What I’m after, in image or writing, is beauty.

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This fall, a student from the University of Central Arkansas reached out to me with some questions after reading some of my work online and learning about Satellite: Essays on Fatherhood and Home (which was recently named one of 100 Notable Small Press Books of 2005 by Literary Hub!). I was happy to respond—even though I was far slower than I should have been, especially after the student closed his request with, “Looking at your work it honestly inspires me to do more and continue what I am doing.” Hey, any time I can be an inspiration, that’s a good thing! Or, at least I think it is…

Here are his original questions with my responses, in case you too would like to be inspired—or just learn a little more about me.

What made you want to take pictures along with writing?

I’ve been a photographer since before college. I got my first camera, an Olympus OM-F, when I was 16, just before taking a trip around the world with my high school. The trip was amazing, but so was the opportunity to record it with a camera. Since then, and especially again once we moved to Tucson in 2000, when my daughters were young, I’ve taken a camera and, more often now, my iPhone with me to photograph everywhere I go. It’s a part of who I am as much—and probably more so—than writing itself. There’s something about the way we focus with a camera in hand—the way we seek beauty in just the right light. That I can also write about my photography, and have my photography align with and support my writing, is a real pleasure. When I give public readings, I hope to include slideshows, as well, in part because my essays are long and having photographs helps the audience along. But truly what I’m after, in image or writing, is beauty. The camera and the pen are different means to that same ends.

Through all of your essay collection, how do you avoid redundancy when writing new material?

There’s certainly some overlap in Satellite—because the original essays were published separately and not written as a book, and so mentions there particularly of family and place occur in each essay. Some of that was edited out when I put the essays together for the manuscript. But in general, especially on larger topics, I avoid redundancy by choosing separate questions to ask—and essaying is all about asking questions, even if we don’t get to an answer. Probably especially if we don’t get to an answer.

In some cases I’ve long thought about what I want to write about. For instance, I knew I wanted to write an essay on migration, Sandhill cranes, and my younger daughter Juliet for about a dozen years before I sat down to craft that one. Now that I’ve written about migration and cranes, I don’t feel the need to write about them again, except perhaps in passing or as it relates to a different, larger topic or concept I’m working on. There are countless stories to tell, and topics to cover, so I don’t think I’ll ever need to worry about redundancy in my writing. Also, I’m not that prolific a writer—heck, it took me 18 years to put together a collection of 16 essays!—so there’s no risk of me writing about everything I could possibly want to write about and then having to turn back since I’ve exhausted my ideas. As writers, we are always thinking of the story in any experience, and different, essential ways to tell that story. And that story is never the same, and so our telling of it should never be the same.

What motivates you to write?

Deadlines, mostly. Well, that’s the way to get me to actually sit down and write. I don’t write as a daily practice. Sounds lovely, but that’s never been my style. Otherwise, what motivates me to write is the world we live in, the beauty of place, the inequities and other challenges the human and more-than-human world face daily and more broadly generationally, even geologically. Also, I’m more inclined to write when I’m avidly reading. Reading inspires me to write.

Where do you draw inspiration from?

The smallest grain of sand to the wide, perplexing universe, and any and everything between. Which is to say, place and our place in it. But also fatherhood, family, nature, democracy, photography and other art, animals, science, urban form. Beauty, and how we find it, define it, gain joy from it.

Looking back, is there one moment or decision that played a key role in your success that you would approach differently if given the chance? If there is, what would you change and why?

I think the single biggest factor in my success as an essayist is that I went to graduate school for creative writing, earning an MFA in Creative Writing (Nonfiction) from the University of Arizona in 2009. Before that, I wrote a fair bit, including having published a book of poetry (Riverfall) and writing a regular column for Next City magazine, but I hadn’t studied the craft of writing, nor practiced it so intentionally as I did in grad school. That time was a gift—a sacred time and space to work on my craft as a writer, to discuss writing deeply with fellow students and faculty, to get good, critical feedback on my work. Simply, it changed my life and enabled me to become a much better writer.

I would not change a thing about that experience. I was older than most students in the program—I had two daughters, lived out in the suburbs (well, Civano, but a suburban location nonetheless), and worked full-time. But I was accepted as any other student, and we had a strong cohort. I am grateful for that experience.

How was the process of writing your book Satellite?

Satellite was originally conceived as a slightly different book by another name: The Sum of All Species, which is the title of the first essay in the collection. In fact, it was accepted as a partially completed manuscript for publication by the University of Nebraska Press in 2011. But then some family issues came up, and I wasn’t in the head space to write that particular nonfiction memoir-in-essays on fatherhood and community. So I cancelled the contract. Over the next several years I wrote a few more pieces, but between 2013 and 2021 I didn’t write any nonfiction with this manuscript in mind.

Then the pandemic hit, and I revised the essays that were written, finding that I had a fair few that seemed like they still held water. To test those waters, I combined the first three essays—“The Sum of All Species,” “Calendars of Sun and Moon,” and “Satellite”—together as a prose chapbook titled Satellite and submitted it to a chapbook contest run by Iron Horse Literary Review. It was named a finalist, which confirmed what I hoped, that the essays still resonated.

But I needed more essays to have enough for a full book, and I knew then I wanted the essays to be more diverse than what the original book was going to be. I also needed to revise the essays—some of them considerably more than others. As we rolled out of the pandemic, I joined a writer’s group with a couple other writers I knew. That allowed me to share both new essays and older pieces and get insightful, constructive feedback to make them better. In the end, I only needed to write two more essays to complete the manuscript—they just happen to be the longest in the book. The first, mentioned above, is “Stopover,” on migration, Sandhill cranes, and my relationship with my younger daughter. The second, “After,” came about when I did a writing residency at the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest in central Oregon. That essay braids my older daughter’s fall through a plate glass window when she was 11 with the 1980 Mount St. Helens eruption and the 2020 Holiday Farm Fire in the Mackenzie River Valley. I didn’t know what the essay would be about, beyond Mount St. Helens, when I visited, but seeing that burnscape, and then by coincidence having a conversation with a nearby resident, put that one into place—landscapes of natural and personal trauma.

I was also inspired by John T. Price’s terrific essay collection All if Leaf, which like Satellite includes disparate essays. Reading that book, which includes several essays published in Terrain.org, helped me see my own manuscript as more free-flowing. Yes, there’s an order, but there’s not necessarily an entire narrative arc for the book. And I like that. So it empowered me to include some essays I might not otherwise have included, and for sure would not have included in the original University of Nebraska Press book.

I updated the original book proposal and sent it to several presses. A couple were interested, and I ended up choosing Trinity University Press. The rest is, as they say, history...

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And a reminder that on my website’s Satellite page, there’s a downloadable PDF of discussion questions and writing prompts for each of the 16 essays in Satellite.

Or bring out your clogs, sandals, sneakers, or beautiful bare feet!*

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Friends, I’ll be in Oregon and Washington over the next week, and should you find yourself in the area, I hope you’ll join me at one of the following events in support of my new book, Satellite: Essays on Fatherhood and Home, Near and Far:

Thursday, October 23 | Reading and Slideshow at Oregon State University’s PRAx Theater
This reading is sponsored by the Spring Creek Project at Oregon State University. The time and space for the crafting of the essay “After,” the penultimate essay in Satellite, was made possible by the Spring Creek Project. 7 p.m. at the Ray Theater / Patricia Valian Reser Center for the Creative Arts, 470 SW 15th St., Corvallis, Oregon.

Saturday, October 25 | Wines and Words at Chemeketa Cellars
Hosted by the Salem Poetry Project, I’ll be reading with poets Ingrid Wendt and Juan Cervantes at a lovely Willamette Valley winery. 1 p.m. in the Reisling Room of Chemeketa Cellars, 215 Doaks Ferry Rd. NW, Salem, Oregon.

Sunday, October 26 | Books and Blooms Reading Introduced by Washington State Poet Laureate
I’ll make the sprint up to Wenatchee on Sunday to read at Fable Books + Blooms, where I’ll be introduced by Washington State Poet Laureate Derek Sheffield. 3 p.m. at Fable Books + Blooms, 115 S. Wenatchee Ave., Wenatchee, Washington.

Monday, October 27 | A Haunted Reading at Rose City Book Pub
And then I’ll scramble back down to Portland for a haunted reading—which is to say, my essay “The Days of the Dead,” closing out my Pacific Northwest visit the week of Halloween. 7 p.m. at Rose City Book Pub, 1329 NE Fremont St., Portland, Oregon 97212.

I sure would love to see you!

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And a reminder that on my website’s Satellite page, there’s a downloadable PDF of discussion questions and writing prompts for each of the 16 essays in Satellite.

* Venue permitting.

