Articles by Rebecca Lawton

April 1, 2022 5

Cleaning

I was going to write about spring cleaning today, as (per writer Candor McNair) “dust bunnies are [...]

March 9, 2022 2

Hydropolitics

(Profits from my book sales this month—and for the foreseeable future—will benefit UNICEF, specifically [...]

February 14, 2022 6

Love

So many ways to love. And so many entities: people and animals and objects. This being an H2O blog, maybe [...]

December 31, 2021 0

Frames

Sometimes, in writing, we use a technique known as framing. We book-end a story between a beginning and [...]

November 21, 2021 2

Giving

This time last year, my brother Jon and I had just begun cleaning personal belongings out of my father’s [...]

October 31, 2021 8

Haunted

Nothing in the world is truly separate, say the physicists and Zen priests, all of us borderless entities of [...]

July 22, 2021 2

“Swimming Grand Canyon is a most unusual take on the place, contained in quirky poems from Lawton’s life on her way downstream . . . Lives loved, loves lost, detours, and roads not taken. Her writing is beautiful and rich. Each poem is carefully crafted, and each line points directly to its target. Metaphors for our lives burst into our consciousness and deepen our own experience. Every poem is an unexpected gem, its own universe. Whatever you think these poems will be—they are not that.” —Christopher Brown [...]

June 27, 2021 2

Refuge

“Dog Days are approaching; you must, therefore, make both hay and haste while the Sun shines, for when old Sirius takes command of the weather, he is such an unsteady, crazy dog, there is no dependence upon him.” [...]

April 25, 2021 8

Lovely

Ed Abbey had joined a Colorado River trip I'd guided in summer 1975, soon after he'd written The Monkey Wrench Gang (Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, 1975). The book was about to hit the shelves and would become a literary and cultural phenomenon. He didn't reveal anything about the Gang, and we didn't ask, but as we floated Cataract, he'd already orchestrated the lives and acts of Hayduke and Seldom Seen and Bonnie and Doc. [...]

April 1, 2021 2

History

All through March, I wanted to compile a list of women who've made history running rivers—but stopped each time. Why only a month? I asked. Why can't March—and all months—be about a thing called The People's History? How amazing we would feel as a body united, not splintered into factions we observe according to Presidential designation. [...]