JOURNAL: WALLACE STEGNER CENTENNIAL BLOG
The Wallace Stegner Centennial Blog:
The great American writer Wallace Stegner was born in 1909 in Iowa, just seven years after the death of John Wesley Powell, but he was raised in the West—Utah, North Dakota, Washington, Montana, and on the last homestead frontier, in Saskatchewan.
With his wife, Mary, Stegner eventually made his home in the California coast ranges—where he taught at Stanford for 25 years and created and directed the university’s writing program. The family summered in Vermont. But when he felt the need to select a hometown and sifted through the many places he had lived, to his surprise he chose Salt Lake City, where he attended high school and college.
The University of Utah celebrated the centennial of his birth during the academic year 2008-2009. I participated by serving as a Stegner Fellow at the Tanner Humanities Center and co-teaching a class on “Wallace Stegner & Western Lands” in the Honors College. The class evaluated the proposal to "complete" Canyonlands National Park by bringing the park boundary up to the natural geographic boundary—the rim of the erosional basin—just as Stegner intended when he helped plan the park in the early 1960s.
Under the auspices of the Utah Humanities Council’s Public Square Program, I took Stegner on the road across a state that he always thought of as home, speaking to community gatherings from Logan to Bluff, from Moab to St. George.
Blog: stegner100.com collects my stories from the road.
Essay: I described my year with Stegner for Isotope Magazine.
You can find the students' "Canyonlands Completion" report here.