The Summer Standstill: An evening of readings and story by Craig Childs

It is as true as breath. It is as important as the words of children. -- Craig Childs

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This will be a spoken word commemoration of summer just days after solstice, during the longest continuous sunlight of the year.

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The elk that you glimpse in the summer, those at the forest edge, are survivors of winter, only the strongest. You see one just before dusk that summer, standing at the perimeter of the meadow so it can step back to the forest and vanish. You can't help imagining the still, frozen nights behind it, so cold that the slightest motion is monumental. I have found their bodies, half drifted over in snow, no sign of animal attack or injury. Just toppled over one night with ice working into their lungs. You wouldn't want to stand outside for more than a few minutes in that kind of weather. If you lived through only one of those winters the way this elk has, you would write books about it. You would become a shaman. You would be forever changed. That elk from the winter stands there on the summer evening, watching from beside the forest. It keeps its story to itself.

― Craig Childs, The Animal Dialogues: Uncommon Encounters in the Wild

Woven through Craig's presentation will be Native drumming, flute and guitar, featuring

Greg Luck on acoustic guitar

Michael Reichart, aka Neebin Makwah on Native flutes and percussion

Kirk Brosius on electric bass

Cynthia Zaitz: drum accompaniment

Craig Childs has published more than a dozen books of adventure, wilderness, and science, including House of Rain, Tracking an Ancient Civilization across the American Southwest, Animal Dialogues, The Secret Knowledge of Water and Tracing Time: Seasons of Rock Art on the Colorado Plateau. He has won the Orion Book Award, the Galen Rowell Art of Adventure Award, the Spirit of the West Award, and three times he's won the Sigurd F. Olson Nature Writing Award. He is a contributing editor at Adventure Journal Quarterly, and his writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Outside, and The New York Times, where he's been called "a modern-day desert father." He has a B.A. in Journalism from CU Boulder with a minor in Women's Studies, and an M.A. in Desert Studies from Prescott College in Arizona. He's taught graduate courses in writing at University of Montana and the MFA programs at University of Alaska and Southern New Hampshire University. He lives off-grid in southwest Colorado.

This event will be hosted by Palisade's own, Wendy Videlock, newspaper columnist and poet laureate of Western Colorado

A Q & A session will follow Craig's presentation.

Please Note: A donation of your own choosing is requested to attend this event. Please know that every dollar helps pay Craig's travel expenses, and his extensive talent and expertise. Thank you for supporting regional writers and making these events possible. Please donate and reserve your seat by clicking "Get Tickets".

Wendy Videlock of Palisade serves as poet laureate of the Western Slope. She is the author of four books of poetry, a children's book and a collection of essays on language, landscape and the imagination. Her work appears in the New York Times, Poetry Magazine, Hudson Review, O Magazine and elsewhere. She is the winner of the Keats Soul Making Prize, The PTB Sonnet PRize, the Fisher Prize and the Cantor Prize. Her syndicated newspaper column, The BarefootLaureate, appears in Colorado newspapers. Wendy is also a visual artist whose works appear in galleries across the valley. She teaches and advocates for the arts across Colorado and believes that language is the invisible influence that informs our thoughts, our actions and our perceptions.