Status Updates From Wallace Stegner and the Ame...

". . . A mule deer buck with a rack like an elk takes off into the aspens just before the Forest Service lookout. Further west, a beaver dam and a lot of felled aspens lying crisscrossed in the woods."

-- Wallace Stegner's notes describing the Aquarius Plateau viewed southward from Boulder Mountain

"Aspens all around us on the overlook are shedding ice with a scolding sort of clatter; they sound like fussy women sweeping their porches clean of litter after a storm. Where they have not shed, they glitter in sheaths of white ice. The air pure, without haze; the sun warming up, the snow soft, the trail thawing in the ruts and against the north banks. . . . "

"Then Stegner brought his argument to a conclusion and gave it the resonance that would propel the last four words into the nature hall of fame: 'We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in. For it can be a means of reassuring ourselves of our santity as creatures, a part of the geography of hope.'"

"Harriet Doerr was a Stegner Fellow in 1980, four years before publishing her first novel at the age of seventy-four. In reply to Stegner's congratulatory letter for winning the National Book Award in 1984 for 'Stones for Ibarra,' Doer wrote: 'Your letter made my day, and the day after, and the day after that. Thank you. . . . I'm extremely grateful to the Stanford writing program for taking me in and to you. . .'"

"Wallace Stegner is remembered primarily as a writer of novels. Too little attention has been paid to how he helped spread the written words of others around the world. He aided not only the students he taught but also those who were in his creative writing program but did not encounter him in the classroom. . . . His knowledge, experience, and character shaped the program and thus influenced them."

"In the foreward to a special edition in 1976, Wally explained, 'I wrote it because it happened to me; the significance I found later. A lot of myself is invested in that book. As I wrote pages of it, I couldn't see the typewriter for tears.'"