Eric Stottlemyer
Although I grew up in Ohio, the adventures of my adult life have led me from the Pine Barrens in southern New Jersey to the Valley of the Sun in the Sonoran Desert, from the Lost Coast Redwoods of Northern California to the two-fisted surf of San Diego’s Ocean Beach. Along the way I explored some of America’s most breathtaking landscapes, and I think fondly of the Navajo Indians that befriended me in Canyon de Chelly, or the German tourists who helped me assemble my tent in a windstorm in Monument Valley, or even of the Western Black Widow whose venomous bite in the Badlands bite caught up with me in Jackson Hole and nearly cost me my life (and effectively altered its course in the process). Eventually this tri-chord braid, comprising geography, humanity, and the environment, intertwined with my love of literature and my passion for teaching.
For my master’s work I investigated the significance and the evolution of Buddhism and Buddhist philosophy within the genre of American Nature Writing from the nineteenth century through the twentieth. Continuing within this purview, I would like to focus my doctoral studies by exploring the connections between Buddhism and contemporary perceptions of landscape as they manifest in American environmental literature, and the ways in which those perceptions represent individual, social, and community-based relationships to land (physical), geography (conceptual), and place (cultural).
For the outdoor enthusiast, Reno is the Biggest Little Secret in the World. Hiking, biking, skiing, kayaking, swimming, backpacking—even scuba diving and skydiving. It’s all here in this quirky little corner of Nevalifornia.