On the two-hour drive up, Juliet and I listened to 80s new wave and alternative music to get in the mood. When “Boy” by Book of Love came on, I was reminded of two books I read this summer: B.J. Hollars’s forthcoming Dinosaur Dreams: A Father and Daughter in Search of America’s Prehistoric Past (available October 1, 2025) and Andrew Furman’s recently published Of Slash Pines and Manatees: A Highly Selective Field Guide to My Suburban Wilderness. Like my own Satellite: Essays on Fatherhood and Home, Near and Far, these books include the incidents, insights, and inventiveness of fatherhood—and much more.

I just published a review of those beauties over on Terrain.org, so won’t repeat myself here beyond this short excerpt at the end of the dual review:

If it’s not clear by now, what these books really narrate, what makes them so important, is a word that’s all too rare in our techno-driven, politically divisive world today: love. Love of and for our children, our friends, our homes and communities, the more-than-human world, and the places disappearing far too fast, far too often. In Dinosaur Dreams, Hollars hasn’t just recapped his delightful road trip with his sweet daughter Ellie, he’s penned an enduring love letter that resonates through the mysteries of deep time and a world just as mysterious, beautiful, and challenged today. In Of Slash Pines and Manatees, Furman hasn’t just presented finely crafted essays on plants and animals, he’s opened his heart to the reader, inviting us into the intricate, intimate, and diverse built and natural communities he adores.

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So get yourself some love and read the books. But first, enjoy another classic love song, one we heard last night to kick off their set: “Space Age Love Song” by A Flock of Seagulls.

Upcoming Events

I’ll be in Colorado, Utah, and Oregon this fall in support of Satellite. Won’t you join me?

• Tuesday, September 2, 7 p.m.: Reading with Juan J. Morales at Analogue Books, Records & Bar in Pueblo, Colorado

• Wednesday, September 3, 7 p.m.: Craft brewing-inspired reading and signing at Crystal Springs Brewing Co. in Louisville, Colorado

• Friday, September 5, 11:30 a.m.: Alumni reading at the University of Colorado Denver College of Architecture and Planning in Denver

• Tuesday, October 7 - Thursday, October 9: Panel and reading at Southern Utah University’s Cedar Breaks Writers Conference in Cedar City, Utah

• Friday, October 10, Noon: Reading in the BYU English Reading Series at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah

• Thursday, October 23, 7 p.m.: Reading for Spring Creek Project at PRAx / Oregon State University in Corvallis, Oregon

I’m hoping to set up a reading in Portland, Oregon, adjacent to the PRAx reading, as well. Check out all my upcoming events here.

Yours in the creative resistance,

Simmons

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When our daughters were young—and the children of many of our close friends and neighbors in the community of Civano were young—we caravaned down one New Year’s to the small colonial city of Alamos, at the southern end of Sonora, Mexico. In Alamos, well before the days of Airbnb, we rented an open-air hacienda and from there explored the city and region with its fascinating history and rich heritage, architecture, and biodiversity.

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On that trip, my daughters, wife, and I became lost (in the best way) in time, which is to say: stepping away from the rushed consumerism of our daily lives opened up a new way of seeing and thinking about place and time, which I explore in the essay “Calendars of Sun and Moon,” one of 16 essays in Satellite: Essays on Fatherhood and Home, Near and Far. In that essay, I write:

On our trip, we’ll pass from 2006 into 2007. In cyclical time, the past is infinitely repeatable, dependent only on the length of the cycle—events of the past year (and much before) may repeat, rising and falling like hills on the arcing horizon. On the sleek hood of linear time, however, the prior year and its events are lost, irreversible, the days of 2006 passing like roadside markers as we drive toward 2007 and beyond. “In the one view past is prophecy; in the other it is prologue,” says ethnohistorian Nancy M. Farriss. In traveling to Mexico are we trying to give time the slip by sliding into a new geography, if only briefly? Or is there a larger ritual at work?

The essay was originally published in Weber: The Contemporary West. Recently I discovered that the journal has posted the essay online—I invite you to read it here, with the caveat that it has been revised a bit for the book. (Have I mentioned you may purchase Satellite and in the process benefit your favorite local bookstore here?)

I think back often to that trip, not only to how we consider time and place, but also to the physical act of visiting the remote, beautiful community itself—a 12-hour drive from Tucson—with my own beautiful community of neighbors and friends. It was a gift, one I continue to cherish.

I hope you, too, cherish the essay, which braids the visit with an exploration of the region’s history, a discourse on linear versus circular time, and waxing poetic—if you will—on the charms and rituals of a place not yet corrupted by consumerism.

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View these Instagram posts for a few of the reasons why we returned: The Big News and This New View of Ours and 13 Ways of Welcoming Your Neighbor. I have always loved this neighborhood, which in so many ways holds my heart and soul and amazing memories, and while we don’t regret living elsewhere in Tucson for seven years, we are happy to be back.

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Speaking of returns, and more broadly migration (animal and human both), I’ve got an essay from Satellite up at Terrain.org, the world’s first online literary journal of place: “Stopover.” The essay explores fatherhood, migration, and the beauty of the in-between primarily through three trips over several years with my younger daughter to view Sandhill cranes—in Nebraska, New Mexico, and southern Arizona. Check out the essay and its photos here.

And here’s a quiz: I’ve got a tattoo on my forearm of a great blue heron. What, and where, is the inspiration for the larger tattoo on my calf?

I hope you enjoy the essay, which I’ll start here and then link over to Terrain.org for the finish. Scroll all the way down here for a photographic answer to the quiz.

Stopover

In the muted flatlands of Nebraska’s Platte River valley, the horizon stretches in bands—pewter river, ochre cornfields, graphite tree line, tungsten sky. It is mid-March 2012 in the cool, wet center of the Central Flyway, the migratory bird route that stretches from Costa Rica to Canada’s Northwest Territories. Bound generally by the Rocky Mountains on the west and Mississippi River and Gulf of Mexico on the east, the Central Flyway hosts more than 50 percent of North America’s migratory waterfowl. And where it narrows along an eighty-mile stretch of the Platte River—its wide, shallow channels like slow-poured mercury beneath an overcast sky—it serves as a key stopover site for the world’s largest gathering of Sandhill cranes.

My 11-year-old daughter Juliet and I have driven 1,200 miles to view these tall, talkative birds. It’s a distance that seems significant to Juliet and me, folded as we were into our silver sedan for two straight days. But for the cranes, whose migration may take them from central Mexico to eastern Siberia and back, that would represent but one leg of an annual journey that has taken place in one form or another, and in one geography or another, for at least nine million years.

“The Platte River is new to cranes in the longevity experienced as a species,” says Allison Adelle Hedge Coke, the poet who invited my daughter and me to Nebraska to view the cranes. “Existing fourteen thousand years, maybe less, the Platte allows the perfect stopover for the annual grand council of cranes on the narrows of the hourglass flyway that was once the pathway of the Inland Sea.”

The pathway Juliet and I took east out of our Sonoran Desert home this spring was much less sea and much more basin and range. We’d had a dry winter; wildflowers were sparse along the route that turned north onto Interstate 25 out of Hatch, New Mexico. Brown and yellow-brown mountains and mesas funneled us north, as did the wide ribbon of highway edging the Rio Grande. But rust turned to gold and then finally green as we passed the Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge where, two years earlier, the Sandhill cranes changed my spirit, if not my life.

I’m not certain how I convinced my wife Billie to join our daughters and me to view cranes over New Year’s in 2010. Like me, she appreciates a good panorama, but she’s never been one to pull on a pair of hiking boots to explore places more deeply. So on my camping and hiking journeys with Juliet and Ann-Elise, she often stayed at home. Perhaps, then, it was the promise of the (admittedly low-budget) hotel room in Socorro instead of a tent, or the fact that we’d be gone over a holiday. More likely, she joined us simply because she could spend time with us—and I wouldn’t force her out onto a nature trail. Not a long one, anyway.

In the middle of winter, central New Mexico’s Bosque del Apache is a landscape of contrasts: placid blue ponds next to the brown braid of the Rio Grande; amber bulrush and cattails against ashen, leafless cottonwoods; the low, cinnamon-colored Chupadera and San Pascual Mountains against a pale turquoise sky. In a word: sublime. Yet what appears as a natural wetlands caused by seasonal flooding from the Rio Grande is in fact man-made. The 5,700-acre refuge was established not just in recognition of the outrageous diversity of waterfowl and other migrating birds that overwinter there, but also because of changes settlers made to subdue the river, beginning with the arrival of Spanish colonists in the sixteenth century.

“A river that overflowed and dug new routes every season was seen as a problem—especially if your house got flooded or your crops washed away,” says literature by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which manages the refuge. “So, people started building dams and irrigation ditches to manage the flow of the river and divert water for crops, livestock, and homes. Taming the Rio Grande was great for people—but not great for wildlife. The once-grand river shrank to a shallow stream.”

