Foundation and enough to say the taxpayers Washington State as part of the building for the arts project. I looked all of our funders but especially of public funding for the arts. Im hoping this might be returned to town hall for some of you are familiar with this building but havent been back for a couple of years. During the time weve been renovating, this is still a soft launch for the space, different elements like signage and bar and cafe service have yet to come online so bear with us. September is the real formal launch of townhall with a big festival of programs we recently announced the you can see on our website town hall seattle. Org. Check us out. We are really happy to reopen and get going with the program especially in the sure which is a new space for us. Thank you for being our guinea pigs. I do know and a couple gifts that this is a little cold in here, we have adjusted the thermostats and are trying to make it more comfortable. Im sorry about that. In the meantime as we are experimenting we are so happy to host office like anthony began. We wanted to jump on this because hes both a powerful voice and a voice to lift himself to this brilliant important topic for america and for the pacific northwest, identity and using a poetic literary sensibility to intersect with his political and social forces and thats exactly what wed like to do here at townhall. If this is your first town hall event this is by the type of thing youd like, please keep in touch with us where members support organization. Thank you for the member is in the, membership information is available. The format tonight is going to be a talk which should be but 4550 minute after which we had time for q a. We are grateful to the good people at cspans booktv devere tonight who are recording this. Partly for that reason we would love if we can get people with questions as questions on microphone. We have microphone here we will move out when we get to the q a section. If youre able to make your with a around their lineup along the wall. After all thats will be a book signing. Copies of shadowlands available for sale. Anthony will be signing afterwards. Now what you hear to see tonight. Anthony mccann was born and raised in the hudson valley. Although i recently learned we were chatting even just a block away away from your in the mid90s right before this organization moved in a 1999. He is the author four collections of poetry including seeing music in my garden and i heart your fate. Anthonys teaching writing a Research Institute 19th and 20th and 21st century north american poetry. The lyrical theology, political ecology, native american history, history of the revolution a constitutional and reconstruction eras. Ecological history of the american west, cultural anthropology, modern latin america poetry and anarchist thought and practice as it pertains to art making, politics. That eclectic and pretty faceting list of interest i think can give you beginning sense of why his voice was uniquely suited to lend itself to this story. He is the poet laureate of machine project and also teaches courses at the California Institute of the arts as well as University California riverside palm desert program. But as i mention hes here tonight to discuss his new Nonfiction Book, shadowlands fear and freedom at the oregon standoff. Please join me in welcoming anthony mccann. [applause] [laughing] careful there in the front row. Theres lots of excitability in this story, if you guys are familiar with that. This book, it is a Nonfiction Book about a current event but it is not maybe in the same vein as many such books. As you just heard in the introduction i come to this not as traditional journalist, but as [inaudible] as you would in the introduction, i come to this story not from a career as a traditional journalist, but as a creative journalist and as a poet. And that informed of the book, how the project was approached and have the book was written. So i will be sharing a sequence of passengers from the book with you tonight that follow a certain thread through the story to which important content is a test. There are many strands in many threads to this story. Just briefly to explain how it came to be obsessed enough with the story to write this book, i live in the Mojave Desert and around the time i had moved fulltime to the desert. I was writing what i thought was a very different kind of book, maybe a book more associated with poets and poetry, or i thought thats what is doing. It turned out thats not what i was doing. I thought id write a book of lyrical essays, interconnected essays about the desert, the extent of the desert and expense of time and expense of history it a place like the desert with the experience of time in society is dislocated. Different aspects are highlighted differently. I was particularly interested in ideas about, ideas of [inaudible] associate with certain around the time this event happen that research of the book leading to a lot of reading about native American Movement particularly ones that had the place, meaning many native American Religion across a whole history of the continent the some of the most famous once took place in the colonial policy and the great basin desert. And around the time i was doing research suddenly i would go to people, a very different messianic credo, occupied the Malheur National wildlife refuge at the beginning of 2016 come in an event i assume you guys remember a little bit that got a lot of coverage, a lot of people think a lot of attention to at the time. A lot of things have happened since then. Maybe youre forgotten some of the details, but what happened basically was a man named ammon bundy, the son of a nevada rancher he would get all the news a couple years earlier in 2014 over a standoff at the ranch, the bundy from the ranch in nevada over a long stint dispute over management of federal land. New regulations on cattle grazing brought about by adl that the city of las vegas was able to make in order to keep growing after the desert tortoise was listed as an endangered species brought new