From 2008 to early 2010, I helped launch the Sustainable Prisons Project with scientist Dr. Nalini Nadkarni, formerly with The Evergreen State College in Washington State, though now heading up the Center for Science and Mathematics Education at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. It was a life-changing experience, to say the least — for Nalini and me and countless others, including staff members with the Department of Corrections and diverse men and women behind bars, many of them now released. I’m proud to see the program still thriving despite the state’s budget cuts and the inevitable challenges that face any startup. The new team continues to expand and refine initiatives, from raising endangered species for ecological restoration to helping prison facilities reduce their environmental impacts. All innovative, all results-driven, all good.

During my time with the project, we worked in four prisons in the southwestern corner of the state, ranging from minimum to maximum security for male and female populations. Reaching thousands of inmates eager to develop conservation skills — and, I believe, to remake themselves, their relationships with family members, and their future in society as a whole — our team included biologists and green business owners, master composters and recycling experts, and partners with The Nature Conservancy and the U.S. Army at Fort Lewis, the nation’s third largest military base.

Simply put, we tried to save tax dollars and natural resources while preparing inmates for life on the outside.

Is it possible? Find out for yourself. Check out the project’s website – it’s loaded with press and multimedia with an inside look at prison life — or enjoy this YouTube video created by my friends at the Department of Corrections. It’s a couple years old now but still hits the mark, plus you can see me inside the Stafford Creek Corrections Center. Looking back, I can’t help but laugh at that moment because my brow was so furrowed with concentration. What you can’t see are the guys facing me as I spoke, dozens of eyes watching, questioning, hoping. Their stares were a powerful distraction.

Life-changing? You bet. For me and, I hope, for them.

To learn more about the Sustainable Prisons Project, please contact the current project manager, Kelli Bush, at bushk@evergreen.edu or (360) 867-6863. Tell her hello for me!

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Photo: With training from the Sustainable Prisons Project, Washington State inmates propagate wildflowers for the rare pine-studded prairies at Fort Lewis, located between Tacoma and Olympia. BENJAMIN DRUMMOND

– Upton Sinclair

– David Gessner, from My Green Manifesto: Down the Charles River in Pursuit of a New Environmentalism (2011)

– Peter Trachtenberg, from Seven Tattoos

Enjoy a short video of one of my recent lessons: a beaver’s life among the lilies. Why sit at home behind a computer when your office looks like this?

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Video: Jeff teaches in the Upper Mississippi backwaters, a little spot Captain Eric calls “Beaver Bay.” ERIC DYKMAN

But Groff poked and prodded us awake, made us laugh, made us squirm, and he instilled the 50 or so students in the room with a newfound sense of urgency. Not only should we write essays or poems to complete our manuscripts, he said, but also participate in the literary community, especially near our own homes. Straightforward advice, really: Develop an identity as a working writer, maintain a blog, and support others through paid and volunteer efforts. Most of all, create a “platform” of personal and professional contacts, including social networking. “We matter most when we have readers,” Groff said, “when we connect with other people.”

I liked the guy from the start. He told us bluntly what’s at stake — that is, the competitive nature of publishing, what sells and what doesn’t. But he also said don’t fret, to write what you know and love. The key is to be yourself yet build a following for your work. Start small, keep plugging away, cultivate your audience.

So it’s in that spirit that I’ve maintained this website and published a few articles and essays, though every week I build on my manuscript, a creature far wilder and more creatively satisfying than any other writing I’ve done. Yet I also know it’s important to write for today, to be that person of letters Groff encouraged, including volunteering for worthy causes. One such cause is my local nature center, the Myrick Hixon EcoPark. It’s a small nonprofit with big ideas such as constructing “outdoor adventure playscapes,” a project that’ll take several years.

But what most intrigues me about the EcoPark is its location in the heart of La Crosse, its opportunity to interpret a river-fed marsh and expansive woodlands. When a staff member asked me to write 450 words for the organization’s quarterly newsletter — the back page with plenty of visibility — I knew that the piece would reach hundreds, if not thousands, of people. Here’s what I came up with, a little plug to get outdoors.

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Trees, Trails, and Community

– from Myrick Hixon EcoPark Newsletter (Spring 2011)

Growing up in Indiana, I loved the old sycamores along riverbanks. The white trees looked like rows of skeletons with knobby bones beneath crumbling flesh. Later, along Washington’s Cascade Crest, I hiked with autumn’s golden larches, deciduous conifers that shed their needles to withstand winter’s desiccating wind. Imagine your gray roots clinging to boulders and inch-deep topsoil. If you can survive in a frozen drought, you’ve got the skills of an Arctic explorer.

Along the Upper Mississippi, though, we’ve got soil and water to spare. Here, my eyes crave the elderly cottonwoods with limbs thicker than the trunks of most trees. Our streams tumble down sandstone bluffs and then settle in the broad floodplain, which you’ll know you’ve reached when the oaks give way to water-loving Populus deltoides. With dog-haired billions throughout the United States, eastern cottonwoods are hardly rare, but if you’re lucky to find a huge one in a city, you’ll know that community values its natural heritage.