Flooding was not only constrained but ultimately eliminated, and with it native plants such as chufa and millet. Not long after, migratory birds along with year-round native species began to disappear. With its designation as a federal refuge in 1939, however, the area now just a short distance from I-25 could be managed for wildlife and native plants, beginning with work by the Civilian Conservation Corps to restore the floodplains. Today, water is moved seasonally from the river through the refuge’s fields, wetlands, and ponds via a series of gates and ditches before it is returned to the river.

We planned our visit to the Bosque del Apache to be quick: drive the backroads surrounding the wetlands looking for wildlife once we arrived, settle onto a viewing deck for the evening, find a late dinner twenty miles up the road in Socorro, and then return to the refuge before sunrise the next morning, before the cranes would head out for the day. And before we’d make the six-hour drive back to Tucson.

What we hadn’t expected when we arrived in the amber light of the afternoon was that there weren’t any cranes. “Where are they?” Juliet asked as we walked a path beside one of the refuge’s marshes. Stepping onto an observation deck, we saw coots, mallards, and other ducks, and in a cottonwood to our left, a bald eagle, but no Sandhill cranes. Ravens worked the branches below the eagle, their croaks carrying across the reed-edged water. But where we had expected to find a gathering of cranes, there were none.

And then, as the winter sun sank behind us, we heard them—the otherworldly chortled bugles of the Sandhill cranes, flying in from farmers’ fields up and down the Rio Grande. In twos and threes and then in groups of a dozen, three dozen, a hundred, the cranes arrived, their thin legs trailing from the vases of their bodies as their long necks led them forward. They landed almost acrobatically before concentrating along the far shore.

My daughters oohed and aahhed as we pulled coats and scarves tighter, as the temperature dropped. My wife tucked into me, whether for warmth or joy did not matter—she had not seen cranes in the wild before—and, joined by other families and a host of long-lensed photographers, we watched the scarlet-capped cranes ruffle their gray feathers and hold congress in the shallow water as the sky grew dark. In a nearby pond a thousand snow geese turned the blue surface white, and in this wetland and the next, the birds’ raucous calls were a crazy delight, the chilled air filled with the strange, flocked symphony that resonated as deeply in the human onlookers as in the water and land beyond.

The next morning, Billie and I nuzzled the girls awake in the darkness, ate a quick breakfast, and loaded into the minivan. The hotel parking lot was a frenzy of people doing the same, all with the singular goal of driving to the Bosque del Apache to view the cranes and geese before the birds flew off for the fields.

Our headlights lit the two-lane road as we made our way south, through the crossroads of the village of San Antonio, and into the refuge. We found a parking space not far from the observation deck of the previous evening and, as quietly as possible, shuffled onto the deck, squeezing between two photographers. The eastern horizon was a shifting watercolor—plum to red, orange to yellow above low, purple mountains. As the sky lightened, the silhouettes of the cranes became more pronounced: hundreds of birds, dark legs straight, thick bodies hunched, heads nestled into the down of their backs. A single black duck trailed across the water, and then another. Unlike the previous evening, the surface was not smooth but instead rippled by the breeze, cutting in its chill. Finally, the sun crested the eastern mountains and, as if on cue, we all sighed in anticipation of the warming day, our faces glowing in the new light.

Then, all at once, a thousand or—who could know in this cacophonous scene?—ten thousand snow geese erupted from the far edge of the pond, an enormous, luminous flock of white birds reflected in the water and rising. To call it breathtaking is to settle for cliché, and yet that multitudinous release took our breath away. It likewise triggered the cranes, who themselves became more vocal, more active.

Yet even in all this avian glory, the girls had had enough. Amazing, yes, but terribly cold for these desert dwellers. So we loaded into the minivan and headed north out of the refuge toward San Antonio, where we would turn west onto the freeway. Driving now in the morning light, however, we saw what we could not on the drive south—lining the west side of the road, only yards away, hundreds of Sandhill cranes had settled in ice-edged ditches and marshes, closer than we’d ever been or could have imagined we’d ever be.

I pulled over. My wife and daughters understood.

Leaving the girls in the warmth of the minivan, I stepped quietly into a scattering of photographers and, like many of them, kneeled. The closest cranes were some forty feet away. Though a few of the Sandhills remained hunched from their nighttime sleep, most now moved around, cracking the ice at the top of the water, stretching their dusky wings, raising their slender necks and pale heads, foreheads bright red in the golden light. Behind them, just on the other side of the interstate, the soft peaks of the Chupadera Mountains drank in the light, becoming vermillion-tinged, the sage a kind of green-gray fire against the copper hills.

The cold breeze was constant but seemed to be rebuffed in the glow of the birds, who stood three or more feet higher than the surface of the water. Like those around me, I snapped photo after photo. But then I lowered the camera and rose, closing my eyes so that the gurgling calls and snicks of the birds flowed over and through me. When I opened my eyes, many of the cranes were queueing to take off—not an airstrip, exactly, but a loose line of Sandhills near the middle of the watery plain where the birds flapped and stretched. I watched them launch, one at a time or in twos and threes. Were the hills to the west responsible for this breeze, or was it brought on by the birds as they took flight, a short run and leap into the pearly sky, water streaming behind them like a whip of light?

“Non-being is the greatest joy,” says Lao Tzu. In this moment, finally, I knew such joy: I was not myself, not a being, but I was present—a presence, a movement, energy, a part of something so much larger and more basic than myself, than my body or soul had known before. I was not flying with the birds, was not the birds, and yet I was the air around the birds, the smallest particles of the air passing through them, the water beneath them and the ice crystals atop the water, the lift in their wings and the hollow bones of their wings, the weaving of gray and charcoal and cream feathers and also the single feather that floats down to the surface of the pond, sinks to the bottom, decomposes, renews. I was renewed. Reborn.

Read the full essay in Terrain.org, or—of course!—buy the book and read this one and fifteen other essays on fatherhood and home.

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Let’s start with technology:

Click to Hear Indigo Buntin Song

And a poem:

Indigo Bunting

This is music, he said,
and his voice climbed
the thin ladder of air

like a cat chases moths,
tumbled like
the river desperate

in flood—his chest filling
with the thick
liquid of song. This

is music: not so much
the silver-chorded calls
or the silent intervals

of indigo flash
between yellowgreen limbs,
but the complete cessation:

the wind, the river, the earth’s
core groaning
among its fiery teeth

to hear this simple song.

It seems appropriate to start with a poem when talking about place and ecology and technology. Indeed, the poet Jerome Rothenberg said that poetry is the technology of the sacred. In my own work with Terrain.org I’ve sought to define, or at least present, the sacred in ecology and place through literature, art, and design.

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But just what is technology?

Let us turn to another Rothenberg—philosopher and musician David Rothenberg, author of Why Birds Sing—to provide his input on the term: Yo Simmons! he said, don’t forget that Aristotle and the ancient Greeks defined the word techne as any creative act of humans—including tools and art.

Yo David! I said, are you suggesting that techne—technology—completes what nature has started? Indeed I am! he said: “We finesse things that nature suggests to us. Could be a song, could be an image. Could be a cabin that then becomes a house and then a city and then roads and then a whole system by which we drink the resources of the planet dry.”

Thanks for bringing me down, man.

In actuality, I’ve been thinking about technology an awful lot myself lately. Several years ago I went into cardiac arrest. Turns out I have a strange line of scar tissue between my atria and ventricles, and the only solution is a technological one: a dual-chamber implantable cardioverter defibrillator, or ICD. Mine also happens to be a pacemaker, with a battery life of ten years. Technology saved my life, keeps saving my life.

But I’m not foolish enough to believe that technology alone can save the planet. And I’m not here to tell you what can. That’s no small answer. But I’m also not going to suggest that we must phase out technology to more authentically experience the poetry of place.

Instead, I’d like to offer three ways in which technology can expand the poetry of place—and the first is represented by my iPhone, and the app that led into my poem “Indigo Bunting”—Merlin Bird ID. (By the way, if you need to wake up your teenage daughter because she has overslept, the song of the Atlantic Puffin is a particularly annoying call with which to do so…)

Just as our addiction to these technological marvels can remove us from an intimacy with place, so too they can connect us. I’m happy to bring a field guide with me when hoping to identify birds, but this little computer gives me the sights and the sounds that that older and much beloved technology, paperback books, cannot.

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The second way in which technology expands the poetry of place is by enabling the literal implant of poetry in place. We’ve got a great local example down in Tucson. Recently, the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum—a kind of natural history museum meets zoo meets botanical gardens—started a poet-in-residence program. The program was modeled a bit after the Language of Conservation program that brought poetry installations and performances to zoos back in 2009, sponsored by Poets House. For example, Alison Hawthorne Deming oversaw poetry installations outside exhibits and in general areas at the Jacksonville, Florida, zoo, while Pattiann Rogers worked in Milwaukee.

