Nowhere Is Our Real Home: Community and Identity in the New West

Nowhere Is Our Real Home: Community and Identity in the New West

                                                           — beginning Sunday, April 3 @ 4PM

In Big Sur and throughout the West, a new economic wave spurred by the internet is causing dramatic impacts. Some immediately presenting issues: workers’ housing, short-term rentals, the commercialization of neighborhoods, traffic congestion along Highway 1, and the intrusion of helicopters, drones, and other electronic devices in the backcountry and in backcountry neighborhoods.

The Henry Miller Memorial Library will host Nowhere Is Our Real Home, a speakers series aimed at shedding light on the overall new economic wave itself—"the natural amenities economy"—while also addressing the specific local issues (listed above) that the new internet-driven economic wave is causing. The series begins with author David Gessner on April 3 (see below) and then resumes on the first Sunday in June. Speakers also include Kenneth Brower (Not Man Apart), Don Usner (The Natural History of Big Sur), and Malcolm Margolin (Life in a California Mission: Monterey in 1786). HMML will also produce it own local programs on Jaime de Angulo, Robinson Jeffers, and Henry Miller.

To begin the series, HMML is pleased to announce…

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Nowhere Is Our Real Home: Finding a Wild Home in a Virtual Age

                                                            — Sunday, April 3 @ 4PM

David Gessner, award-winning author of All the Wild That Remains: Edward Abbey, Wallace Stegner, and the American West and nine other books, opens the series with an exploration of what it means to find (and keep) a real and wild home in our "virtual age." As part of a generation of writers who have followed Gary Snyder and Wendell Berry, Gessner will discuss his own "post-regionalist philosophy" about what home and its relationship to the wild might mean now. And he will use Wallace Stegner, Edward Abbey, and Wendell Berry as touchstones.

Please visit www.henrymiller.org or call 831.667.2574 for updates and more details

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(Disclaimer: I'm on the HMML board of directors and also one of the co-creators of the "Nowhere" speakers series.)