Beaver's Fire: A Regional Portfolio (1970–2010) ed. by George Venn (review)

Beaver's Fire isn't the usual collection of a literary scholar's papers, unillustrated essays all about the same length and written for essentially the same academic audience, arranged by subject, updated and somewhat reworked for the new context. Instead, it's a compilation of documents, illustrated texts of widely varying lengths and types, arranged in reverse chronological order, reprinted as previously published, each prefaced by an account of its composition, prior presentation, and reception. It's a big book—in format, length, and range.

The first piece—the one from which the book takes its title and the only one not in reverse chronological order—offers an implicit suggestion on how to approach this large and diverse array. Presented in 2002 as a speech at Eastern Oregon University, "Beaver (Tàxcpol) and the Grande Ronde River (Welíwe)" tells the Nez Perce story of how Beaver stole fire from the Pine Trees. The implication of this tale's placement is that the texts that follow are so many live coals gathered and shared to kindle intellectual fires—an apt metaphor.

The "coals" take many forms. There are book reviews, biographical sketches, critical essays, addresses, and transcripts of interviews and symposia. There is even an annotated reading list and, as the penultimate selection, a piece of historical fiction. In these various texts, Venn is often more curator than author. His role has been to seize the live coals—to edit rough transcripts, assert their importance, and find publishers for them. Prime instances of this are the World War II photographs and letters of Fred Hill and the 1877 Nez Perce War diary of C. E. S. Wood. These instances of recovery reflect both the range of Venn's interests and the extent to which they connect with place, especially the northeast corner of Oregon, where he has lived since coming to teach at Eastern Oregon University in 1970.

Venn met Fred Hill, a photographer and fellow resident of La Grande, Oregon, during research on Minor White's short WPA stint in La Grande and undertook to make Hill's wartime photographic work and personal story known by collaborating with him on the book Darkroom Soldier (2007). In the case of the literary and public figure C. E. S. Wood, it was controversy over the authenticity of Nez Perce Chief Joseph's famous "Surrender Speech," for which Wood's somewhat varying texts have been the source, that spurred Venn's research on this early soldier phase of Wood's career.

Letters and diaries are not the only words of others that share space with Venn's in Beaver's Fire. Interviewees—Ursula LeGuin, Carolyn Kizer, and Richard Hugo—have their spirited say, responding to questions not from Venn but from, respectively, a group of university writers, Tim Barnes, and Ronald H. Bayes. In the transcript of a 1980 conference on "Northwest Poetry and the Land" one hears the articulate, mature voices of Hugo, Madeline DeFrees, and William Stafford. There, strikingly, one also hears the young Venn, struggling to formulate his vision of the importance of actual place against Stafford's forceful statement of the power of the imagination to range and its susceptibility to influences from elsewhere and from other elements besides landscape.

In later, composed pieces of his own, Venn would eloquently convey what that vision implied for any artist living and working in a place remote from cultural capitals and, more specifically, for Oregon-based authors. In the final passage of the 1987 "meditative essay collage" (265), "Marking the Magic Circle," the title piece of a collection that garnered an Oregon Book Award, Venn resonantly declares,

An artist who chooses not to live in political or population centers, who chooses not to become an alien to the oldest and most immediate sources of human nurture, who chooses not to become a victim of nationalism—such an artist must assert the region as microcosm—this locust...