In fact, Pattiann wrote of her experience in Terrain.org, in a lovely piece titled, “Under the Open Sky: Poems on the Land.” Here she writes not only of the 54 poems and excerpts installed at the Milwaukee County Zoo, but also of poems embedded in and becoming part of landscapes across the country, from a poem by Robert Frost on a footpath behind the farmhouse where we once lived in Franconia, New Hampshire, to a series of seven poems by William Stafford installed along the Methow River Valley in northern Washington state, to lines of watery poems installed in concrete and waterworks in downtown Lakewood, Colorado, and Austin, Texas.

And water, or the lack thereof, brings me back to the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum’s poet-in-residence program, which was first filled by my friend Eric Magrane, a young poet and geographer who himself had previously inscribed his own poems into mirrors and placed those in the Sonoran desert as both literary and visual art.

Like Pattiann, Eric oversaw the installation of poems and poem excerpts at the Desert Museum: the Woven Words Poetry Project. One of the more interesting applications was of a line from a poem by Alberto Álvaro Rios:

The scorpion carries on its back the question mark of its existence

The line was painted on a rock wall, a favorite place of scorpions. And it was only visible when ultraviolet light was shined upon it—which is also the most effective way to view scorpions at night: under a black light. On Desert Museum Saturday summer evenings, you can do just that.

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Which brings me to my own poem, “Shine,” from Bloom:

Shine

Pouring the black light into every crevice,
we follow the thick vertebrae of the wall

until the moon and bats rise—
until the purple radiance fills the night. There

and there, all at once, the poisonous scorpions shine,
their exoskeletons like intricate green

imps stealing moths at twilight.
We keep their gruesome glow in our minds

and on our tongues as we talk
through the empty hours of the drive home:

the dark mountain pass, the pressing lights
of the city, the dim lane leading

to our house—and then brake hard
at the tangled braid of red and yellow and

black. Eyes open and shining, jaw heavy
with venom, the coral snake’s body

is bent upon itself, rolled tight from the quick black
wheels of the day. Gathering ourselves

now into the car, into the silent rooms
of our house, there is a violet

light pouring over everything and nothing,
like that last terrible night in Eden

when every sharp animal rushed to hide
in all the exposed crevices of the world.

The third way technology expands the poetry of place is by enabling access to landscapes and other places we cannot otherwise obtain. Just as we may bring technology with us into the field to enrich our experience by, for example, using it to identify the song of an indigo bunting, so too technology becomes a portal to places far away, places threatened and endangered, places inhospitable, even places imagined and unimaginable. This, of course, is media, for better or worse.

The ills of media such as television have long been argued. In fact, Paul Lindholdt has an excellent essay on just that—television, habituation, and the skewed views of wild nature on the screen—in an essay titled “The Trumpets of Solitude” in Terrain.org. Paul writes, “One outcome of all our TV viewing is the social creation of nature. The intelligent designs of corporations, all bent on consuming us as media products, filter what we think we know about the out-of-doors.”

I agree. There is no excuse for not getting outside—excerpt certain weather, I suppose. But I am here, too, as the editor-in-chief of an online, placed-based journal—have I mentioned that it’s called Terrain.org?—and we too serve up a kind of nature, though advertisement-free, at least.

Whether on the theater screen or television or computer or your favorite handheld device, however, think of the role media provides in bringing the built and natural environments directly to us. It is filtered, to be sure, but it is accessible as in no time before in human history.

Imagine: poetry, ecology, and place in a technological world. Now, if we only had more time…

Which reminds me of a poem of mine:

In May I Consider My Websites

My client reminds me that the April coupon
is still online, though it’s mid-May, and though
there is a white-winged dove at the feeder,
just arrived from Mexico or maybe Belize.

And that reminds me of the Mexican birds-of-paradise
fanning the backyard in yellow and red, the orange
globemallow now past prime at their rooted and clenching
toes. Beyond the wall, the scarlet ocotillo flowers

are fading to brown, lost in the arid silhouette
of the mountains seemingly painted behind them.
Which reminds me of the trail my daughters and I
hiked late last month, past aromatic creosote—

the rains lingering this winter—past slate and prickly
pear that shine like windows in the sunlight. The view
from here is, of course, gorgeous; and that
reminds me of the website I’m crafting for my neighbor’s

bed and breakfast, with its elegant landscaping
and utterly modern IKEA décor. They are sure to be
a hit—the square tables and chairs and atmosphere,
I mean—which reminds me of the coupon, again,

and now that it’s half past the month of May (or more)
I better get to it, as I pause at the front room’s
inviting window, reminding me—as a Gila flicker
drops in—of the yard’s single saguaro, open and blooming.

Upcoming Readings, Signings & Workshops

I’ve got some events coming up in support of Satellite: Essays on Fatherhood and Home, Near and Far, plus a cool new workshop! Join me:

• April 6, 6 p.m.: Reading and Signing @ Civano EATS, Tucson, Arizona (open only to Civano residents and guests, free)

• April 12, 6 p.m.: Environmental and Southwest Writers: A Reading @ Northern Arizona Book Festival, Flagstaff, Arizona (free)

• April 21: 6:30 p.m.: Reading, Slideshow, and Signing @ Changing Hands Bookstore, Phoenix, Arizona (free)

• April 24, 10 a.m.: Writing the Wild Resistance Workshop with Pamela Uschuk, Online ($50)

Rest in peace, Edward Sinclair Buntin, Jr.
(January 2, 1935 – March 3, 2025)

In the coming days, I will write my father’s obituary. A U.S. Air Force veteran, commercial airline captain, landlord, and so much more, my father contained contradictions like all of us. We didn’t always see eye to eye, especially when I was younger, but I remain grateful for the man he was. And perhaps even more so for what he never realized he taught me—lessons that shaped the father I have worked to become.

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But if you read my book, Satellite: Essays on Fatherhood and Home, Near and Far, publishing today(!) you might not see much of that gratitude—or much about my father at all. Here’s the longest passage in the book that mentions him, from the title essay, “Satellite”:

Once in on the joke, I felt more comfortable among the Scouts. It also provided confirmation of my own ability to decipher the real from the artificial. At home, life was often surreal: my mother’s depression and my father’s absence reflecting a life different from most of my friends. Moving between home and school, my days seemed gauzy, undefined. Only the trips to the Desert Museum, explorations of the nearby wash, and escapes such as the jamboree freed me from the inertness. They filled in for the tangible experiences, such as a tour of Kitt Peak, that I rarely shared with my parents.

Grief and gratitude are often intertwined, and today, as my book officially enters the world, I hold both close. My father’s presence in my life was complex, but even though our interactions were at times strained—if they happened at all—his presence was deeply felt. While Satellite is not a book about him, the echoes of what he taught me are woven throughout its pages.

Today, I honor my father not just with words, but with the lessons he left behind, the father I became, and the stories I continue to tell.

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Satellite Book Launch: Sunday, March 9, 4-5 p.m., Tucson

Friends, if you’re in Tucson this Sunday, please join me at the Center for Creative Photography for the launch of Satellite, sponsored by Sky Island Alliance and Terrain.org!

Get the details right here and join us at this free, multimedia event.

Whether you’re journaling, crafting personal essays, or simply looking for a spark to start writing, these 16 prompts invite you to explore place, memory, heritage, and the ways we navigate the world around us.

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Each prompt is designed to help you dive into the stories that shape you—encounters with wildlife, the rhythms of seasons, the pull of relationships, and the landscapes that linger in your imagination. They stand on their own, but they also connect to Satellite: Essays on Fatherhood and Home, Near and Far, my new book about family, place, and belonging. If you’re curious, you can find the full set of prompts—along with discussion questions crafted by Janine DeBaise and a gallery of full-color photographs—at simmonsbuntin.com/satellite.

Here’s a writing prompt to get you started:

In “The Bells of San Borja,” Simmons Buntin weaves together three narratives—a journey to the San Borja Mission, the story of Ben’s Bells and the grief that inspired the organization, and a walk with his daughters searching for a bell “in the wild”—creating a braided essay that explores themes of beauty, loss, and connection. By shifting between these threads, the essay deepens its meaning, showing how personal and historical experiences intertwine.

For this assignment, write a braided essay that interlaces at least two different narratives or experiences from your own life. One thread might explore an experience of grief, beauty, or discovery. Another might focus on a historical or cultural event, a family tradition, or a journey to a meaningful place. Consider how these different threads speak to one another—how their connections reveal something larger about memory, healing, or community. As you write, pay attention to transitions, tone, and the rhythm of your essay. The power of a braided essay often lies in the spaces between sections—how one thread echoes or contrasts with another, creating a deeper resonance. Use both sensory details and reflection to bring your essay to life, and conclude the essay with a section that weaves the seemingly disparate braids together.

Ready for more prompts?

