To Everything on Earth: New Writing on Fate, Community, and Nature

In October 2004, Barry Lopez invited a group of writers to meet with him, Bill McKibben, Alan Weisman, and Dennis Covington at the Junction campus of Texas Tech University. Out of this meeting grew a community that has since collaborated on initiatives and projects tied to fate, community, and nature. To Everything on Earth is a journey through many landscapes. It begins with stories that look at the external landscape, the world around us, asking hard questions about the capacity to destroy what we love best. The stories then turn inward, into the human heart, searching for an answer there. The journey ends by addressing perhaps the central question of our time: how best do we make a home on earth? “If To Everything on Earth sounds like a toast, it is exactly that. And if most of these fresh voices express tales of angst, fear, breakage, and doubt about their places in diminished societies and on damaged ground, every one distills beauty too, and in the end, a measure of redemption.” —Robert Michael Pyle, author of Wintergreen, The Thunder Tree, and Sky Time in Gray's River Contributors Shelley Armitage Kurt Caswell Susan Cerulean Lisa Couturier Matt Daly Peter Friederici Susan Hanson Marybeth Holleman Joy Kennedy-ONeill David Lukas Jordan Fisher Smith Susan Leigh Tomlinson Diane Hueter Warner

In October 2004, Barry Lopez invited a group of writers to meet with him, Bill McKibben, Alan Weisman, and Dennis Covington at the Junction campus of Texas Tech University. Out of this meeting grew a community that has since collaborated on a number of initiatives and projects tied to fate, community, and nature, including this collection of essays. To Everything on Earth is a journey through many landscapes. It begins with stories that look at the external landscape, the world around us, asking hard questions about the capacity to destroy what we love best. The stories then turn inward, into the human heart, perhaps searching for an answer there. The journey ends by addressing perhaps the central question of our time: how best do we make a home on earth?

Kurt Caswell, assistant professor of creative writing and literature in the Honors College at Texas Tech University, is the author of An Inside Passage, which won the 2008 River Teeth literary nonfiction book prize. His essays and stories have appeared in numerous magazines and journals, including Isotope, Janus Head, Matter, Ninth Letter, Northern Lights, Orion, and Potomac Review. He lives in Lubbock, Texas. Susan Leigh Tomlinson is director of the Natural History and Humanities degree program in the Honors College at Texas Tech University. Her work has appeared in Writing on the Wind: An Anthology of West Texas Women Writers. Diane Hueter Warner works in Texas Techs Southwest Collection/Special Collections Library, where she is responsible for the James Sowell Family Collection in Literature, Community and the Natural World. William E. Tydeman is an archivist in the Southwest Collection at Texas Tech University. Bill McKibben, author of many books on nature and the environment, is a scholar in environmental studies at Middlebury College and lives with his family in Vermont.