LAKE HAVASU CITY – When was the last time you met a Native Arizonan? If it’s taking a while to remember, it’s probably because many of the residents of Arizona moved here from different towns.

Journalist and photographer Gregory McNamee made a visit to Lake Havasu to share that writers especially, have been relocating to Arizona for decades. The Seeing the Desert with Gregory McNamee lecture took place on Thursday, April 4 at at the Lake Havasu City Library.

The Arizona Humanities speaker  is currently a contributing editor for the Encyclopedia Britannica and a research fellow at the Southwest Center of the University of Arizona (U of A). Through photographs and slide shows, McNamee went into great detail about the transitional experiences of poets and writers such as Barbara Kingsolver and Richard Shelton. Originally from Annapolis, Maryland, Kingsolver’s writing career began to flourish in the mid 1980s. Kingsolver was a science writer for the U of A.

It was a role that led to freelance writing for the Tucson Weekly. Her career as a fiction author was achieved when she won a short story competition for a local newspaper in Phoenix, Arizona.  Many of Kingsolver’s stories are primarily based on where she has resided. While carrying her first child, Kingsolver struggled with insomnia and this was when she wrote The Bean Trees published in 1988.

The story is about a woman’s uprooting journey from Kentucky to Arizona. In later years, the author then went on to write High Tide in Tucson which is a book that consists of 25 essays all written by Kingsolver. The book depicts several stories about community, ecology, and family. Kingsolver has obtained many honors and awards in the span of her career such as the National Humanities Medal, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and Women’s Prize for Fiction.

McNamee’s lecture also included famed southwestern poet and writer, Richard Shelton. Also a U of A professor, the Boisean from Idaho came to Arizona as a soldier stationed at Fort Huachuca in the late 1950s. Before the writer’s discharge, he accepted a job as a school teacher near Bisbee, Arizona. Shelton’s 1992 memoir Going Back to Bisbee, is the story of the writer’s love of the southwest and day trip to Bisbee.

It is the poet’s narrative of remembering the history of Bisbee’s allure and it’s a reflection of Shelton’s own life experiences. Going Back to Bisbee was chosen for the One Book Arizona program in 2007. Several notable writers of fiction and nonfiction were introduced during the discussion like Mary Austin, Joy Harjo, Joseph Wood Krutch, and many others. Modern scientific ideas and Native American folktales were also included in this discussion about observations of the desert.

The purpose of the topic was an Arizona Humanities opportunity for the community to learn about viewing the desert as a space for lively charm and bliss.

Phaedra Veronique