The Battle for Our Story: Toxic Myths and Vanishing Wildness
October 16th, 7 PM at the Bumbleberry Theater, 897 Zion Park Blvd. Springdale, Utah, and Admission is Free.
Zion Canyon Mesa and Torrey House Press present writers Betsy Gaines Quammen and David Quammen for a conversation about their two new books, “True West” and “Heartbeat of the Wild.” It’s rare that a married couple, both writers, have new books published at the same time, with both books examining one of our most problematic current messes: that our understanding of reality has flattened into a contest between stories. Betsy’s “True West” explores long-held, embedded myths about the West that have become toxic, adversely affecting our communities. David, a long-time contributor to Outside Magazine, will outline a “contest between stories” to understand the ongoing confusion and rancor about the origin of COVID-19. Please check out our podcast with Betsy through our website about her previous book “American Zion,” where she sheds light on the origins of far-right militias through extended stays and interviews with Cliven and Ammon Bundy: zioncanyonmesa.org
Historian and writer BETSY GAINES QUAMMEN focuses on the intersections of extremism, public lands, wildlife, and western communities. She received a Ph.D. in History from Montana State University, an MS in Environmental Studies from the University of Montana, and a BA in English from Colorado College. She lives in Bozeman, Montana, with her spouse, writer David Quammen.
For “TRUE WEST,” Betsy traveled from the Northern Rockies to the Southwest deserts, exploring how myths shape our identities, heighten polarizations, and fracture our shared understanding of the world and each other. She traveled through small towns and big cities, engaging people to understand their perceptions, true or not, about land, politics, liberty, and self-determination. She seeks to reconcile the anger and misunderstandings that continue to fuel the West’s enduring myths. Whether sitting down with a local resident seeking to protect his rural Utah town from Antifa or talking with grassroots organizers working across ideological divides, Gaines Quammen brings to life connections and contradictions that shape our politics and our lives far beyond the West.
For more than two decades, award-winning science and nature writer DAVID QUAMMEN has traveled to Earth’s most far-flung and fragile destinations, sending backfield notes from places caught in the tension between humans and the wild. This illuminating book features 20 of those assignments: elegantly written narratives, originally published in National Geographic magazine and updated for today, telling colorful and impassioned stories from some of the planet’s wildest locales.
He is an author and journalist whose eighteen books include Breathless (2022), The Tangled Tree (2018), Spillover (2012), The Song of the Dodo (1996), and, most recently, The Heartbeat of the Wild (2023). In the past forty years, Quammen has also published a few hundred pieces of short nonfiction—feature articles, essays, columns—in magazines such as The New Yorker, National Geographic, Harper’s, Outside, Esquire, The Atlantic, Powder, and Rolling Stone. He writes occasional Op-Eds for The New York Times and other newspapers and book reviews for The New York Times Book Review and The New York Review of Books. He lives in Bozeman, Montana, with his wife, Betsy Gaines Quammen (also an author: American Zion and the forthcoming True West: Myth and Mending on the Far Side of America) and their family of three dogs, a cat, and a python.
The ZION CANYON MESA Arts and Humanities residency center is now open! Stay tuned for more events and programs.