Head over to simmonsbuntin.com/satellite and download the full document. And hey, why not pair it with the book itself, which you can order here for 20% off through book launch on March 4 using the code SA20!

Purchase Satellite

By the way, here’s the photo that accompanies the essay (in the book it’s cropped and black-and-white):

View More Photos + Writing Prompts

Free Literary Reading Tonight!

Join Simmons Buntin (hey, that’s me!), Juan J. Morales, and Rachel Richardson for an online reading of award-winning poetry and prose hosted by Terrain.org: Monday, February 24, 2025 @ 5 p.m. PT / 8 p.m. ET.

Register for Online Reading

Finally, here’s one of the photos that didn’t make it into the book, but is included in the image gallery on the Satellite page on my website:

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Who needs a little more joy given the political dumbfuckery of the day?

I do, and I bet you do, too. (And I hope you’ll pardon my language…)

Please join me at one of the following events not just in support of Satellite: Essays on Fatherhood and Home, Near and Far, but in support of community, place, family, and love—which is to say joy, in all the essential contexts it takes.

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Monday, February 24, 5 p.m. PT / 6 MT / 7 CT / 8 ET
Online
Terrain.org Reading with Juan J. Morales, Rachel Richardson, and Simmons Buntin (Registration Required)

Sunday, March 9, 4-5 p.m. Arizona Time
Center for Creative Photograhy | The University of Arizona
Satellite Book Launch (Multimedia Presentation, Reading, Signing), Sponsored by Sky Island Alliance and Terrain.org

Saturday, March 15, 11:30 a.m. - 12:30 p.m. Arizona Time
Koffler Building, Room 216 | The University of Arizona
All Parents Matter: Tucson Festival of Books Panel with Simmons Buntin, Julie Fingersh, and Marianne Novy

Saturday, March 22, 1-2 p.m. Arizona Time
Barnes & Noble Tucson Eastside
Satellite Reading and Signing

Wednesday, March 26, 7-9 p.m. PT
Audio Graph Beer Co. | Los Angeles
8x9: Terrain.org and Writing the Wild AWP Off-Site Reading with Annie Wenstrup, Chaun Ballard, Christina Rivera, Jennifer Case, Juan Morales, Rob Carney, Ryo Yamaguchi, Sean Hill, and Simmons Buntin

Saturday, March 29, 12:10-1:30 p.m. PT
Concourse Hall 153 ABC, Level One, Los Angeles Convention Center | Los Angeles
Poetic Fathers: On the Entanglements of Writing About Our Children: AWP Panel with Derek Sheffield, Matthew Nienow, Gregory Pardio, Nathaniel Perry, and Simmons Buntin

Saturday, April 12, 6:30-7:30 p.m.
Firecreek Coffee | Flagstaff
Northern Arizona Book Festival Environmental Humanities Reading with Simmons Buntin, Zak Podmore, and Michael Englehardt

View All Upcoming Events

And if you made it this far, you deserve a poem—this one from my book Bloom.

Shower

Our house is full of ladybugs. My daughter has released the whole lot, the profit
of an afternoon’s unwavering work: busy opals in red and black, black and

gray, caught beneath palo verde shade and poppy sheath. In the insect box
she lays silver leaves of guava, gentle shoots of yellow sage. As she

gathers them one by one, cradled in the warm chalice of her hand,
I read Irish poetry and observe the garden: the bluebells are

fading, their indigo petals turn to glass and stain the desert
floor. The agave sends a single martyred spike to the sky.

Back on earth, she gathers more and more. The bug
house is filling, buzzing like a midsummer hive.

In my book: spring snow in Dublin and scarves
of silver and green. In our garden: she is

absolutely floating—forty! Glowing
like a Chinese lantern, like the

sudden hillside of Indian paint-
brush, she races inside, opens

the box, and showers
the room with

pure red
joy.

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You might, given their recent “on the field” success.

With Super Bowl LIX freshly in the books, I thought I’d share an updated column of mine from Next City, a wonderful nonprofit news organization that believes journalists have the power to amplify solutions and spread workable ideas from one city to the next city.

Instead of covering the NFL’s championship game, today’s post begins with a fantasy football championship, on a day in December not so long ago…

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Today marks the championship game for many fantasy football leagues, including mine. If you’re not familiar with fantasy football, it works like this: Before the beginning of the NFL season, fantasy football leagues comprised of, say, ten teams—one team per manager—hold a draft. Each manager picks players in key positions, and once a player is picked he’s only on your team. In my league, we draft key positions including quarterback, running back, wide receiver, tight end, kicker, and defensive positions. The teams (mine is called the Tucson Turbos) then play a slate of seventeen games, and each week managers choose the actual NFL players on their teams’ roster they think will do the best, to get the highest score. Points are awarded for things like yard gained, receptions, touchdowns, etc. You play against another team, and whoever gets the most points each week wins. Success comes from a combination of strategy, advice, actively patrolling the waiver wire, and no small amount of luck. Which I didn’t have: I lost in the championship game this year.

But enough about me. Fantasy sports are big fun, and big money, and have expanded well beyond the NFL. But the arena that most interests me now is, so far, removed from the fantasy field. What I mean is this: What if fantasy football guidelines could be applied to our urban environments—to cities and towns and metro areas?

As with fantasy football drafts, we’d have a fantasy urban league draft. Positions might be urban indicators, such as those defined by the United Nations Urban Indicators’ Guidelines, like “durable structures” and “land-to-income ratio.” Or they might be more specific, like the fourteen principles of sustainable development I documented when conducting graduate school research on suburban downtown redevelopment, principles like “public spaces,” “green construction,” and “high-density, mixed-use core.” Players ranked highly by sources like ESPN and Yahoo! Sports—but in this case Next City and, say, Terrain.org—would excel, or at least excelled last season to earn their rankings for this draft, in these areas.

So for the position of “transit orientation,” most coveted players could be San Diego’s trolley system and Washington, D.C.’s Metro, for instance. For “pedestrian orientation” we might find that Boston and San Francisco are neck-and-neck for the #1 pick.

Still, the highest drafted players don’t always meet expectations. This year I drafted Cincinnati Bengals quarterback Joe Burrows early, but he started out poorly so it’s a good thing I could play Washington Commanders impressive rookie Jayden Daniels off the bench. In our urban fantasy league, Asheville may have been drafted high for “access to outdoor recreation” and “locally crafted goods” but would have taken a hit—from no fault of its own, of course—by Hurricane Helen and its devastation (on that note, please don’t forget about their need for support—you may donate to the charity of your choice here). In its place, I then would have started, not Washington, D.C. despite the Commanders’ terrific run to the NFC Championship game, sorry, but up-and-coming Denver, with its new and exciting series of parks and mixed-use neighborhoods along downtown’s South Platte River. (Plus the Broncos’ future looks bright with Bo Nix under center. But I digress…)

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Regarding my own city of Tucson, I’d play the “multicultural” and “local gastronomy” position regularly, but neither “transit orientation” (despite the successful Sun Link streetcar) nor “high-density, mixed-use core,” though both are critical to any sustainable metropolitan area. In pockets—against certain other teams, that is—I’d play “regionalized architecture, site design, and landscaping” and “water and wastewater reduction and reuse,” too.

Over the course of the games we’d see the standouts like this season’s Philadelphia Eagles running back Saquon Barkley—those cities that are most vibrant, diverse, and self-sufficient, who might be risk-taking or unpopular in implementing sustainability measures but nevertheless pull it off. Cities like, according to Rocket Homes 15 Most Sustainable Cities in the U.S. in 2023, Berkeley, San Diego, Portland, and Denver. Tucson doesn’t make the cut in their top fifteen, but Salt Lake City does, for such positions as “greenspace,” “free public transportation for school children,” and “free public charging ports.”

By the end of the season, the true winners aren’t the team managers, but the cities themselves. And just as fantasy football changes the way people watch football games, so fantasy urban league would change the way people think about cities. And thinking about cities more critically, whether via urban indicators or sustainability principles, can only be a good thing. That, of course, is no fantasy.

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- Simmons

~~

P.S. How’s your evening looking on Monday, February 24th? Why not join me online, with Juan J. Morales and Rachel Richardson, for a reading hosted by Terrain.org. Learn more and register for this free event here.

Hope is the thing with endangered feathers.

If March is the Sonoran Desert’s showiest month—wildflowers threaded across the jagged landscape in yellows and blues—then February is its most ambivalent. The month might begin in snowfall, the sharp hillsides of saguaro and ocotillo turning soft, ghostlike in the rare morning of blue-tinged white. It can end with temperatures hovering near 90, hinting of the quick climb into summer, when the days regularly top 110 degrees. In between, February’s weather is unpredictable: rain as likely as wind as likely as granite-dry days. Yet a recent calendar marked full of hikes and other outdoor activities reveals that the month is generally filled with mild days and chilly, star-filled evenings.

