Geography of Hope

San Francisco Chronicle about the wish-I-was-there three-day Wallace Stegner Conference at Point Reyes Station this weekend. 

 The 17 authors on tap include former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Haas, who lives in nearby Inverness; Annick Smith, who co-produced the Academy Award-winning film "A River Runs Through It;" Rebecca Solnit, author of "A Field Guide to Getting Lost;" and Stegner's son, Page Stegner, a noted author.

It's the sort of lineup worthy of a man of Stegner's stature. Other great writers of the West and its needs have also emerged in the past half-century: Larry McMurtry, Ken Kesey, Edward Abbey, James Houston, Robert Haas. But one commonality shared by all of these, and many others, is that Stegner taught them how to write at the Stanford University creative writing program that today bears his name.

We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in. For it can be a means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures, a part of the geography of hope.