Introduction

There were only a few unfamiliar faces in class so far, so I will make my introduction brief. I'm Lea, a hopeless liberal with a rather incredulous level of expectation. I hope that all of you, in your own way, take writing as seriously as I do. I think this is important for several reasons: we grow from working with one another, and we excel in a field that gives us the opportunity to be heard. In a world nearing nine billion, this is becoming increasingly rare.

There are a few things that I have fallen in love with in my short years on this planet, so you should be prepared to hear a lot about them, since I aim to write about what I love. In order of importance they are as follows:

1. Nature / place (though the eco-critic in me cringes at the use of that word)-- more specifically, the dry and arid red rock desert where two rivers converge as lifelines in a wasteland, the 15th region of southern Chilean Patagonia where you find the banks of the Baker river, and the Crazy Mountains that form the boundaries of the valley that we call home. These places, to me, are sacred and deserve to remain unchanged. I hope in my writing to do more than pay tribute to these incredible places: I hope to preserve their small moments in a way that allows them to exist in the mind of a reader who has never dipped their hand into turquoise water and felt the heartbeat of an ancient ecosystem flood the spaces left barren by urbanism. I hope to spread love and stewardship for the Earth.

2. Water -- I have harbored an obsession with rivers and water rights, built on my experiences in Chile in opposition to a series of hydroelectric megadams on the two most ancestral rivers in the country. Water privatization is a dirty and slippery business, and often it creates a David-vs-Goliath situation. I am curious recently about Montana water rights, and the distribution of use when it comes to "public" access.

The Baker River, Southern Chilean Patagonia, Region XI-- My favorite spot 

3. Travel -- Seeing new places and exploring the unknown canyons and mountaintops of this planet is a passion I'll never be able to fully satiate. I make an honest effort to travel somewhere new as often as possible, both as a learning experience and as a reminder that my world is not a constant. Upcoming trips include Japan and Norway.

Recently characterized by my editor as verbose but styled, a goal of mine this semester is to sharpen and tighten my prose. I want to work on Omitting Needless Words (thank you E.B. White) in an effort to control my tone, and create a work of writing that is professional, engaging and environmentally oriented. To do this, I know already I will have to rely heavily on all of your eyes and ears--I'll need critical views and harsh advice, red pens and copy-editing--to be able to draft something that speaks beyond my own belief and can help sway an audience to the losing side of the paradigm.

As you can tell, I try to emulate the kind of things I read. Call me a total nerd, but my favorite kind of writing, and the books that are spilling forth from my bookshelf as we speak, are the eco-criticism books I hoard whenever there's spare money in my bank account. Top picks include Timothy Morton (whose blog is well worth the read), Dana Philips, Terry Tempest Williams, Ed Abbey and Doug Peacock of the Monkey Wrench Gang, poet James Galvin, and even our very own Dr. Susan Kollin, who writes about the changes in the Alaskan wilderness. I have an unrelated obsession with Virginia Woolf and the modernism movement, mostly because I see a lot of parallels between the Modernist struggle and the circumstance from which it arose, and eco-crit. Since it is the newest of the revisionists in the world of literature, it is very much underrated and virtually unacknowledged outside the academic world. Someday I want to be a voice that helped propel it forward, and spur movement in the world around us from the shape of my phrases.
They say the difference between a dream and a goal is a plan... well, perfect timing.