One February many moons ago I turned 40 and celebrated by inviting more than 200 of my closest friends, coworkers, and neighbors to a party in our neighborhood center. I walked the propane grill over from our bungalow three blocks away while my wife Billie and my daughters Ann-Elise and Juliet, then eleven and eight, coordinated the potluck and three large cakes. Though we reserved our community’s activity center—a room retrofitted from a one-time café, and soon after converted back—I was eager to hold the party in the lushly landscaped courtyard, open to the elements. We lived then in the community of Civano, in southeast Tucson, and at the neighborhood’s core is a commercial center of adobe, strawbale, and stucco buildings designed for offices and galleries and small shops, as well as a round neighborhood meeting hall. A mix of scored concrete, groomed gravel, and native cacti and flowers defines the courtyard, along with large mesquite and palo verde trees, a small grass amphitheater, and thick columns beneath porches and smaller porticos.

I knew that hosting the party outside could present a problem. Unlike the sporadic thunderstorms of the desert’s summer monsoon, winter rains are steady, often lasting a day or more. Southern Arizona delights in 350 days of sunshine a year; winter rains mostly account for those other days of gray. The forecast for the party wasn’t promising, either. One storm had just rolled out and another was predicted to hit Tucson about the time I would light the grill.

But I was determined to hold the party outside. Why confine the celebration of a year’s passing to the interior of a building that gives little indication of where we are? I preferred instead to bring friends and loved ones together at the symbolic and physical heart of the neighborhood, with its distinct architecture, mix of residential and commercial activities, and sense of place. Determination, though, is not the same as stubbornness, so I compromised by opening the activity center for those who wished to celebrate inside, moving the tables and chairs under a large porch, and tucking the grill under the overhang. Fortune, it turns out, was on my side. The weather held well into the evening, and the party was a success. When the rain finally did arrive, it might have been a summer monsoon for all the anger it unleashed. But that was at two in the morning, and the booming waves of winter rain only momentarily roused me from my slumber following a day ripe with family and friends, good food and robust community.

Just as the party belonged outside, the event further confirmed that, particularly while our daughters were growing up, my family and I belonged in Civano, a pedestrian-oriented neighborhood designed and constructed in the last two and a half decades, yet which feels like it has been a part of the multicultural desert landscape for far longer. Civano fits because its planners and New Urban design respect the natural lay of the land: a rolling swath of desert overlooking a wide arroyo called Pantano Wash, not far from the Rincon Mountains east of Tucson. It fits because it is based on a set of sustainability goals aimed at reducing energy and water use, vehicle miles driven, and the need for every resident to commute. And it fits because many neighbors—and at that time there were about 600 families—seek an active residency in which participation, social and political, is key to creating dynamic community.

The essays in this collection titled Satellite (use the code SA20 for a 20% discount on your pre-order!), written over a span of almost two decades, are largely about that sense of belonging, something worth considering then, as I was entering my fifth decade of life after spending ten years in Civano. And something worth considering today, some 16 years after that birthday party and six years after we moved from Civano to a more historic (though no less interesting) neighborhood in midtown Tucson. Ranging throughout the Desert Southwest, on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border, and as far afield as Mount St. Helens, northern Vermont, my mother’s homeland of Sweden, and even the moon (if a telescope atop Kitt Peak counts), the essays here explore the challenges and beauty of raising a family and creating more sustainable community in a landscape of rich cultural and ecological diversity. In these journeys near and far, there are many questions to pursue: How broadly should community be defined? How do we realize heritage in an age of globalization? How do we define beauty in our communities and natural landscapes and so—realizing we are drawn from the same material if not mystical source—in ourselves? What forms may grace take, and how as parents can we pass that onto our children? What does community teach about being a better father, and what has fatherhood taught me about creating a more sustainable and resilient life?

If every generation has its great challenge, then ours is finding a way to exist in the world without exhausting our natural and cultural resources. Exploring how we can create such a belonging for ourselves, and for communities both human and nonhuman, seems to me our essential work and responsibility. Fortunately, it is a responsibility both shared and rewarding, funny and phenomenal, for at every turn there is a new discovery, a new integration between ourselves and the world around us that culminates, when we succeed, in a vibrant sense of place—a balance between the human and more-than-human worlds that enables us not only to survive, but to thrive.

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A month after my 40th birthday, I gathered up my daughters for a drive from Tucson to Denver and back over spring break. Our goal, in addition to seeing old friends, was to visit as many national parks and monuments as possible over the seven-day journey. The road trip brought us back to the place my wife Billie and I lived before moving to Tucson, when Ann-Elise was not yet three years old and Juliet was still in her mother’s womb. Denver holds much history for our family, whether the first suburban house we called our own, or the home built in 1903 near downtown that we lived in before moving to the desert. Yet I hadn’t expected to travel as far back in time as we did, beginning with our visit to Florissant Beds National Monument in the mountains of central Colorado. Grasping the timeline of ancient prehistory is difficult for daughter and father alike, but the sense of time’s slow arc—or circle, for many heritages—becomes more tangible in the sight of a petrified redwood stump 30 feet in diameter, its quartz-and-caramel bark hardened to stone, a mature ponderosa pine growing from the stump’s mineral-rich top.

Even our trips through Rocky Mountain National Park and Great Sand Dunes—where we delighted in geology and wildlife alike—transported us out of the modern conveniences of the car and into the real essence of time: millennia, epochs, eons. The uplift of the Rocky Mountains occurred 50 million years ago, followed 20 million years later by massive volcanic eruptions, though rocks visible along Trail Ridge Road, at some 12,000 feet in elevation, are nearly two billion years old. The mountains’ current form, however, is a much more recent phenomenon, caused by a series of ice age glaciers beginning about two million years ago. And just 15,000 years ago most of the mountains were cloaked in a thick layer of ice that today has all but melted away.

Yet I found myself more fascinated by the parks established primarily to protect our nation’s younger cultural resources, like Mesa Verde National Park of southwest Colorado. Of the weeklong excursion logging 2,700 miles, we spent a full day exploring the cliffside dwellings of the Ancestral Pueblo people. When Billie and I had traveled through Mesa Verde when she was pregnant with Ann-Elise, back in 1997, I was intrigued by the dwellings and people who first created them some 1,400 years ago. I cared more, though, about the natural landscapes: the mesa itself and the wildfire that had raged only a year earlier. More than a decade later and with two daughters in tow, the architecture, artifacts, and associations of the original residents compelled me far more.

As we drove south into New Mexico, visiting Aztec Ruins, and then west into our home state of Arizona, stopping to explore the Wupatki “ruins”, I considered my change in attitude. People’s interests change over time, of course, and time in and of itself is one plausible reason for my shift. But something else was at work, and I credit that to family and, broader still, community. Once I became a father and a more active participant in the neighborhoods where we lived, I found myself drawn to the wide variety of community types, modern and ancient. What was the family structure for the Ancestral Pueblo people who resided 700 years at Mesa Verde? What role did spirituality and ceremony play at Aztec Ruins, with its surprisingly high number of kivas? How was political and social community sustained at Wupatki, less than 800 years ago the largest active pueblo in North America, yet also among the warmest and driest? What do all of these dwellings, now weathered into hillside or cliffside skeletons of granite and sandstone, tell us about our own chances for sustainable community—whether in a new development like the master-planned community of Civano, or a long-lived community such as Tucson?

Those are the types of questions my daughters and I discussed, in a roundabout way at least, as they completed their National Park Service Junior Ranger programs at each stop before we drove west to the Grand Canyon. The drive to the final national park of our voyage took longer than I anticipated, and by the time the girls picked up their Junior Ranger books at the park’s east entrance, we had less than an hour to trek west to Grand Canyon Village, stopping at viewpoints along the way. Though the sun tracked low to the west, magnifying the haze over the vast canyon on what otherwise was a clear day, the views were stunning, if not overwhelming. Just as time becomes even more of an abstraction when one gawks at the geologic wonders of the Rocky Mountains, so space becomes a concept nearly beyond comprehension at the Grand Canyon. The towering maze that ranges in color from scarlet to turquoise spans more than 270 river miles. The canyon stretches up to 18 miles wide and reaches a mile deep. Rather than shooting panoramic photographs, I found myself including the near edges and outcrops of the canyon in my photos’ foregrounds to provide a context for the colorful chasm. More often, I framed my daughters in the photos to create a richer context still.

Our reluctant rush was the result of the Park Service’s schedule of events. Arriving late, we were limited by the number of ranger-led activities still available, yet still required for Ann-Elise and Juliet to receive their Junior Ranger badges. The last program, however, seemed the most enticing: “Condor Talk: Wings over the Canyon.” After a series of frenzied stops along the South Rim, we found a parking spot at Bright Angel Lodge and scrambled up to the Lookout Studio. A crowd of about 60 people had already gathered, the ranger well into her talk, but the girls were able to slip into the audience and find perches near the front. I floated back and turned now and then to photograph the canyon in the gorgeous afternoon light, keeping an eye out for the soaring dark birds with nine-foot wingspans.

