All stories have power, and they can impact the landscape around us.
On Thursday, April 18 at 7 pm, John Clayton, author of Natural Rivals: John Muir, Gifford Pinchot, and the Creation of America’s Public Lands, examines elements of storytelling and how they apply to the public land debate. He shares examples of stories from the world’s first national forest to the creation of Muir Woods to the alliance of rivals John Muir and Gifford Pinchot on the shores of Glacier’s Lake McDonald for our monthly Winter Speaker Series talk in the Cordingley Room.
John’s book was featured in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Review of Books, and on NPR’s OnPoint. One of his previous books, Wonderlandscape: Yellowstone National Park and the Evolution of an American Cultural Icon, was a Montana Book Award honor book and winner of the High Plains Book Award.
John’s articles appear regularly in the Montana Quarterly, Big Sky Journal, and dozens of other publications. An earlier book, Stories from Montana’s Enduring Frontier, collected John’s essays on Montana history. A major previous work, The Cowboy Girl, chronicled the life of Montana/Wyoming novelist, journalist, and homesteader Caroline Lockhart. John’s now-out-of-print first book, Small Town Bound, was featured in Time and Harper’s magazines and on the Today and Oprah Winfrey shows.
Before he could fully make a living from his own writing, John helped businesses develop books, reports, bylined articles, and case studies, with a recent focus on how and why to reduce carbon. John has taught at Montana State University-Billings and Rocky Mountain College, and served on the advisory board for the Montana Center for the Book. He speaks about public lands, wilderness, John Muir, Yellowstone, Caroline Lockhart, writing, and the West. Before he founded Natural Stories on Substack, he occasionally blogged from this site. Natural Stories, Clayton writes, is “your weekly nature fix in story format. Or, your weekly story fix in a natural setting.”
In his spare time John enjoys basketball, hiking, snowshoeing, home-brewing, and of course reading. John graduated from Williams College, and lived in the Boston area before moving west in 1990. He lives in central Montana with his dog, Chaka Khan.
For more information, contact Jake Sorich at jsorich@greatfallslibrary.org or
406-453-0349 ex. 220.
Author: Staff
Our Staff account is used to publish submitted content. If you have content that was published under this account, and wish to have your name as author, please contact us at (406) 952-3021
