>La Grande Observer | Union and Wallowa Counties' News Leader

PROF, POET, EDITOR: Books surround David Axelrod at his home in La Grande. (Observer/LAURA MACKIE-HANCOCK).

By Jeff Petersen

Staff Writer

hough the earth has a remarkable capacity to recover from whatever humans dish out, humans also need to be good stewards of what is most alive in the world around us.

"I'd much rather cultivate a place than migrate from place to place," says author David Axelrod, whose new book "Troubled Intimacies: A Life in the Interior West" (192 pages, OSU Press, $18.95) has just been published.

A short reading and book signing is scheduled from 1 to 3 p.m. Saturday at Sunflower Books.

The book explores life in the rural West and such themes as "to live here without a distracting desire for elsewhere."

Axelrod began thinking about writing a book like "Troubled Intimacies" in the mid-1990s, when he completed the long poem, "The Kingdom at Hand." He began looking at all the parts he had cut from that poem, issues that needed to be explored, an exploration that could be better accomplished in prose.

After many false starts, he began writing the book in the spring of 1999 and finished a year and a half later with a draft much in need of serious editing.

"I always seem to write more than I need to," he says. "But I try to be agreeable with my editors and readers, and nine times out of 10 when they ask me to trim something it merely confirms what I already suspected — that the passages in question are very easy to cross out."

Axelrod, a professor of English at Eastern Oregon University, grew up in Alliance, Ohio, in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. The area around his home was clearcut in the 19th century and then strip mined, leaving behind tailings piles and fouled streams.

"And yet, it was a landscape that, no matter how terrible the industrial uses were, if left alone the land insisted on bringing back its wildness," Axelrod says. "It became a strong metaphor for me about how we might survive and live better lives if we honored what is wild and most alive."

Treated as a commodity alone, the West shares many similarities with the Ohio of his youth. Axelrod's book explores such issues as the relationship between humans and the landscape, the attitudes we have toward the land and its inhabitants, and the inevitable results of those attitudes.

"I propose that we cultivate our place in the world rather than strip it bare for profit," he says. "I mean this literally in terms of urban and rural spaces, but also in a cultural and aesthetic sense as well."

The cover design of Axelrod's book is by Kat Galloway, EOU assistant professor of art. The design shows an Eastern Oregon landscape, rimrocks above the Fossil dump.

"It's a lovely image of the troubling ruptures that occur within intimately known spaces," Axelrod says.

Axelrod is currently finishing a memoir, "Confessions of a Junkyard Dog," and is shopping around with publishers a new collection of poems, "The Cartographer's Melancholy."

"The memoir has convinced me that I never want to write another memoir. The poetry, however, is the best I've ever written," he says. "And the fact is, I couldn't have written either of these without first writing ‘Troubled Intimacies.' "