Movements & Periods, Anthologies 

From the Island's Edge: A Sitka Reader compiles the work of individuals who have participated in a brilliant, challenging, and innovative series of workshops called The Sitka Symposium of Human Values and the Written Word. For the past decade, the Sitka symposia have put good writers and good thinkers to the service of important ideas. This vibrant reader makes these ideas available for the first time to a wider audience. Many cultures and schools of thought are brought together in this volume, which includes essays, poetry, and short fiction. Conversations revolve around complex dilemmas on political, ethical, social, and environmental fronts -- dilemmas faced by individuals, families, communities, and the larger society. Underlying these deliberate questions has been a broader, yet more specific one that the participants address: what is my role, my responsibility, my work in relation to these issues? Poets and astronomers, anthropologists and novelists, natural historians and philosophers, and linguists and folklorists offer their perspectives -- perspectives often rooted in Western and Native American traditions and in the written and spoken word. They juxtapose aspects of the human experience that are seldom considered in relationship -- the poetic imagination and the reasoned argument, and ultimately, the public shape of our private lives. - from Amzon