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A Route Through Grief to Love: A Writing Lab with David James Duncan

$50.00

The guardian holiness that is our living Mother Earth is in crisis. We are losing the entire world's coral reefs because they're literally drowning because the world's oceans are rising a couple of millimeters faster than coral can grow. We're losing the polar caps that create the oceans' life-giving currents. Since the 1970s North America has lost 3 billion of its birds, nearly 30% of the total, and even common birds such as sparrows and blackbirds are in decline.

To be truly awake to our time is to make grief a constant companion. But when we're able to breathe deep enough to hold our grief with steadiness, another door sometimes opens. Late in life Barry Lopez felt this opening, and wrote of it, "Now, more than ever, it is more important to be in love than in power." I would add, with St. Bernard of Clairvaux, that love itself is both a form of knowledge and of power. The time to wield knowledge and power by loving our Mother in every conceivable way has arrived.

Tuesday, February 24, 2026, 6:00-7:30 PM Central Time
Live online

The guardian holiness that is our living Mother Earth is in crisis. We are losing the entire world's coral reefs because they're literally drowning because the world's oceans are rising a couple of millimeters faster than coral can grow. We're losing the polar caps that create the oceans' life-giving currents. Since the 1970s North America has lost 3 billion of its birds, nearly 30% of the total, and even common birds such as sparrows and blackbirds are in decline.

To be truly awake to our time is to make grief a constant companion. But when we're able to breathe deep enough to hold our grief with steadiness, another door sometimes opens. Late in life Barry Lopez felt this opening, and wrote of it, "Now, more than ever, it is more important to be in love than in power." I would add, with St. Bernard of Clairvaux, that love itself is both a form of knowledge and of power. The time to wield knowledge and power by loving our Mother in every conceivable way has arrived.

Tuesday, February 24, 2026, 6:00-7:30 PM Central Time
Live online

This is a live, participatory lab and it will not be recorded. A meeting link will be emailed a few days prior to the lab. Cancellations must be made 48 hours prior to the lab and will be charged a $10 cancellation fee. Partial scholarships may be available. Apply here by ADD DATE

David James Duncan is the author of the classic novels The River Why and The Brothers K, the story collection River Teeth, the nonfiction collection and National Book Award finalist, My Story as Told by Water, the best-selling collection of “churchless sermons," God Laughs & Plays, and the novel legendary editor Michael Pietsch “will immodestly call David’s magnum opus” and writer William deBuys calls “one of the greatest imaginative achievements I’ve encountered in a lifetime of reading," Sun House. David’s work has won three Pacific Northwest Booksellers Awards, two Pushcart Prizes, a Lannan Fellowship, the Western States Book Award, inclusion in Best American Sports Writing, Best American Catholic Writing, two volumes of Best American Essays, five volumes of Best American Spiritual Writing, an honorary doctorate from University of Portland, the American Library Association's 2004 Award for the Preservation of Intellectual Freedom (with co-author Wendell Berry), and other honors. David lives on a charming little trout stream in Missoula, Montana, in accord with his late friend Jim Harrison’s advice to finish his life disguised as a creek.