http://stream.publicbroadcasting.net/production/mp3/knau/local-knau-728478.mp3
Flagstaff, AZ – Earth Notes: Mary Austin
For author Mary Austin, the drylands of the Southwest were a lush wellspring. The spirit of the place inspired her early writings, and later reinvigorated her literary career and her imagination.
Born Mary Hunter in Illinois in 1868, she moved west with her family to homestead in California. She married and had a child, but the marriage didn't last. Austin penned her first book, The Land of Little Rain, in 1903. Soon after, she began to mingle with literary lions such as Robinson Jeffers and Jack London in Carmel, then moved on to the salons of New York and the cities of Europe.
Two decades later, with a dozen books and many shorter works to her credit, she began searching for a source of renewal. In 1923, Austin set out for the heroic landscape enclosed by the upper Rio Grande and the Rio Colorado.
From that 25 hundred-mile journey across New Mexico and Arizona came one of her best works, The Land of Journey's Ending. She called it both a book of prophecy and a book of topography.
Woven with mystical metaphor, the book's essays take the reader into glittering aspen groves and high-country pine forests, into the deep traditions of the Spaniards who settled New Mexico, and on to the ancient pueblo villages of the Hopi Mesas.
For Austin, travel was a means of deep exploration. If you go far enough on any of its trails, she wrote, you begin to see how the world was made.
-Rose Houk