I believe in the threads that connect All. I have learned it is my work to activate some of them. Here, quoted in Gillian Bradshaw's Island of Ghosts are the words I am studying:

'Whoever's never loved, love tomorrow; love tomorrow, whoever's loved before.'

"THERE IS A SHIMMER ON THE PERIPHERY. TRUST IT."

Resume your place in the Great Circle... as if you could ever leave... what creature frightens you, what creature repels? There are other teachers. There are the lessons you were taught to fear.

- from the journal, 'Sister Raven, Brother Hare'

Mary Sojourner immigrated to Flagstaff, Arizona January 1985, with two intentions: to write and fight for the earth.

Results of her vow include:

Sisters of the Dream, a novel of 12th Century Northern Arizona (Northland Publishing, 1989 out-of-print)

Delicate, short story collection (Nevermore Press, 2001; Scribner, 2004.)

Bonelight: Ruin and Grace in the New Southwest, essay collection, U. of Nevada Press, 2003; paperback, 2004.

Solace: rituals of loss and desire, memoir/essay, Simon and Schuster/Scribner, 2004.

Wordsmithing, twice-monthly column on writing, Flag Live!

Short fiction

Essays

Writers on the Range syndicated columns, National Public Radio national commentaries Sporadic appearances on local telephone poles and in cafes of her environmental/social justice column, Open Space.

A rare wetland in the heart of a dead volcano protected from development; an ancient meadow not penetrated by a breccia pipe uranium mine; the beginning of the healing of a pumice mine scar on the Sacred Mountains north of Flagstaff; the on-going battle to stop Snowbowl ski resort from making artificial snow from wastewater on those same mountains.

She wrote alone; the earth-work is always in the company of kin.

Mary Sojourner teaches writing throughout the Southwest.

She also teaches writing throughout the West.

' I come from a land-based people, the Pennsylvania-Deutsche in northern Pennsylvania. I was raised gardening, hiking, canoeing, and knowing that our greatest gift, as humans, is the earth itself. I write and teach from this perspective: our stories, our poems, our best words are inextricably drawn from and linked with the land on which we live. We must do more than take. We must give back, and in our writing we can do just that.

My writings and readings and teaching flow from the same place, opening out questions that can be answered only in examining and changing the way one lives. In my work, I have found that most student writers, most of my readers and listeners are hungry for something substantive. They want more than theory. They want connection. I am willing to be that bridge.

Opening From Bone Light: Ruin and Grace in the New Southwest

" To write about the New West is to write about hunger and greed, emptiness and searing beauty. To write about the New West is to be humbled again and again. I write about hunger because I am perpetually hungry. I write about greed, because I always want more. I write about emptiness because I too often feel empty, and that makes me kin to frantic developers, builders, hustlers, card sharks, slot hogs---and billionaires, one of whom has said, "I am insatiable for land. I can’t ever own enough." I write about the beauty because in doubting mine I have lost it, and cannot bear to see the beauty of this western earth lost to bad faith. I am humbled because I have limped into the throat of the Turtle Mountains, paddled on the San Juan River in the noon twilight of a solar eclipse, been swallowed and spit out by Rapid Twenty-Four and a Half on the Colorado River, and stood helpless above an un-named wetland valley watching bull-dozers rip it apart. I have changed names of places and people in some of the essays for their protection.