I remember this each time I visit the EcoPark to walk or run or ride my bike. East, I can hike through the 800-acre Hixon Forest and top out on a rolling prairie, or I can head west along the meandering La Crosse River, catch a Mississippi sunset and skip a few stones. Either way, I can choose from more than 20 miles of trails, every inch owned by the City of La Crosse. But what many of us may not realize is that hundreds of people donate their time to help others enjoy the place. Volunteers from the EcoPark and Human Powered Trails contribute in all kinds of sweat-soaked ways, from laying wood chips and removing invasive species to cutting brush and repairing tread. So remember whenever you step foot on a path to give thanks for someone’s strong back.

Wisconsin’s late great conservationist Aldo Leopold said, “The landscape of any farm is the owner’s portrait of himself.” My, what a fine quote. Had he walked near the EcoPark these days, I bet he would’ve said as much about our trails. If the city could admire itself in the mirror, it would see a leafy valley at its heart. And if it looked even closer, it might see my favorite cottonwood. You can find it along the loop trail in the center of the goose-speckled marsh. Come summertime, its canopy will cast enough shade to darken half a football field. It’d take 20 hand-holding fourth graders just to circle its waist.

But don’t take my word for it. Lace up a pair of shoes that don’t mind a little springtime mud. Join the bikers, joggers, birdwatchers, and others who pass by the tree everyday.

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Photo: Jeff visits an elderly eastern cottonwood in the La Crosse River marsh. PAULA OGDEN-MUSE

Recently, during my MFA studies with Ashland University, I read a thought-provoking article by Chad Harbach, a kachina in his own right. If you have time, and especially if you’re a writer, check out Harbach’s “MFA vs. NYC” in Slate, a piece subtitled “America now has two distinct literary cultures. Which one will last?” Harbach raises good points about the endeavors my fellow students, professors, and I take so seriously as we peck away at essays and poems. Here’s one that caught my eye, given my status as a would-be author:

For the MFA writer, then, publishing a book becomes not a primary way to earn money or even a direct attempt to make money. The book instead serves as a credential. Just as the critic publishes her dissertation in order to secure a job in an ever tightening market, the fiction writer [and, I assume, nonfiction writers like me] publishes her book of stories, or her novel, to cap off her MFA. There is an element of liberation in this, however complex; the MFA writer is no longer at the whim of the market — or, rather, has entered a less whimsical, more tolerant market. The New York publishing houses become ever more fearful and defensive, battened down against the encroachments of other “media” old and new merely imagined — but the MFA writer doesn’t have to deal with those big houses. And if she does get published by one, she doesn’t need a six-figure advance. On the whole, independent and university presses (as for the poet and the critic) will do just fine. (3)

None of what Harbach said really alarmed me, especially the influence of economic factors on one culture of writers or another. Actually, I think what he has written is an analysis of writing careers more than of writing itself. Such as it is, I’m not too worried about making it big book-wise, which, he seems to imply, is the goal of the most ambitious of us. Starve, sweat, slave away, and you might produce a best seller. That is, if you attend the right parties.

Without knowing much about this topic, I’d probably take Harbach’s analysis one step further. There’s at least a third camp of writers out there, the kind pursuing or holding MFAs yet not producing much personal material or teaching in academia. It’s the folks working in marketing jobs or publications or editing or communications. Even information technology has plenty of storytellers writing and writing. I think there’s merit to that. Realism, too. And I think the skills and discipline of the MFA process can help this third culture grow, and vice versa.

As an environmental educator, I learned long ago that you can’t just teach as a naturalist — in forests, in deserts, in backwaters — and expect to make much money. No matter how much you know about plants, wildlife, and geology, a man’s gotta eat, right? Thus I became a manager and a fundraiser, a budget wrangler and a website grunt. I never stopped being a naturalist, of course, but instead grew into something more.

That said, I’m striking out into new territory, this wordsmithing close to the land, but I think I’d all do well to keep an open mind about how I’ll use my MFA. If I could end up as a “writer-teacher,” one of those college town-types Harbach pokes fun at, I’d be pretty damn happy. If not, I’ll settle with my wife somewhere in a remote patch of woods or wetlands, chronicling what I can of wild things and the people who live among them. Creative drive and adaptability are more important than drinks in Manhattan!

How about you, friends? What kind of degree or training or career have you pursued and then applied in surprising ways? I enjoy hearing how hard work and happenstance can provide a springboard to unexpected pleasures.

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Photo 1 : In 2004, above the confluence of the Skagit and Sauk rivers, Paula and Yukako Masuda survey the North Cascades as Jeff sits and scribbles in his field journal. NAO MASUDA

Photo 2: Paula and Jeff backpack on the Osa Peninsula in southwest Costa Rica, sweltering even in winter. JEFF MUSE

While I commuted to work in Olympia, Washington, one spring, faraway from my wife during weeknights, I used to stroll around a pond in the foothills, one with soupy trails along its edges and a rickety boardwalk that eked out toward the middle. Salamanders with yellow stripes on their backs, some the length of my palm, would wriggle beneath the glassy, pollen-dusted surface and then dive slowly to the detritus below. They were likely munching on the insects and arthropods that litter the bottom of most freshwater habitats. One evening, I counted more than 50 of the creatures while kneeling on the splintery planks. So much mystery within an arm’s length, I thought. Have you ever felt like that?