The ranger hoped aloud, but could not guarantee, that we would see the rarest of North American birds of prey, which were recently reintroduced to the Grand Canyon. The last Arizona condor before the reintroductions was sited in 1924. When we visited in 2009, perhaps 60 condors were native to Arizona. Today, at least 110 wild condors live in Arizona, predominantly centered around the Vermillion Cliffs, and many regularly frequent the Grand Canyon, especially in summer. But mid-March was still early in the season, and though we waited well after the ranger’s talk on the patio outside the studio, no condors appeared. With pronounced sighs, the girls followed me to a nearby gift shop, where they could submit their Junior Ranger programs.

The ranger who led the condor talk filed in behind us and quizzed my daughters on their Grand Canyon experience before leading the Junior Ranger pledge and handing over their badges with a smile. Though the ranger headed out, we stayed in the shop a bit longer. Since this was the last evening of our road trip, I agreed that the girls could each buy a souvenir. Ann-Elise chose a ranger-led audio tour of the Grand Canyon, complete with digital mini-music player. Juliet found a stuffed animal, a condor, tagged #19. Each reintroduced condor is marked and then tracked. Number 19, the cashier told us, was a female born in the San Diego Wild Animal Park in 1995 and released in the Grand Canyon in 1997. Sadly, the gift shop employee said, the bird died in 2007 from lead poisoning. The thought of spotting the live namesake of the stuffed animal was no doubt inspiring for Juliet. But knowing that the condor died made my daughter clutch the plush toy even tighter.

As we left the gift shop, large junipers along the canyon rim filtered the horizontal sunlight, casting long shadows over the paved walkway. We headed east, toward the lodge and, beyond that, the parking lot and then the long drive back to Tucson. With the light waning, I put away my camera and began fumbling with my cell phone to call Billie. Suddenly, the girls squealed and pointed skyward. I looked up to see two enormous birds, black with broad white bars beneath their wings. A square tag was stitched to each bird’s left wing. The condors floated just 30 feet above us, the full shape of their wings and heads and tails distinct against the opaline sky. We stood in awe before I tugged my camera bag around and pulled out my telephoto lens. But by the time I switched lenses, the birds had dipped over the lip of the canyon and out of sight.

Though the condors represent a linkage to a past older than Wupatki and Mesa Verde—older even than the Clovis people and the reign of giant sloths and sabretooth cats—I knew then that they also represented the future. From 1987 to 1992, no condors existed in the wild in the U.S. But thanks to a successful reintroduction program, seeing a condor sweep in great circles over the Grand Canyon is a reality, even if the sensation approaches the mythic. Seeing the condors gave me immense hope not just for the birds, but for my daughters: for the story they’ll bring back to the community and for the community that is an intrinsic part of their evolving stories.

My daughters scurried forward and I followed, eager to watch the birds even if I couldn’t capture them on film. Two minutes later, four condors emerged from the shadows of that great chasm, and though they didn’t fly directly overhead, they soared close enough for me to photograph—close enough for my daughters to see with keen eyes and wild imagination. Silence then settled over us as we watched the birds glide into the golden horizon, feathered, I still believe, with hope.

- Simmons

~

P.S. If you're in Tucson, please join me for the official Satellite launch event on Sunday, March 9, 2025, in partnership with Terrain.org: 4-5 p.m. at the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona. And if you’re note in Tucson, join me online for a reading with Juan J. Morales and Rachel Richards on Monday, February 24, 2025, at 5 p.m. PT / 8 p.m. ET. Registration is required: register here. View all of my upcoming events.

When I entered graduate school in 1995, four years out of college, I worked for an agency of the U.S. Department of Energy called Western Area Power Administration. I was drawn to urban planning—from too many late nights playing Sim City, no doubt—but given my role as an energy services specialist, I thought I’d focus on energy planning. I wasn’t interested so much in power generation or the high-voltage transmission lines Western maintained that marched across the arid West in sweeping metallic rows from dams like Hoover and Glen Canyon. No, I was instead drawn to the energy efficiency and renewable energy initiatives we implemented with our municipal utility and rural electric cooperative customers—a regulatory requirement of receiving such cheap federal hydropower.

Yet once I entered the Master of Urban and Regional Planning (MURP) program at the University of Colorado at Denver, I fell for urban design and specifically an old-is-new-again planning and architecture movement called New Urbanism.

In a nutshell, New Urbanism prioritizes people over automobiles through “neotraditional,” human-scaled design: walkable streets, a close and appropriate mix of uses from institutional to commercial to residential, accessible public spaces such as parks and plazas, and vernacular architecture with region-appropriate landscaping. There’s much more to it than that, of course, but since that fuse was first lit back in the MURP, I’ve visited, photographed, and written about dozens of New Urban communities across the country—and lived in one, Civano here in Tucson, for nearly two decades.

Several of the essays in Satellite: Essays on Fatherhood and Home, Near and Far (pre-order here using the code SA20 for a 20% discount) discuss New Urbanism from a particularly familial perspective. In addition to these personal essays of fatherhood and place, I’ve also written a couple dozen community case studies. They started as suburban downtown redevelopment case studies for my master’s thesis before growing to a regular series in Terrain.org, the online literary journal of place I founded in 1997. Several appear in the book Unsprawl: Remixing Spaces as Places, co-authored with Portland-based landscape architect and urban planner Ken Pirie.

But since that book published in 2013, the case studies authored by me have been fewer and farther between. Still, even though my family and I moved from Civano more than six years ago, my interest in New Urbanism and sustainable design more broadly hasn’t waned. But over the last decade I also hadn’t gone out of my way to visit neotraditional neighborhoods—that is, until this fall, when I traveled up to Denver for a fantasy football draft (yes, I am that into fantasy football).

Over Labor Day weekend, I drove from Tucson, through New Mexico, and up into Denver. On the way back, I headed west out of Denver (actually, out of Estes Park following a quick visit to Rocky Mountain National Park) to southwestern Colorado before heading back home. On the way up, I toured New Urban community Aldea de Santa Fe, spending a lovely afternoon with my friend Renata Golden in Santa Fe. Heading back from Denver I spent a half-day at South Main in Buena Vista, capped by a refreshing brew at Eddyline Brewing, before driving to Durango, where I spent much of the next morning at Three Springs. All are intriguing New Urban developments of quite different styles and scales, if not geographies.

On Monday, Terrain.org published my first Unsprawl case study in some five years: South Main, a 41-acre, mixed-use development that began with a community design charrette in 2004 and is still, slowly if not steadily, building out. Located just south of the town’s historic Main Street, the project reconnects Buena Vista to the Arkansas River through thoughtful urban design, public spaces, and sustainable architecture. Conceived by siblings and competitive kayakers Jed Selby and Katie Urban, the development was designed to preserve public access to the Arkansas River and create a vibrant, walkable neighborhood. Central to this vision is a central public park and riverside trail, donated by the developers, which ensures that the riverfront—which was formerly a dump site—remains accessible to the entire community.

South Main is, in a word, gorgeous. I’ve got about 4,000 more words and plenty of photos and other graphcis in the South Main Unsprawl case study to describe it, so if that’s your thing, give it a read here.

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You know, there’s a hell of a lot of crazy political and environmental crap happening in this country right now, and as you’ll learn if you read the case study, the developers have had their fair share of challenges, too, particularly in a small, rural, conservative town. But one thing that gives me heart even in these darker days is the power of place, and particularly places that are crafted for a mix of uses, a mix of activities, a mix of people—places where beauty matters. Because beauty is its own kind of creative resistance, and in communities like South Main, like so many of the centuries-old communities we often strive to emulate, beauty is essential.

Take a stroll with me through the beautiful, mixed-use neighborhood of South Main, won’t you?

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And to further entice you, I begin with a question—and I’d love to hear your response: What’s your favorite place, and why? If you’re like me, you may not be able to pick just one place, so perhaps your latest favorite place. That’s what I’ve shared to get the conversation going…

I had planned for the second installment of Urban Wild to feature the preface I originally wrote for Satellite but ultimately left out. However, in light of recent events, it feels fitting to hold off and revisit that next week.

Instead, here’s an excerpt from the penultimate essay in the book, “After.” The full essay braids the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens, my daughter’s fall through a plate glass window, and the 2020 Holiday Farm fire in Oregon’s McKenzie River Valley. It’s an exploration of personal and landscape trauma, recovery, and, ultimately, renewal.

