Naturalist Matthiessen to speak on writing

Peter Matthiessen, a naturalist, explorer, and award-winning author, will give a free public lecture about writing this month as part of the University Lectures Committee series.

“The Craft of Writing About Place” begins at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, Nov. 17 in 145 Birge Hall.

Matthiessen has published seven novels, including “Lost Man’s River” (1997); “Killing Mister Watson” (1990); “At Play in the Fields of the Lord,” which was nominated for the National Book Award; and “Far Tortuga,” as well as the collection, “On the River Styx and Other Stories.”

A naturalist and international explorer, Matthiessen also has written numerous books of nonfiction, among them “The Tree Where Man Was Born,” which was nominated for the National Book Award, and “The Snow Leopard,” which won it.

Michael Viney of the New York Times recently reviewed a large- format reissue of 1972’s “The Tree Where Man Was Born,” noting: “Matthiessen’s intense observation and the quality of his descriptive prose certainly are classic. His travels by Land Rover and his sojourns in the bush feed the imagination with marvelously cumulative word-pictures, some with all the raw excitement of adventure stories.”

Here’s one sample from Africa, as Matthiessen stalks elephants with George Schaller, the field biologist: “Then the bull scented us — the hot wind was shifting every moment — and the dark wings flared, filling the sky, and the air was split wide by that ultimate scream that the elephant gives in alarm or agitation, that primordial warped horn note out of oldest Africa.”

His other nonfiction works include “The Cloud Forest” and “Under the Mountain Wall” (which together received an Award of Merit from the National Institute of Arts and Letters), “The Wind Birds,” “Blue Meridian,” “Sal Si Puedes,” “San Rivers,” “In the Spirit of Crazy Horse,” “Indian Country,” “Nine-Headed Dragon River,” and “Men’s Lives.”

Matthiessen has received the John Burroughs Medal, African Wildlife Leadership Foundation Award, the Gold Medal for Distinction in Natural History from the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, and a Global 500 Environmental Achievement Award from the United Nations Environment Program.

His visit is sponsored by the University Lectures Committee; Institute for Environmental Studies; Chadbourne Residential College; International Institute; Departments of English, Geography, and Wildlife Ecology; Creative Writing Program; African, Southeast Asian, and Latin American and Iberian Studies Programs; and Center for Russia, Eastern Europe, and Central Asia.