The scene of a pond pops into my head as I consider what I’m writing for my MFA manuscript, a question I get more and more these days as people take interest in my work. No clever metaphors, really, just an image I’ve seen countless times: tossing stones into a body of water, one after the other. When you do that, the circles trail outward forming a Venn diagram with overlapping edges. Is that a memoir or a collection of essays, I wonder, this approach to discovering and telling stories?

To be honest, I’m not sure where I’ll end up with my manuscript in a year, though my intent has been a suite of personal essays. I started there, I think, because I’ve always enjoyed reading collections much more than novel-like memoirs. There’s something about the nature of the single essay, how the all the necessary components are in place for a stand-alone story, yet not so much that the mystery is over-told. Come to think of it, I also like short fiction more than voluminous novels. Maybe I’m just drawn to small landscapes.

That said, I recognize the importance of a binding theme or a question that holds a collection together. Mine centers on my lifelong interest in wild things, though I’m not sure how that came to be. So I’m weaving this thread through other elements in my life, events that might shed light on my biophilia, from my parents’ divorce when I was a child to marrying a park ranger, or working in prisons as I was doing in Olympia that spring. I hope, too, to explore various emotions such as humor, agony, and awe — the full spectrum any of us feels. For now, I’m tossing stones and seeing where the circles overlap. The shared spaces are likely the richest stories.

What kind of creative nonfiction do you like to read, book-length memoirs or essay collections? Share a few titles and tell me why they move you. Your interests can inform my approach. Thanks!

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Photo: Jeff ponders a canoe trip in the Upper Mississippi backwaters of Wisconsin’s Perrot State Park. ADAM RUSSELL

Cabin fever, anyone? I’ve got it bad.

There’s still ice on the river in patches and dirty snow piled in parking lots, but why grumble about a chilly day when spring is on the horizon? The older I get, the more I’m smitten with the coming stretch of weeks, their aroma and color, their fecundity and promise. Were life but a journey through Aprils and Mays and especially sweet Junes — a walk through radiant green leaves and the skitter of dragonflies, their wings twinkling like daytime stars. Dramatic, I know. But that’s springtime for you.

As I write these words it’s barely March, a month named for Mars, the Roman god of war. In ancient Rome, this was the beginning of the calendar year, the start of the growing season as well as the season for battles, or at least for slogging off to one. But in our house it’s a different story: now’s the time to look skyward. Whenever my wife and I step outside these days, we survey the woods and waterways, the neighborhood parks and backyard feeders. We mark Audubon trips in our planner and set our alarm earlier to match the sunrise. We finger through field guides and carry our binoculars like talismans to ward off snowfall.

If you’re weary of winter’s grip, take comfort in the changes afoot. Soon our trees will not only be green but filled with chatter and movement. There are billions of birds on the wing like a wave about to crest — warblers from Costa Rican cloud forests, orioles from steamy Panama, Swainson’s hawks traveling 6,000 miles from the grasslands of Argentina. Sure, plenty of birds stick around the Midwest during our coldest months — chickadees and owls, for instance — and a few venture here from the Arctic to enjoy a relatively balmy winter. But springtime is when the real show begins, and we’ve got a front row seat.

The 7 Rivers Region is world-class habitat for hundreds of migrating species — raptors, waterfowl, and neotropical songbirds that rely on the Mississippi River flyway. It’s the most critical avian pipeline through the North American continent. We’ve got wetlands and open water, mixed forest and seed-packed prairies, and the bluff-cloaked topography along the Mississippi is ideal for generating thermals, plumes of rising warm air that help birds soar between the latitudes. Think of it as a blend of elevators and those magical conveyor-belt walkways through endless airport halls. Use them or miss your flight!

Forgive me for getting ahead of myself. Again, it’s only March, the time of year Aldo Leopold heralded in A Sand County Almanac:

One swallow does not make a summer, but one skein of geese, cleaving the murk of a March thaw, is the spring…[A] migrating goose, staking two hundred miles of black night on the chance of finding a hole in the lake, has no easy chance for retreat. His arrival carries the conviction of a prophet who has burned his bridges.

On second thought, that’s a somber image — a poetic but sullen goose. Instead, think about the ruby-throated hummingbird on his heels, mad-dashing from Central America. He’s sexed up, nectar-drunk and fiery, flying nonstop across the Gulf of Mexico. His wings beat 53 times per second. His heart pounds 1,200 times per minute. You think he’s worried about burning bridges or holding back his desire for spring?

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You can download this essay from the March/April 2011 issue of La Crosse Magazine here, or enjoy it as a podcast.

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Photo: Paula searches for golden eagles above the bluff’s of Wisconsin’s Perrot State Park. JEFF MUSE