Readings from Deep Wild Journal
Western Wyoming Community College (Western) is hosting a literary reading with authors from the Deep Wild Journal: Writing from the Backcountry on Friday, October 21 at 7PM in room 1302. Light refreshments will be served as three writers for the journal, Stephanie Eardley, Stephen Lottridge, and Rich Kempa read and discuss their work and that of other contributors to the journal.
Deep Wild Journal is unique in the literary space with its mission, “to provide a home for creative work inspired by journeys to places where there are no roads.” In the current issue, published this summer, 51 writers invite the reader to go skiing, mountaineering, canoeing, rock-climbing, snowshoeing, hunting, fishing, horseback riding, swimming, long-distance running, and, especially, hiking.
Eardley, writer and ultra-marathon runner from Mountain View, whose essay “Just a Couple Miles: Mountain Ultra-Running” is featured in Deep Wild 2022. Eardley lives on a ranch in southwest Wyoming and can most often be found along a game trail with her kids and a backpack full of books. Since being published in Deep Wild, her work has also appeared in Hippocampus Magazine.
Lottridge, a retired clinical psychologist and former director of Southwest Counseling Services, resides in Jackson. He is the author of two books, Three White Pelicans (Deep Wild Press, 2021), a collection of stories about raising his two daughters in the wilds of Wyoming; and The Old Bison: Threads from the Fabric of a Western Life (Fulton Books, 2022). A third collection, The Book of Bauer: Stories from a Forgotten Town, is forthcoming from the University of Utah Press.
Kempa is the author of three books of poems, most recently Too Vast for Sleep from Littoral Press, and editor of two collections of writing about the Grand Canyon. Before his retirement in 2019, he taught for 31 years at Western and directed the college’s Honors Program for ten.
Deep Wild Journal is now taking submissions of essays, fiction, and poetry for its fifth issue, to be published next summer. More information about the submission process will be provided at the reading.
The event is sponsored by the Arlene and Louise Wesswick Foundation and Western’s English Department. For more information about the event contact Associate Librarian Jonathan Harwood at 307-382-1702, or by email: jharwood@westernwyoming.edu . For a full list of events on campus, visit westernwyoming.edu/calendar.