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Headwaters book avoids advocacy Work focuses on regional identity By BILL VARBLE You might expect a book published by environmental activists to be full of polemics. In the case of "Intricate Homeland, Collected Writings from the Klamath Siskiyou," you'd be wrong. The new anthology is the first book from Headwaters Press, featuring 28 writers about place, most of them Southern Oregonians. An Earth Day reading is planned tonight at C.K. Tiffin's in Medford -- but don't look for clarion calls. "We were trying to stay away from direct advocacy," says Headwaters spokeswoman (and now book editor) Susan Cross. "We wanted to work more on a regional identity rather than a call for action." The Klamath-Siskiyou region stretches roughly from Mount Shasta to the Pacific Ocean and from the Umpqua to the Sacramento valleys. A quarter-billion years ago it was an actual island. Now it's an island famed for its biodiversity. To enter it is to venture, as Pepper Trail writes, into paradox. Here Engelmann spruces grow hundreds of miles from their normal Rocky Mountain home. Cross says she first had the idea for a book focused on the region a couple of years ago. It would have a literary, rather than scientific or political, focus. "I thought I was having an original idea," she says. "I found out it had been done before, like Terry Tempest Williams' and Stephen Trimble's book." That book was "Testimony, Writers of the West Speak on Behalf of Utah Wilderness." Cross wanted contributors from varied backgrounds, and she got them, with broadcaster Eric Alan, poet Jonah Bornstein, retired English professor Robin Carey, writer/teacher Diana Coogle, free-lance timber chronicler Robert Leo Heilman, biologist Pepper Trail, writer David Rains Wallace and many others. Writer David James Duncan wrote a cover blurb. "He said if he didn't live in Montana, he'd live in the Klamath Siskiyou," Cross says. The biggest obstacle was money. Enter the World Wildlife Federation with a $3,500 grant for printing. Next biggest was lack of experience. Cross is a naturalist and educational specialist without book publishing experience. "I was surprised at how long it takes," she says. About a year-and-a-half. She helped persuade the Orion Society, a publisher of literary quarterlies, to bring writers to Ashland for a symposium on regional writing. The Forgotten Language Tour was held in Ashland in October 1998. Two of the writers, Robert Michael Pyle and Kim Stafford, would later contribute to "Intricate Homeland." Cross put out a call for contributions not long after that, and got some 70 submissions. "Selection was the hard part," she says. Contributors were paid in copies of the book. Community members with book experience such as Coogle and Bornstein pitched in to help. The book ranges widely. Wallace, author of the classic "The Klamath Knot," wrote about differences between the Siskiyous and the Galapagos Islands from an evolutionary viewpoint. Frank Lake, a fisheries biologist more used to scientific papers, switched to the essay for a piece about his American Indian ancestors' roots. Linda Hussa, a Northern California rancher, wrote a poem about the region. Cross says future projects might include a photo essay and a paperback version of Monte Killingsworth's "Eli's Song" (McMillan, 1989). Killingsworth, a novelist, is Cross's husband. "We're hoping we can develop a body of literature from this place and about this place," she says. About wearing an editor's hat, she says, "It's exciting and I like it, and you're bound to make someone glad, and you're bound to make someone mad." Today's Edition : News | Sports | Business | Weather | Tempo | Classifieds Mail Tribune Copyright � The Mail Tribune 2000, Medford, Oregon USA