After a long and accomplished career in scientific illustration, Bonnie Hall turned with wonder and determination to the art of screenprinting. Resolved to "share the privileged close scrutiny of nature" that she had enjoyed, Hall created her first screenprint in 1992 while undergoing chemotherapy for breast cancer. Over the next twelve years, she created screenprints of Pacific Northwest wildflowers, ferns, and butterflies--natural history portraits in simple, sharp-edged planes of brilliant color. Inspired by old botanical prints and motivated by a desire to draw attention to "the...

For Robert Michael Pyle, "walking the high ridge" is a way of life both figuratively and literally. In his latest book he describes in compelling detail his efforts to live and work in that special natural space Nabokov described as "a high ridge where the mountainside of scientific knowledge joins the opposite slope of artistic imagination."

Eminent Astorians marks the bicentennial of Astoria in 2011. Each of nine essays presents a literary biography of a figure who looms large in Astoria's history, from Comcomly, the powerful, one-eyed leader of the Chinook Tribe when Lewis and Clark arrived at the mouth of the Columbia River in 1805, to the Salmon Kings who capitalized on the region's natural bounty from the 1870s to the 1910s. Modeled after Lytton Strachey's literary portraits in Eminent Victorians, these essays are interpretive, engaging, and rich in context. The authors are among the best known and most respected writers and...

Originally published: Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1993.

It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us Charles Darwin, "The Origin of Species"
Robert Michael Pyle s popular Tangled Bank column appeared in fifty-two consecutive issues of "Orion" and "Orion Afield" magazines over eleven years. Each...

By an early age, Robert Michael Pyle discovered that he had a greater facility with words than with numbers. In high school, he found he could get good grades and win essay contests by relying on words alone. But he wasn t really moved to write until a powerful experience in the summer of 1965 brought his pen together with his passion for the natural world, and he wrote his first heartfelt essay.
That essay began a life path devoted to natural history, nature conservation, and language and how they all meet in the literature of the land. Working in a succession of far-flung jobs in...

In the Willapa Hills of southwest Washington, both the human community and the forest community are threatened with extinction. Virtually every acre of the hills has been logged, often repeatedly, in the past hundred years, endangering both the land and the people, leaving dying towns as well as a devastated ecosystem. Weaving vivid portraits of the place and its inhabitantsanimal, plant, and humanwith the story of his own love affair with the hills, Robert Michael Pyle has written a book so even-handed in its passion that it has been celebrated by those who make their living with a chain saw...

Chinook and Chanterelle is Robert Michael Pyle's second full-length book of poetry. Rich in natural images, stories, and indelible episodes from the whole world around us, Pyle's poems also track the territory of loss and grief as it rises onto the higher ground of rediscovery, redemption, and re-enchantment. They exalt the ordinary even as they find the extraordinary in physical details that we too often look right through.

"Fast claiming his place as one of the country's finest natural history writers, Pyle takes to the hills in search of Bigfoot in this absorbing, classily written field report. Pyle makes all the right connections. Best of all, he loves a good mystery and is smart enough, open and radical enough, to never say never." --Kirkus Reviews

Awarded a Guggenheim to investigate the legends of Sasquatch, Dr. Robert Pyle trekked into the unprotected wilderness of the Dark Divide near Mount St. Helens, where he discovered both a giant fossil footprint and recent tracks. He searched out...