Speakers Bureau Speaker
Gregory McNamee, Tucson
Gregory McNamee is a writer whose publications include twenty-six books, as well as numerous essays, short stories, articles, and translations in journals in the United States and abroad. He is a contributing editor to the Encyclopedia Britannica and writes regularly for its blog. Mr. McNamee has taught writing courses at the University of Arizona and elsewhere, and he delivers talks and lectures on writing in many venues.
Presentations may be made in Spanish.
Arizona for Newcomers
What is it that makes Arizona unique, that gives it a different flavor from neighboring New Mexico, California, Utah, and Sonora? In part the answer lies in Arizona’s longstanding habit of absorbing influences from its neighbors. Influences such as architecture, music, cuisine, and the arts are continually incorporated into Arizona’s already vibrant traditions, and served up in a unique blend of visual arts, literature, and folk life that is unlike any other.
Names on the Land
Place names are like fossil poetry.They afford a kind of folk history, a snapshot in time that enables us to read them and reconstruct how members of a culture in the past assigned names to the places they saw. The U.S. has over 3.5 million place names, and there is no part of the world where nomenclature is so rich, poetic, humorous, and picturesque. In this presentation, McNamee examines the history of Arizona place names, from Ali Shonak to Zephyr, using lively anecdotes to discuss the little-known stories behind names on the land.
The Opening of the Frontier and the Closing of the West
To an American at the end of the Revolutionary War, the frontier began in the eastern foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. To an American only a century later, the frontier was a thing of the past, destroyed by the forces of manifest destiny, closed off by fences, and made irrelevant through progress. Yet, even as new fences rise, we continue to find new frontiers. Americans, it seems, cherish the idea of an untamed wild beyond the walls. This presentation describes the tremendous historical events that signaled the opening of the frontier, its eventual closing, and on the transformative moments in between; it will help modern audiences put questions about the current, contested frontier into historical context.
River of History: A Gila Journey
Six hundred miles long from its source in the mountains of southwestern New Mexico to its confluence with the Colorado River above Yuma, the Gila has been an important avenue for the movement of populations—birds, animals, plants, and peoples—across the desert for millennia. McNamee, author of the prizewinning book Gila: The Life and Death of an American River, presents a biography of this vital resource, drawing on Native American stories, pioneer memoirs, the writings of modern naturalists such as Aldo Leopold and Edward Abbey, and other sources.
