David Fenimore
Since my training was in Western American literature with a secondary focus on nature writing, my teaching when I began 20 years ago centered around texts like Desert Solitaire, Solace of Open Spaces, Walden, My Ántonia, Sand County Almanac, Land of Little Rain, and Ann Ronald's Sierra Club Wilderness Reader, to name a few. These I taught in first-year writing and literature survey courses, but as my assignments shifted into sophomore English-major courses, capstones and Core Humanities I began to seek ways to introduce similar topics into the new syllabi I was writing. Ancient epics, classical Greek drama, medieval romances, metaphysical poetry, early American prose, Victorian novels, 20th-century drama, and recent popular science from Stephen Jay Gould, John McPhee, and E. O. Wilson -- these yielded interesting readings when seen through the ecocritical lenses our colleagues were developing during the 1990s.
When I became involved in Chautauqua (scholarly first-person
public portrayals of historical characters) my presentations of Zane Grey,
Horace Greeley and Capt.
John A. Sutter addressed in part the record of environmental change in
the New West, Midwest, and old California, respectively. Zane Grey, I
have argued in several papers, can be read as an early nature writer.
My newest Chautauqua character Woody Guthrie has complicated and sometimes
conflicting points to make about farming, dams and Western water.
In addition to conference papers and a handful of personal essays and reviews in various journals, I've published a chapter reviewing Ed Abbey's Monkey Wrench Gang in George Hart and Scott Slovic's Literature and the Environment, a book-length memoir titled Bicycling Across America, and a biographical play on Zane Grey, A Bad Boy Grown Up.
I live at North Lake Tahoe and spend as much time as possible out of doors.