The 2008 ISU Wildness Symposium: Earth/Animal/Oracle
By Mary Swander, ISU

This year's conference features Brenda Peterson who will give the keynote lecture entitled "Rapture in the Earth." Peterson is one of the most prominent contemporary nature writers (both fiction and non-fiction) in the United States.

Drawing upon her decades of writing about whales and dolphins, novelist and nature writer Brenda Peterson will speak and show slides from her new work Raptured: Seal Sitting in the End Times and her memoir, Build Me an Ark: A Life with Animals, which was named as a “Best Spiritual Book of the Year.” Her presentation will be based on the following article first published in Orion magazine.

http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/502

Tables and display from groups and organizations will be set up from 6:00-6:30 P.M. on Sunday, Feb. 17th before the keynote events in the Sun Room of the ISU Memorial Union.

The entire Wildness Symposium includes a Laotian flute player and wood carver, two American book award winners, panels on animals and our changing world, a nature slide show/reading fiddle concert, a reading from new books published by ISU alumni, workshops for students hoping to become published writers, a panel with members of the Black Earth Institute,  and a student readers theatre production called Farmscape: Documenting the Changing Rural Environment.

You can find the entire schedule, times and room locations at:

http://engl.iastate.edu/4th-annual-symposium

Please send this link to other colleagues, students, friends and relatives. The event is free and open to the public.

Mary Swander
Professor of English
Distinguished Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences
203 Ross Hall
Department of English
Iowa State University
Ames, IA  50011
515-294-3373
http://www.maryswander.com