then, and also to show, as David Spurr has done in reference to Bhabha with The Rhetoric of Empire (1993), that such “terms of authority, once given voice, are far from having a direct and unambiguous effect”; that “colonial discourse in general is, at some level, always divided against itself”; and that this quality might even grant the postcolonial travelogue a measure of redemption.

On the left: Ian Frazier and Fraser Harrison

#AWP13

Join RBM and friends for a reading tonight at the Festival of Language, now in its fifth year, at the Association of Writers and Writing Programs Conference in Boston. RBM will open the off-site event at Dillon's, 955 Boylston Street, at 5:30 p.m. Also on the roster: Halvor Aakhus, Christopher Allen, Janee Baugher, Tom Bligh, Laura Bogart, Jane L. Carman, Ryan Clark, Ewa Chrusciel, Larry O. Dean, Debra Di Blasi, John Domini, Kate Dusenbery, Andy Farnsworth, Sarah R. Garcia, Ani Gjika, Rebecca Goodman, Steve Halle, Stephen Hastings-King, Quintus Havis, Gretchen Ernster Henderson, Deborah Henry, Lily Hoang, Tom Hunley, Len Kuntz, Anna Leahy, Michael Mejia, Martin Nakell, Kirk Nesset, Daniel Nester, Alissa Nutting, Theresa O’Donnell, Doug Rice, Thaddeus Rutkowski, Anita Schmaltz, Leona Sevick, Rob Stephenson, Ayara Stein, David Stevenson, Monica Storss, Yuriy Tarnawsky, Holms Troelstrup, Meg Tuite, Robert Vaughan, Sam Witt, and Bill Yarrow, with Dakota D. Carman providing music at intermissions. There's more information over at Facebook and AWPWriter.org.

500 Words on Arbor Day

January 29, 2013 -- RBM has new flash nonfiction, "500 Words on Arbor Day," featured online this week over at Hobart. So as not to give too much away, here's a (five-word) excerpt:

... There is talk of lightening ...

For more from this whiskey-friendly consortium, consider subscribing, buying a good book by a friend of this blog, or reading some of the journal's fine fiction in The Best American Short Stories 2012.

The View from Indian Beach

January 6, 2013 -- The view from Indian Beach and Oregon's Ecola State Park, where Lewis and Clark visited a beached whale in 1806, and later, Steven Spielberg's crew filmed much of The Goonies.

The View from Wind River

December 30, 2012 -- Pictures from a perfect day along Washington's upper Wind River, where recreational access has returned to "normal" this season.

Kakorrhaphiophobia

RBM has a new short story, "Kakorrhaphiophobia," in the current issue of Otis Nebula. An excerpt:

This had happened once before, during his freelancing days in Washington, before he went back to teaching—in the vast, unfinished basement on Georgia Avenue that he’d shared with a luggage boy from the Marriott. Feral cats had ripped holes in their window screens. Benjamin awoke to the sound of his laundry money being poured into a sock. The boy’s brow was glistening, and he held a finger to his lips. Benjamin thought he was being robbed—was about to offer the boy some real money—when the sock took flight. It only hung near the water pipes for a half-second. Just long enough for something fast and brown to seize hold, then crash to the linoleum, where it flapped for a while. The boy said he’d used the same trick back home, in Nigeria. Benjamin wasn’t sure if it could be true, but it made his column that week—all about harmless Chiroptera, his place in literature and his good work in your backyard.

For more from ON6, check out this week's review from NewPages.com.

Photo of the Day

September 22, 2012 -- Sunset over the lower Missouri on this, the first day of autumn.

The View from North Platte

August 12, 2012 -- Scenes real and hallucinatory from the Fort Cody Trading Post in North Platte, Nebraska, and Scout's Rest, William Frederick "Buffalo Bill" Cody's nearby ranch, which housed livestock for the showman's infamous Wild West.

Photo of the Day

August 5, 2012 -- The view from Washington's Clark County Fair and "The World's Premier Canine Aquatics Competition."

The View from Rainier

August 1, 2012 -- Pictures from Camp Muir and the summit of Washington's Mount Rainier via Disappointment Cleaver. There's a 2005 essay on RBM and family's last attempt at Rainier over at this dispatch.