John Lane and Brent Martin in Conversation

John Lane and Brent Martin will visit City Lights Bookstore on Tuesday, March 14th, at 6 p.m. They will discuss John Lane’s new book, Coming Into Animal Presence. This book of collected writing explores Lane’s encounters with wild animals in wild places and the diversity and mystery of what's often called "the more than human world." In each piece, there is always an animal presence, sometimes central and sometimes peripheral. In one piece, the Columbian mammoth comes back to trouble the contemporary political landscape of South Carolina. In another, he ponders the fate of a wing-shot goose finding a last refuge in the Lane family's tiny frog pond. In another, Lane ventures into an abandoned Zimbabwean gold mine alone to check on the status of a common genet, a shy carnivore.

Brent Martin is the 2022 Thomas Wolfe Memorial Literary Award winner for his book George Masa's Wild Vision. He is also the author of three chapbook collections of poetry and The Changing Blue Ridge Mountains: Essays on Journeys Past and Present. His poetry and essays have been published in the North Carolina Literary Review, Pisgah Review, Tar River Poetry, Chattahoochee Review, Eno Journal, New Southerner, Kudzu Literary Journal, Smoky Mountain News, and elsewhere. He lives in the Cowee community in Western North Carolina,

John Lane John Lane is an emeritus professor at Wofford College, where he taught creative writing and environmental studies and directed the Goodall Environmental Studies Center. There he helped imagine and direct the Thinking Like a River Initiative. In the past decade, Lane has been named one of seven regional Culture Pioneers by Blue Ridge Outdoors, and he has been honored with the Water Conservationist Award from the South Carolina Wildlife Federation, the Clean Water Champion by South Carolina's Upstate Forever, and inducted in 2014 into the South Carolina Academy of Authors.