The Craft of Environmental Fiction
Speaker:
Brenda Peterson
18 Feb 2008
9:00 AM
Pioneer Room, Memorial Union
Renowned nature writer Brenda Peterson will draw on examples from her novel Animal Heart in a discussion of how animals can become characters in fiction. The novel offers a captivating love story of people whose compassion for animals compels them into extraordinary acts of heroism. Peterson is the author of four novels, one of which, Duck and Cover, was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. She began her career working for The New Yorker and then relocated to the Pacific Northwest. Her articles and essays have appeared in the New York Times, Sierra, Orion, and Utne Reader. Part of the 4th Annual Symposium on Wildness, Wilderness, and the Creative Imagination.
This lecture was made possible in part by the generosity of F. Wendell Miller, who left his entire estate jointly to Iowa State University and the University of Iowa. Mr. Miller, who died in 1995 at age 97, was born in Altoona, Illinois, grew up in Rockwell City, graduated from Grinnell College and Harvard Law School and practiced law in Des Moines and Chicago before returning to Rockwell City to manage his family's farm holdings and to practice law. His will helped to establish the F. Wendell Miller Trust, the annual earnings on which, in part, helped to support this activity.