Contributors

Poe Ballantine is the author of five books. A documentary based on his memoir Love & Terror on the Howling Plains of Nowhere (loveandterrorthemovie.com) is making the rounds of the film festivals. He is tired of reading news stories that begin, “Scientists are worried . . .” Just once he would like to read that “Scientists are carefree today” or “Scientists have gone out for another twelve-pack.” He lives in Chadron, Nebraska, with his wife, Cristina, and his son, Tom.

Brian Doyle is the editor of Portland magazine at the University of Portland in Oregon. His Book of Uncommon Prayers will be published next month by Sorin Books, and his whopping novel starring, no kidding, a pine marten will be published in April 2015 by St. Martin’s Press.

David James Duncan is the author of the novels The River Why and The Brothers K and has finished seventy-five chapters of a third novel, leaving him with just twenty-five to go. He lives in Lolo, Montana, where he continues to work — in a way that suspiciously resembles play — on a study of the many languages of Pacific-bound rivers and streams.

Stephen Gaskin founded a collective community called the Farm in rural Tennessee in the early 1970s, and it remains one of the oldest such communities in the country. He wrote many books, on subjects ranging from sustainable living to political activism to the use of psychedelics. He died last July at the age of seventy-nine.

Jim Heynen is best known for his short stories about boys, which have been featured on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered. He also writes poetry and young-adult fiction, and two years ago he published his first novel for adults, The Fall of Alice K. He lives in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Tony Hoagland’s latest collection is Twenty Poems That Could Save America and Other Essays. His poetry chapbook Don’t Tell Anyone recently came out from Hollyridge Press. Several years ago he founded the Five Powers of Poetry (fivepowerspoetry.com), a program that provides teachers with a firm footing for reading and teaching poetry. He lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Linda McCullough Moore is the author of The Book of Not So Common Prayer, a collection of essays about the transformative practice of praying four times a day. She lives in Northampton, Massachusetts.

Michael Thurman is a therapist and astrologer who lives in Lexington, Kentucky. In the late seventies and eighties he periodically traveled the country, visiting intentional communities and communes.

Robert Alexander is a retired newspaper editor and has also been a documentary photographer for the past forty years. He lives and shoots in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Rita Bernstein has been a photographer for more than fifteen years, but she recently took up drawing and painting because she likes being a beginner again. She divides her time between Philadelphia and New York City.

Sarah Blodgett is a commercial and fine-art photographer residing in Ithaca, New York. Since she got her first camera at the age of ten, Upstate New York has been her chief source of inspiration.

Peg Díaz lives in the high desert of Southern California on a family ranch that dates to 1907.

Greg King is a fifth-generation resident of Northern California. In 1987, while working as an environmental activist, he discovered and named Headwaters Forest, then the world’s largest unprotected ancient-redwood grove. He is working on a book titled The Ghost Forest: Radicals and Real Estate in the California Redwoods.

Roger Pfingston lives and takes photographs in Bloomington, Indiana. He is retired from teaching after thirty-one years, but he still gets up at 6 AM every day, because at that hour, he says, “everything seems possible, and sometimes it is.”

Lori Pond recently built a darkroom so she could make her own tintypes. She lives in Los Angeles and pays for her photography obsession by working for the TV talk show Conan.

John Sutton is a photographer who has built and restored pianos, harpsichords, pipe organs, and fine furniture. He lives in southern Vermont with his wife, Leyla, and Coco, their cat.

Santosh Verma’s photographs have appeared in The New York Times, Bloomberg, and Time. He lives in Mumbai, India.