So, too, is our witnessing of the wildfires in Los Angeles—and their horrific outcomes for so many people and places. How many of us know someone personally impacted? The daughter of the man my sister is dating lost her home in Pacific Palisades. Her husband and son, after evacuating safely with the rest of their family and pets, turned back to watch from afar as the building collapsed in the flames. So many painful stories.

“After” is all too timely. Tragically, all writing and art about wildfire—like the powerful series Lookout, curated by Terrain.org in partnership with the Spring Creek Project—will remain painfully relevant for the foreseeable future.

Here, then, is the third section of “After.” Read the full essay in Satellite: Essays on Fatherhood and Home, Near and Far, which you may pre-order at a 20% discount using the code SA20 (send your proof of pre-order to contact@simmonsbuntin.com by March 4 and I’ll enter you into a drawing for one of my prints, too).

And if you’re new to Urban Wild, please consider subscribing:

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Excerpt: “After” from Satellite

After the fire, Patrick Dibala had no choice but to leave his home. On September 7, 2020, winds reaching seventy-five miles an hour swept through central Oregon’s McKenzie River Valley, knocking a tree into high-tension powerlines. The resulting spark ignited a wildfire near the hamlet of Rainbow that funneled west down the valley—a literal firestorm—ultimately burning more than 173,000 acres and destroying more than 700 buildings and several communities. The Holiday Farm Fire scorched entire forested mountains for twenty-seven miles on both sides of the river, and burned for nearly a month. Dibala’s home near Blue River was not one of those that was lost, though he told me that the heat from the wildfire melted the vinyl surrounding his windows and cracked another while the fire otherwise incinerated every building, pumphouse, vehicle, and piece of machinery around.

“Our house survived because, just the day before, I climbed our trees and lopped off the lower branches,” he said to me on an unseasonably warm day in July 2023, pointing to his white house, the only building standing among the only thriving trees in the clear-cut field before us. That burned and logged field rose to a burned and unlogged hillside, its second-growth Douglas firs charred, dead but still standing, a spritely understory of bigleaf maples, fireweed, and invasive Scotch broom greening the ground in contrast to the black trunks and deep blue sky. “I’d cleared most of the other trees thirty or forty feet out from our house years before, and I’d been watering the grass every day. We were lucky.”

The business he and his wife opened in 1993 in Blue River was not so lucky. Like every other building in town, Christmas Treasures burned to the ground. Only a brick chimney, an indistinct pile of rubble and ash, and half a dozen sooty concrete Santa sculptures remained. I met the man who himself looked a bit like Santa, a cheerful red face and short-clipped white beard beneath khaki ballcap, just south of the nearby Blue River Dam and Lake. I was viewing the burnscape from the roadside, where I held up my iPhone to identify the calls of songbirds. As he walked past, he asked what I was up to. I had arrived three days prior for a weeklong stay at the H. J. Andrews Experimental Forest. My first evening I was serenaded by a pair of Swainson’s thrushes as I walked a gravel road among a tangled stand of moss-draped Douglas fir, hemlock, red cedar, maple, and yew. Theirs were the only birdcalls I could discern. On the burned edge of the recovering forest, however, my Merlin app identified nearly a dozen birdsongs: Western tanager and common yellowthroat, black-headed grosbeak and cedar waxwing, MacGillivray’s warbler and white-crowned sparrow, house wren and Swainson’s thrush, spotted towhee and lazuli bunting. I only saw a bird or two, and wasn’t close enough to identify any of them by sight, but their emphatic calls were a welcome lushness I had not expected on this traumatized landscape.

“A number of people watched the fire, scared out of their wits, from right over there,” Dibala said, pulling me away from the birdsong as he pointed to the parking lot at the dam’s edge. Behind the azure water of the reservoir, high this year thanks to one of the wettest winters on record, rivulets of dead but standing trees striped the otherwise green mountains, likewise victims of the 2020 fire. “They thought they were going to die.”

“It all started on an evening like any other,” he continued, “except the wind, and our power was out, which happens.” Power outages caused by fallen branches are common during high winds in the McKenzie River Valley. Though utilities often cut power during severe windstorms to avoid exactly what happened farther up the valley—a live wire going down and sparking a forest full of tinder-dry undergrowth—local utilities had not deenergized systems in the fire area until early the next day. “I was on the porch, sipping whiskey, you know, when I got a text from my son that they were evacuating. I got up and walked around the house. It was dark out, but I could see the orange glow of the fire over that ridge,” he said, pointing to the charred hillside to our east.

Seeing the fire crest the ridge, he ran to his nearby rental house and alerted the residents, who left immediately. He saw that his other neighbor was home, but she refused to leave, calling the evacuation “only a precaution.” She changed her mind quickly, Dibala said, when he urged her to step outside, the flames growing higher. “I jumped into the car with my wife and we drove into town, but so much was already ablaze,” he recalled. “The store was still there, so we grabbed some paperwork, a computer maybe, and raced back to the house. My wife looked up. ‘How could there be helicopters?’ she asked. But then we realized they were embers, swirling down all around us.” By that time, the route north on the U.S. Forest Service road that runs between the reservoir and the Andrews Forest was backed up with others who sought their own escape. They had no choice then but to drive southwest, back toward the flames and their now-burning store. They reached Highway 126, turned west, and then, as Dibala told me, “we seemed to be traveling with the fire, smoke and ash as we went, along with everyone else, bumper to bumper.” With flames in their rearview mirror, they stuck to the winding two-lane highway that edges the river and finally, frantically, made it to the Willamette Valley and Springfield and safety.

The Andrews Forest sustained damage from the fire as well. Approximately 400 acres burned several weeks after the initial, two-day windstorm from the east diminished and more seasonal, less intense winds from the southwest kicked in. That’s when the fire turned back on itself and, in late September, burned up and over the mountainside on the Andrews’s southern edge, where fire lines dug by hand and bulldozer were repeatedly jumped—until, finally, they weren’t. Though most of the trees in the Andrews burn area survived, the Holiday Farm Fire wasn’t fully contained until smoke from the fire cast a pall over the area—reducing the overall temperature—and wildland firefighting crews could finally turn their full attention to the Andrews, which was the last area to extinguish. The rest of the valley, which includes the damaged but still-standing home of environmental writer Barry Lopez several miles west, seemed lost. “The land around us as far as we can see looks flayed,” Lopez wrote on Facebook on November 5, 2020. “For ten miles in both directions along the river from us, all that stands where a whole community once lived are bare chimneys. The devastation for some is catastrophic and irreparable. This part of the western Cascade Mountains was declared a National Disaster Area in September. The severity of the fire is widely thought to be the direct result of a climate change event.”

I didn’t have to prompt Dibala for his opinion on the climate crisis. He offered it up freely, mentioning the burned timber he harvested on his eight acres of land, the trees he replanted in April 2021, 40 percent of which failed in the deadly heat dome two months later, when temperatures reached 110℉, 30 degrees above normal. “I guess it’s all on account of climate change,” he said. “How will we survive?”

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If you're in Tucson, please join me for the official Satellite launch event—presentation, discussion, reading, and signing—on Sunday, March 9, 2025, in partnership with Sky Island Alliance and Terrain.org: 4-5 p.m. at the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona.

Cities are wild places. So are our lives.

Welcome to Urban Wild, a space where I’ll explore the untamed edges of place, fatherhood, and creativity, offering personal essays, insights, and musings into community-building and our connection to the more-than-human world.

This newsletter is an extension of the themes in my new book, Satellite: Essays on Fatherhood and Home, Near and Far, which publishes on March 4, 2025 and is available for pre-order now with a 20% discount when you use the code SA20. (On that note, before the book launches, I will randomly draw two names from those who pre-order—and send me proof of purchase (contact@simmonsbuntin.com)—and send them a signed print of the photo below!)

In Satellite, I ask: What does it mean to belong—in place, family, and community—and how do we create connections that sustain us?

Here’s what you can expect from Urban Wild:

• Brief personal essays and musing that reflect on place, home, beauty, and our shared stories.

• Thoughts on community and urban design, inspired by my work in urban planning.

• Stories of fatherhood and the more-than-human world—from the Sonoran Desert to far-off landscapes.

• The occasional photo or poem.

For instance, here’s a photo I took at Gates Pass in the Tucson Mountains that was a finalist for the cover of Satellite:

(In truth, it was my favorite, but I was outvoted by both my editor and my wife!)

Remember: I will randomly draw two names from those who pre-order and send me proof of purchase (contact@simmonsbuntin.com) by March 4 and send them a signed print of the photo above. Use the code SA20 for a 20% discount on your pre-order!

If these themes resonate with you, I invite you to stick around and explore with me.

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Thank you for being here. There’s a lot to share, and I’m excited to embark on this journey together.

- Simmons

P.S. If you're in Tucson, please join me for the official Satellite launch event on Sunday, March 9, 2025, in partnership with Terrain.org: 4-5 p.m. at the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona.