David Oates

David Oates writes about nature and urban life from Portland, Oregon. His poetry has appeared in many journals including Yellow Silk and Poetry LA. A forthcoming book of essays about lies, politics, and the creative spirit is entitled What We Love Will Save Us .

His previous books include City Limits: Walking Portland's Boundary (Oregon State 2006), and Paradise Wild: Reimagining American Nature (Oregon State 2003). In 1989 he published what Daniel Philippon has called one of the first books of ecocriticism Earth Rising: Ecological Belief in an Age of Science. His essays have appeared in many periodicals, including Orion (forthcoming), Earth IslandJournal, Creative Nonfiction, Northern Lights, and High Country News. His commentary has appeared in such diverse places as the PBS program Making Sense of Place (on-camera commentator) and the 2008 Bioneers keynote (extended excerpt).  He teaches writers in the Wild Writers Seminars, at Clark College (Washington), and at Marylhurst University (Oregon). Connect with him at www.davidoates.info.

David is excited to attend the MRCSE workshop as a wise elder.   He offers the following questions to stir our thinking:

1. Real story – myths that move us – often turn on paradox, surprise, irony. Always a twist. How is our story about nature, or about nature-and-culture, more than mere propaganda or morality tale?

2. What literal, real-world example(s) embody "the story" we want to tell?

3. The reality of nature includes exactly as much death as life. How does death figure in what we want to convey to students, fellow citizens, responders to global crisis? Should death be kept out – as too scary for junior-highers or too difficult for the general public or (etc)?

David sees the value of the MRCSE Collaborative is in our ability to seek and discover "the story" that carriers us through the next 100 years:

 As a writer and educator, I am looking for the way to convey the story of our moment. As a historian of environmentalism, I know that "the story" that carried the nature-movement for its first hundred years was the one Muir defined: Nature is an eden which we have lost, of which we must preserve a few remnants. This story has been exhausted.

So I want to know: What is the story that takes its place – the story that will give heart for the next hundred years, that will motivate righteous, joyous, difficult action in the face of a warming planet and thousands of dying species? I hope to enjoy a gathering of sincere and knowledgable enviro's – knocking sparks from each other, seeking, trying, discovering.

For me this is "the big question" that overarches the many detailed techniques, lesson plans, approaches, movements, etc that we will be learning about from each other.

 To learn more about David and read some of his recent work, explore the following links: