photo by James G. Gehling for the NY Times

Looks kinda like a gang sign, no? A tribal tattoo? Something from The Matrix?

Actually, it’s a fossil from a time we know very little about, in terms of biology.  The Precambrian era was a very long hunk of time — about 4 billion years, to be imprecise — that predated the explosion of life characterizing the Cambrian period, 542 to 490 million years ago.  An article in yesterday’s NY Times by Sean B. Carroll describes recent work by geologists and paleontologists to access fossils prior to that period of intense proliferation.  In places like the Namibian Desert and the evocatively named Mistaken Point on the Avalon Peninsula of Newfoundland, they’ve discovered fossils that provide interesting, if puzzling, clues to the evolution of life from simple single-celled creatures to the more complex animals with bilateral body symmetry that showed up during the Cambrian.

This is news? Rock lays on rock, right?  Shouldn’t they just be able to look lower to find fossils from an older period?  After all, we know life dates as far back as three and a half billion years.

The trouble is,  there’s a lengthy period of the earth’s history — roughly 1.2 billion years — that’s gone AWOL.  Lost and unaccounted-for.  And disappeared with it are the trace evidence of life — the fossils — that might clarify the transition from billions of years of unicellular simplicity to the startling development of structural and functional complexity.

Geologists call this (writers, you will love this) The Great Unconformity.  To me that conjures pictures of a turn-of-the-century magician, a man out of step with his time in a mysterious and possibly lucrative and alluringly shady way, who must perpetually dodge efforts by the more boring conformities to toss him in jail and throw away the key.

No, no.  The Great Unconformity for geologists is a gap in the rock record.  You can actually lay your hand on it.  Go to the outcrop on highway 337 near the Doc Long Picnic Area in the Sandia Mountains east of Albuquerque.  Lay your hand so your thumb points down and you can touch granite 1.4 billion years old with your lower digit; your pinkie will rest on sandstone from the Mississippian Period, roughly a billion years younger.

The significant distinguishing factor?  Precambrian rock almost everywhere is devoid of fossils.  No evidence of life.  While the massive sediments that accrued while this neck of the wood lay under vast inland seas are teeming with fossils of creatures who roamed the murky depths and crawled up onto the shores.

The Great Unconformity.  No-life to rampant life.  Ever remind you of your writing?

Whoa, now.  I know.  Hell of a leap.  But, still:  though the analogy is far from watertight, I think there’s something interesting in thinking about how those sometimes dull and awkward first drafts can morph into writing that’s possessed of a life of its own; something bigger, somehow, than the me what made it.

It feels like that to me, sometimes.  A quickening.  The quicksilver leap from raw material to a thing of beauty and intelligence and for which I can take only some of the credit.

And maybe not so quick, really.  Because the only way I know to get from A to B is through tuned-in exploration, patient excavation, and a really good dose of luck.

Not unlike the paleontologists who have hunted down the mystery fossils in the land lost to time.

We took field trips two days of the five, but the other three days found us inside at a conference table. We talked about place in writing, traded stories about specific places in our personal memories, put pen to paper for timed writing exercises, and assembled a list of books that offer valuable insights to the writer wishing to access the power of place in her work. I diligently wrote those titles on a large flip chart we kept handy throughout the week. I less than diligently forgot to transfer the list to a notebook before leaving at the end of the week — !!!!– so what follows is an incomplete record.

You’ll all have to pitch in.  Anybody remember others?  Any readers want to add personal favorites to the list?

Here, then, are ten books I’ve found particularly useful in thinking about writing place:

The Meadow. James Galvin. I return to this novel every few years for Galvin’s acute observations, breathtaking prose, and sheer love of a particular place and the man who embodies it in human form. Read more about Galvin’s craft here.

Home Ground. Barry Lopez and Debra Gwartney (catch a review of Home Ground here). A lexicon of terms Americans have used to describe physical places.

Mayordomo. Stanley Crawford. We talked about how work offers a useful lens on place, and this memoir of serving as head honcho for a New Mexican village acequia — the network of ditches that water the agriculture in this area — is a good example.

Power. Linda Hogan. This novel, set in Florida, is as mysterious and unsettling as all of her work. Read Linda Hogan and the power of place for more background.

Wisdom Sits in Places. Keith Basso. An anthropologist’s account of decades of work with the Western Apache, whose landscape is annotated by stories that remind people how to live.

Broken. Lisa Jones. A recent work of non-fiction about a quadriplegic horse gentler whose powers extend to healing people in the harsh and beautiful windswept plains of Wyoming. Compelling.

Divisadero. Michael Ondaatje. This novel works the power of the weather — in this case, a rogue blizzard — for all it’s worth.

Enormous Changes at the Last Minute. Grace Paley. Stories of urban New York by a modern master. Find out why I miss Grace Paley, who died in 2007.

The Things They Carried. Tim O’Brien. Everything essential about a small group of soldiers in Vietnam is revealed by — you guessed it — the things they carried. An astonishing novel.

Invisible Cities. Italo Calvino. Calvino imagines his way along Marco Polo’s route in a series of short bursts of brilliance.

What titles have inspired you?

The stack by my bedside grows. I just picked up Marilynne Robinson’s ABSENCE OF MIND, which sounds a bit like a murder mystery title but is instead a meditation on the tension between science and religion. Being a science geek with a decidedly non-empirical approach to the world, I’m pretty excited to read what she has to say on this topic.

Robinson is one of our finest novelists writing today. Wait; that sounded lukewarm, and I am scalding hot in my appreciation for this writer’s work. I read GILEAD straight through, and then I turned back to the start and read it all over again. HOUSEKEEPING; HOME — these are master works by a writer who marries an achingly beautiful approach to language to a penetrating inquiry into the nature of morality, particularly as it pertains to human relationships.

And who writes a damn good story.

Speaking of which — I’ve just finished two of those.  Susan Breen‘s THE FICTION CLASS came out in 2008 and I’ve just now read it.  Breen is one of those rare writers who can make you laugh all the way through and then fell you with the earned sentiment at the end.  This novel follows a woman — Arabella Hicks, named for the heroine of a romance novel — who teaches fiction to a colorful assortment of beginners in New York City while juggling the demands of her aging, ailing mother.  Wry, sly, and with not a touch of meanness, THE FICTION CLASS made me laugh, made me tear up, made me laugh again.  I developed a lasting fondness for the characters and for Arabella herself, an old-fashioned and at the same time thoroughly contemporary woman doing her bumbling best to make sense of a world through the stories it offers her.  Extra pleasure for anyone who’s ever taught fiction.

I turned from NYC of THE FICTION CLASS to the Los Angeles and Salton Sea of  CUT AWAY, a short and breathtaking novel by Catherine Kirkwood and published by the inimitable Red Hen Press. Kirkwood has the corner on stunning sentences; this novel may be short in pages, but it’s long on poetry. Surefooted, inquiring, cool in the very best manner, CUT AWAY follows three women whose lives intersect as each gives chase to a missing teenager, a girl who fled her home in search of a clearer understanding of her own identity. Each of these adult women, too, seeks to understand who she is beneath the multiple disguises she herself wears. Los Angeles may be the city of hard surfaces, but it’s the arid, unforgiving landscape of the Salton Sea that serves up the most accurate mirror for these characters — and Kirkwood’s prose is a match for that unrelenting honesty, yielding pleasure at every turn.

You reading anything good, lately?  Or has the world outside snatched your time, too?

photo by Kathy Namba

Yesterday morning we woke up to spring snow, a layer of white that melted well before noon. Beautiful! Except for the fact that we’ve got apricot trees growing in our new digs here in Taos, and the branches are loaded with delicate white blossoms that mean a bumper crop of fruit this summer — IF they can make it through spring without freezing.

It’s a long shot, I know.  One good year in seven are the general odds for apricots in Taos County.  Last year we were swimming in fruit, so I ought to quit being so greedy and just enjoy the snow.

Hanging out among the blooming branches of fruit trees is one of my most favorite, how’d-you-get-so-lucky kind of ways to spend an idle hour. Bees buzzing, sun streaming past the petals, the smell that’s too earthy to call ambrosia. Who wants to go to heaven when you can sit in the crotch of an apple tree here and let heaven settle around you?

My friend Lucy Gonzales wrote about that experience in a writing class I taught in Questa in 2002. Eight years later, she’s got a book out — Treasures of My Valley:  Humor and Survival in Early 20th Century San Luis Valley – that describes not just the joys of spring but also the hardships of growing up native New Mexican, and the resourcefulness and cooperation it inspired. She’s got tales of picking wild raspberries, wearing bloomers sewn from flour sacks, driving a tractor, raising five kids, burying a husband. She’s got a lot of stories. Lucy is 92.

But the story I love best is the way she describes her “secret place.”

I’ve been thinking about this a lot, about secrets in general and secret places in particular. One of the most provocative panels I attended at AWP considered the use of other people’s private details in fiction. What kind of responsibility do we have to the owners of those details when we borrow them for our own work?

Put another way, how much respect should we pay to the privacy of other people’s personal lives?

And places? Even our own places? Can we describe them without revealing their location? Can I say what they mean to me without insisting they mean the same for someone else?

I almost didn’t go to the panel.  Me? I’m hugely respectful of other people’s privacy (I thought). I rarely use details that arise directly from experience, my own or anyone else’s (I thought).  When I write, I take the kernel of a thought or an experience and cultivate it in my imagination (“culture it in a petri dish” is probably a more apt analogy, given the messy state of my mind) so that what emerges will, I HOPE, resound with the emotional truth of the original impulse while bearing no identifiable relation to that specific motivating detail.

But I went, and realized … all that “no sir, not me” stuff? Kinda bullshit.

All writers do it. Autobiographical or not — and I land far on the “not” end of the spectrum — we use the raw stuff of our daily lives as grist for the mill.

So the moral issue stands, for all of us. And sometimes it means a hard, hard choice. Abandon the felicitous detail — the one perfect capsule of meaning that motivates the whole story — or risk treading on something deeply valued by someone else.

Is there a way that the transformative power of art justifies this kind of theft? That’s not a rhetorical question. I’m really asking.

‘Cause, the way it feels to me? If I use a secret — my own, or someone else’s — I’m risking some kind of bad karma. I’m risking having that thought or secret or experience taken away from me.  Door closed.  Story over.

Oddly enough, I excuse memoirists from this exchange — on the basis that we each own our own interpretation of our personal history. Memoir carries in its membership rules the one that says:  this is how I see it.

In fiction, we are doing something different.

Aren’t we?

Well, AWP was great.  Provocative panels, terrific new people, chewy ideas, plenty of gossip, only a few too many glasses of wine. Even the food thing worked out okay, if you discount the late-night Domino’s pizza in the room.  (Pepperoni and pineapple. That’s how I really know I’m on vacation.)  I loved hanging out with other writers, talking crap and craft, listening to snippets of new work, exchanging suggestions.

And then we all went home.

I’ll have lots to say in future posts about craft and such — issues that were raised in panels and bandied about after — but for today I’m thinking a lot about community.  How do you sustain an atmosphere of mutual support and encouragement when you’re back home, working solo at your desk, facing that blank page?

Here in Taos, we have a lively bunch of writers and a lovely organization, SOMOS, that supports and promotes the literary arts, both spoken and written, in the region.  SOMOS has been around for something like 20 years, the brainchild of a bunch of civic-minded writers who wanted to organize for their own benefit and at the same time share their knowledge and energy with young emerging writers and other community members.

Other, larger communities have similar organizations.  Minneapolis has The Loft (world renowned), D.C. has The Writers Center, Boston has Grub Street, Denver has Lighthouse Writers Workshop.  Representatives from these four groups joined to present a panel on Creating Literary Community, offering ideas and recounting useful stories from their experiences.

Highlights?  Here are a few.  And, though their suggestions are mainly directed toward large, urban populations, there’s plenty of food for thought for smaller places, too.

1. Know your core mission.  Are you there to connect writers?  To develop readership?  To reach out to underserved groups? To promote professional development among your membership?  You may be doing all of these things.  It helps to formalize your aims and periodically assess your progress.
2. Strive to maintain quality of programming while you welcome writers (and readers) of all levels.
3. Try to work toward a balanced funding stream.  It isn’t always easy. The panelists had a lot to say about securing funding in the current economic climate.
4. Promote accessibility.  Are your programs affordable?  Do you have a welcoming, easily accessed space?  Do all community members feel invited?
5. Be creative in your ideas and approaches, but strive to maintain a consistent identity.

These are organizations with big budgets and impressive workshop schedules.  Here in Taos, SOMOS operates on a shoestring and offers much more circumscribed programming.  Even so, these folks sent me home with lots of thoughts for how to improve things here in my own community.

What works for you?  Do you have a writers group?  Do you correspond with writers who live at a distance?  Are you part of a local organization, or aspire to start one? Do you reach out to younger writers, or know where to turn when you need advice or mentoring?  What ideas or strategies can you offer others?

I’m just home from giving a talk and a reading at the local college to an Intro to Literature class.  (My friend Sean Murphy, himself an accomplished novelist, is the teacher.)  The students, a wonderfully diverse group, were interested, informed, empathetic, and involved on a deeply personal level.  It reminded me how important it is for writers to get out and talk both to their current readers — and to people who might someday be inspired to pick up a book, just because they heard somebody talk about stories with passion and relevance.

What are your thoughts on creating literary community where you live?

Maybe you already write the west.  Maybe you write everything but.  Maybe you want to, but can’t get a handle on it for all the iconic imagery.  Maybe your own west is a personal thing, the downhill side of your body when you’re walking the flank of a favorite mountain, the uphill side when you’re ambling back.

But if you’ve ever thought about these questions — how to engage in words, that is, this mythic landscape, with its checkered history — you may want to head for the Associated Writing Program’s annual conference next week in Denver.  If you get there, you’ll find thousands of others for whom these questions are neither trivial nor fully answered.

Not to mention the thousands who could care less about writing the west, and have come only because, well, it’s the AWP, and God knows what would happen if they missed one.

There’s something addictive about the experience, I’ll admit.  Being among throngs of other writers for 3 days, talking shop, making connections, entertaining new ideas, trading insider secrets.  Drinking overpriced cocktails.  Bumping into semi-famous people. Catching that one explosively brilliant panel presentation that will provide you with grist for the mill for at least the whole trip home.

Noisy, exhausting AWP:  3 days in overpriced hotels eating bad food and keeping your cell phone on vibrate so that maybe you’ll feel it, at least — since you sure won’t ever hear it ring.  But if you’re lucky, you will go away energized, raring to return to your work.

I’m excited about this one.  It will be my third, and I’m kind of getting the hang of these things.  It’s nice to spend time amid so concentrated a group of writers.  And, even though there’s a lot of emphasis on creative writing programs and the growing credentializing (is that a word?) of the profession, there’s still an honest respect for the independent writer.  Even better, there’s a kind of collective awe around the literary work itself.

These are people who love to read.  They believe good writing matters.  God bless ‘em.

If you’re there, come see me.  I’m speaking on a panel on Thursday morning, 9 am, in rooms 102 and 104, street level of the Colorado Convention Center.  That one’s called “Writing the West:  the Transplanted Writer as Literary Outsider.”  I’ll be joined by Uma Krishnaswami, Pam Houston, and Rob Wilder.  My second panel is with E.J. Levy, Valerie Martinez, and Sawnie Morris, and is called “Border Crossings:  Women Writing the West Across Genres.”  It’s at noon on Saturday, Room 108 of the Convention Center.

More fun stuff:  I’ll be part of a reading offered by Taos writers at the Mercury Cafe, 2199 California Street, Denver, on Wednesday from 6-7:30.  Might just tell a story about a big black dog, a fast-running ditch, and a very drunk woman.  The next night there’s a 10th-anniversary party for A Room of Her Own Foundation at Mario’s Double Daughters, and the drinks will be flowing.  You don’t have to be attending AWP to come to either of these.  They’re both free, and open to everybody.

I expect there’ll be a fair amount to report from Denver, so be sure to check back.  And I’d love to hear from you — here on the blog, or in person up at the event — if these are questions you care about.  Feel free to write in and suggest a guest post, or just comment below.  You can reach me directly at summerwood@taosmesa.com.

And you know what else?  It’s spring.

Which makes me VERY happy.

Ah, vacation. Time off, a change of scenery, and no laptops tethering us to the cyberworld.

Just the world itself, out the front windshield of the mini Cooper.

(photo by Kathy Namba)

We headed for the western edge of the Gila Wilderness (first spot so designated in the country – thanks to Aldo Leopold and his forward vision) and spent the night in Glenwood. The next morning we hiked the Catwalk beside the river, made plans to return for hot springs and cliff dwellings and more, and headed for Tucson.

The little toy car forded the flooded road sections, and the two of us reveled in the sheer joy of being on a road trip.  We crossed country we’d never seen before and let the landscape steal our attention from thoughts of work and everyday life.

Even if you love your life, there’s something indispensable about leaving it behind for a while, giving your mind a rest from the one-thing-after-another aspect of it all. With a road trip the travel itself, the movement from one place to the next and the next, substitutes for plot. It’s enough just to look.

Part of what I watched for (besides cactus, which I’ve long been crazy about, and rock formations, a new obsession) – was the frequency of roadside memorials to friends and family lost at treacherous turns in the road. In New Mexico we call them descansos, the homemade markers that celebrate a life while they mourn its loss. They stand as a reminder that any stretch of highway offers a good opportunity to rocket out of this life.

But they do more than just put a shine on a sense of mortality; in a weird but charming way, they personalize the relationship between humans and the land. Render it more specific. Here, at this place, somebody left her body behind.

A loved body, in a lot of cases.

I couldn’t help but remember the story my uncle Rolland told of his great-great Uncle Stephen and Aunt Elvira, who ventured west in a wagon train, had a baby en route, and turned back – returned to Ohio – when a snakebite proved fatal for their infant son.

And it made me wonder. When you die, do you miss yourself?

No, stay with me. Here’s what I was thinking. You know how deeply we miss the ones we love, once they go? Even places, once we’ve been separated from them? I wonder if there’s maybe a moment in the midst of the act – the experience – of dying, when some part of you can look (sure, metaphorically) on the body, the whole self, being left behind, and just, well, plain, miss yourself. Not all that went with it; just that specific human body, written on by time and the weather.

Reminded me of that great Basho haiku, written on the occasion of the death of his young son (trans. Robert Hass):

The world of dew

is a world of dew, and yet –

and yet.

Then we got to Tucson and ate a lot of great food and slept in a great place and got back in the car and drove north to Gold Canyon and saw wonderful friends and drank some astonishing tequila and slept again and then we got back in the car and came home, to work and — yes — beloved everyday life.

Last time I promised more Siberia. Lucky you! There’s plenty of it to go around.

There’s so much Siberia, in fact, that it took Ian Frazier and two Russian pals five weeks and two days to cross it in a diesel-powered Renault step van. He wrote about the experience in a two-part article The New Yorker published last August.

Nearly anywhere Ian Frazier goes, I will follow. I first encountered his writing in Great Plains, his non-fiction account of the huge hunk of land (and its various denizens, human and otherwise) that makes up the American midsection. (Here’s a good interview with Frazier, discussing On the Rez, another of his books.)

Clearly, this is a man unfazed by size.

But if the American Midwest is big, Siberia occupies a different order of magnitude. All of the continental U.S. and most of Europe could fit in the broad swath of land – forty-six hundred miles wide – that’s loosely considered Siberia. It doesn’t exist, officially. Not as a political entity, anyway. But try telling that to the world’s largest forest, the vast expanse of tundra, and the miles on miles of steppe that comprise the region. Try telling that to the thirty-eight million Russians and native people who live there. (If you can find them.)

Try telling New Yorker readers about a landscape that foreign and that daunting – and you’d better have a few tricks up your sleeve to make it work.

My disinterest in Siberia notwithstanding, I read the article, “Travels in Siberia,” with absolute relish the first time through. And then I read it again, more carefully, to try to understand how Frazier manages to keep our keen interest while plowing through material that might more likely be encountered in a sixth-grade report.

The names of the mountains. The names of the rivers. The political borders. The climate, mineral reserves, transportation system, flora and fauna and history. Are you asleep yet?

Not if you’re reading the article. If you’re reading, you’re on the edge of your chair. The river does what? you say. No shit! How big are the logs? How cold does it get? Tell me more!

Because you are there, and that’s your buddy Ian pointing out some of the more interesting aspects of the place to you. He’s giving you some background information, weaving his presence, his agile intelligence, his wit, and his personal credibility into language that is both accessible and deftly structured for maximum pleasure.

If you give much thought to rhetoric – not just how to construct an argument, but, more broadly, how to structure any written work to persuade the reader to join your corner – this article is a goldmine of successful strategies.

The Ural Mountains, which cross Russia north to south from the Arctic Ocean to Kazakhstan, are the western edge of Siberia. The Urals also separate Europe from Asia. As a mountain range with the big job of dividing two continents, the Urals aren’t much. It is possible to drive over them, as I have done, and not know. In central Russia, the summits of the Urals average between one thousand and two thousand feet. But after you cross the Urals the land opens out, the villages are farther apart, the concrete bus shelters along the highway become fewer, and suddenly you realize you’re in Siberia.

In general, abstract facts are stingily allotted short sentences. Frazier saves his words for the tangible – what the reader can see, hear, feel, imagine – and varies the sentence length so that no paragraph feels overburdened with either fact or image. And he is constantly, constantly interjecting narrative: the obvious narrative line of his travels, and the oblique introduction of brief stories to illustrate ideas.

Makes me want to go somewhere. Kathy and I are headed to Tucson for a brief jaunt – springtime in the desert, all that jazz – but we’ve been kicking around the idea of a longer trip, too. We’re thinking maybe it would be fun to take a month and walk the Camino de Santiago across Spain.

In the meantime, I’m content to travel along with writers who can make me see and smell and feel the place they’re moving through.

Any recommendations of writers who have done that for you?

With all apologies due James Taylor, there’s something powerful about the way a place – even a place you’ve never visited – can stand in for a state of being.

Siberia? I think: Cold. Isolation. Hard labor. Okay, tundra. Maybe caribou.

There are few places in the world I don’t want to go to as much as I don’t want to go to Siberia.

Not so for the unnamed narrator of Per Petterson’s latest novel, TO SIBERIA. Called Sistermine by the brother she adores, she dreams of traveling the vast region by rail, leaving her native Denmark to escape to a place of “open skies that were cold and clear, where it was easy to breathe and easy to see for long distances.”

Like Petterson’s 2007 OUT STEALING HORSES, TO SIBERIA gathers its emotional weight from the intersection of personal life with the rise of the Nazi threat in northern Europe. As her brother becomes increasingly involved in the Resistance movement, her own isolation and disengagement grow more profound as she watches the effect of the war on her parents, her neighbors, her schoolmates, her town.

Many of Petterson’s gifts evident in OUT STEALING HORSES – the later, more mature work – are on display in this novel as well. His long lines, with their unconventional breaks. His descriptions of place, less often as landscape and more as a felt experience of water and rock, a way of breathing, the chill in the bones and sounds carrying down the streets of the town. Some of his images are breathtaking: a fisherman approaches, the holes in his layered wool sweaters overlapping at places; the girl and her brother lie on cows for their warmth, matching their breathing to the animals’ deep respiration.

TO SIBERIA is no match for OUT STEALING HORSES in its psychological acuity, though. For me, there’s something off in the author’s efforts to capture the sexual awakening of a young woman. There’s a kind of narrative flatness in the sex scenes that seems intended to stand in for the character’s overall social estrangement – making them function more as a device and less as a natural outgrowth of who she is.

But when she dreams of Siberia, it’s a place where “the houses are built of timber that gives off the good smell of tar and warmth in summer, and when the long winter sets in the glow stays in the logs and never fades. The wood contracts and waits and stretches out when spring comes and drinks in the wind and the sun.”

That’s sexier than it ever gets in the rest of the novel.

Next up: Ian Frazier goes to the real Siberia – and gets bitten, real bad. Stay tuned.

And for you?  Any place carry a mythic weight?

I spent much of last night watching the TV and staring at the computer screen, stunned by the images of a Haiti under siege. The disastrous earthquake and its death toll, the very literal ticking clock as relief workers toil to rescue those still trapped, and the misery among the survivors – who will face not days or weeks but years of work to rebuild their lives – it’s a disaster of such scale that it’s almost impossible to comprehend.

Haitian-born author Edwidge Danticat is a MacArthur Fellow and the author of Krik? Krak! and Breath, Eyes, Memory, among other books. She spoke with Amy Goodman of Democracy Now about Haiti’s troubles (“Haiti devastated…”). In the report – which combined reports of collapsed buildings and general mayhem with some history of Haiti and Haitian immigration to the US – Danticat mentioned the work of some of the long-standing relief organizations doing positive work in the country.

One of those, Paul Farmer’s Partners in Health, was profiled by author Tracy Kidder in the bestselling Mountains Beyond Mountains. The organization’s mission is “to provide a preferential option for the poor in health care,” and they’re fulfilling it in an inspiring way. Right now is a good time to donate at the Partners in Health website.

The health care needs of this country, always enormous, have increased exponentially in the wake of this disaster. The Red Cross, USAID, and teams of rescue workers and medical providers from around the globe have rushed to bring aid to the injured and supplies to those in need. Part of the problem, though – said a weary Nan Buzard, a senior Red Cross coordinator in the country – is the difficulty presented by the need to transport supplies through a devastated countryside.

Accurately updated maps and other geographic information is critical in any disaster. That’s why I’m so impressed by the work of MapAction, a British-based NGO that works to provide “frequently updated situation maps showing where relief help is most urgently needed.” They take a boots-on-the-ground approach to gathering and assembling geographical data that can help advise relief agencies on blocked transportation routes, physical dangers, and other impediments to their work, helping them make decisions and save valuable time.

They’ve published a free downloadable handbook called MapAction Field Guide to Humanitarian Mapping. It teaches relief workers how to use free, open-source Geographic Information System (GIS) software to guide their humanitarian operations.