POST's Lecture Series Celebrates Centennial of Wallace Stegner's Birth
February 10, 2009
Peninsula Open Space Trust (POST) opens its 16th Annual Wallace Stegner Lecture Series with naturalist, adventurer and author Craig Childs on February 19. Childs, an Arizona native, has written more than a dozen highly acclaimed books, including The Secret Knowledge of Water and House of Rain.
This year’s lecture series also features, on April 30, Jim and Jamie Dutcher, Emmy Award-winning filmmakers who will share their wildlife experiences in a multimedia presentation called “Living with Wolves,” illustrating the true nature of these fascinating animals. On May 21, award-winning actor, author and longtime environmentalist Ed Begley, Jr. will speak. Star of the hit HGTV reality series “Living with Ed,” Begley will share his thoughts about pursuing a “green” lifestyle and how each one of us can transform the way we live, work and play on Planet Earth.
Craig Childs’s most recent book, The Animal Dialogues: Uncommon Encounters in the Wild, will be the focus of his lecture. According to Publishers Weekly, in this book “Childs describes some of his extraordinary experiences with creatures—from wasps, red-spotted toads and hummingbirds to grizzly bears, coyotes and jaguars . . . Childs’s captivating essays, rich in sensuous imagery, are hauntingly beautiful and replete with evocative observations of animal life.“
Childs’s lecture will be held at the Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts on February 19 at 8:00 p.m. It will be followed by a question-and-answer session and book-signing reception with the author.
The lecture series is presented by POST in honor of the late Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and conservationist Wallace Stegner. One hundred years after his birth, the legacy of writer Wallace Stegner still reverberates across the mountains, plains and valleys of the American West. The series is dedicated to exploring the themes of land, nature and conservation that Professor Stegner celebrated in his writings about the West’s people, lands and wilderness.
For the past 16 years, Ambassador Bill and Mrs. Jean Lane have sponsored POST’s Wallace Stegner Lecture Series. POST is deeply grateful to Bill and Jean for their ongoing dedication and support. Generous support for this year’s series also comes from media sponsor Embarcadero Publishing (Palo Alto Weekly, Mountain View Voice, The Almanac) and from lecture sponsors Noble and Lorraine Hancock, Sand Hill Advisors and Paul and Antje Newhagen.
To purchase a subscription to the 16th Annual Wallace Stegner Lecture Series, please contact POST at (650) 854-7696 or lecture@openspacetrust.org. Single tickets for Craig Childs, Jim and Jamie Dutcher, and Ed Begley, Jr. are $22 each and can be ordered directly through the box office at the Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts at (650) 903-6000 or www.mvcpa.com. For more information about the lecture series, please visit POST’s Web site at www.openspacetrust.org/activities/lecture.html.