grazing restrictions to the place where the bundy family raised their cattle and the bundy family chose not to accept those and no longer mechanize the federal government through what many would regard as a creative interpretation of the constitution. Which we would get into later. Two years later another change involving a rancher, and ranching family caught the attention of ammon bundy and inspired by the holy spirit as you here in just a second. He felt the need we felt compelled almost against his will, he plan to intervene in this story, and that led to an armed confrontation of the refuge and a whole other sequence of events that have been going for a number of years since then, and which ive been following ever since the story sucked me in in january 2016. So i want to begin at the beginning. With ammon, and give you a feeling for the instigator of the whole drama. Can anybody hear me . Does everything sound okay back there for you . [inaudible] louder . Lets see, how is that . Just dont turn away. [laughing] will see how i can shout. I can get really growly. [inaudible] ive got enough water. Dear friends, my dear friends,. [inaudible] every time someone hits play from 2016 all the way to the end of the [inaudible] along the invisible pathway the virtual tabernacle the World Wide Web ammon bundy was calling his people to the desert. They called the patriot movement, activating [inaudible] it was time, ammon was saying for what he called a hard stand. Thered been some confusion about what he meant in previous communique. He received pushback. He sat down in front of the camera to try to clear things up. He had a cowboy hat. Weeks later on a Mountain Road he wore a western checkered shirt [inaudible] he couldnt help [inaudible] clean cut to the core. Before being summoned to the desert of organ by his god, that folded been enjoying making apple pies for his neighbors using apples from his new orchard and delivering the pies himself. But the quite idle of that audit was already flung over. This was to be its last video address to his Online Community before leading the very next day and armed takeover of oregons Malheur National wildlife refuge. A macbook air laptop is open on his desk. Its like undoing its quite intrepid work to place all our american lives and dreams, even those of rightwing holy insurrection, under its sign. Payable in true light comes through the blinds of the window behind him. In the video which he titled dear friends, ammon explains how it was god who it guided him to organ too much earlier, through news of the plight of two county ranchers, a father and son. Mandatory federal sentencing that is about to send them back to prison for arson charges. [inaudible] his father cliven is also a rancher. The bundy come had acquired a National Profile for the dramatic culmination of the 20 odd years dog with federal authorities over the grazing rights on Mojave Desert lakes in southern nevada. That conflict had come to a head in april 2014 in remarkable event. An armed standoff with federal agents whod resulted shockingly and the seemly victory for bundy claim. This standoff and the families ongoing struggle with the aftermath of the lifechanging actions have felt like enough to ammon who would recently moved far from seven nevada two new home with his wife and six children in the sagebrush seven oh idaho at the far northern end of mormon country on the outskirts of boise. He himself was not even a rancher come had not been for years. He ran a trucking Fleet Maintenance business still headquartered in arizona. It turned out even that moved to idaho would come to seem a part of gods want larger plan for hf and his friends, the county and america. Theres been something a a lite strange about the move, even at the time. He and his wife had felt a strong simultaneous urge to relocate. It had been a feeling that had descended as if from nowhere. They couldnt understand entirely but they followed it anyway and headed out in the spring of 2015 traveling about the in about the west looking at houses. Nothing had been quite right but then on the very last of the trip, they come to this very last house in a Beautiful Valley in emmett idaho and i dont instantly that this was the place. It was one of many decisions ammon would be guided to that year. That guidance in his mind is often providential. How else could clean you end up moving within three hours of remote hunting count organ with the whole premise of which it know nothing about at the time had taken place and now here he was just a few months later barely settled into his new business all asking is a link to join order to take a moment to stand, a stance of the nothing less than a future of American Freedom might be at stake. After the move to idaho his next big revelations come late one monday morning on november 2015. On january 1, seated in front of his camera he told the tale of that night he was online followers. Lying in bed in his familys new home, tired after a long day, he received a message on his phone, a link to yet another article about mohammad in the past hed shrugged off messages about the case. I felt my family was fighting hard enough, explained. We didnt need to go fight some elses battles but this time something was different. An urge quickly took possession of him. A sudden impulse to learn all he could about this family. He searched the internet and Read Everything he could find about the case. Unable to sleep he read on into the dawn. How sunrise is dark night of research was followed by a second urge you to decide he recognized as defined in spy. This was an impulse to expression. I felt this urge again, this society began to write. It wasnt easy at first, writing really is. My emotion about the hammonds after some was happening and found it was happening to them was the same thing that happened as semimotions were clouding my thoughts. But then inspiration came to him as it often seems to come, mysteriously and from somewhere outside. I got on my knees and ask the lord and i said lord, if you want me to write something, then please help me clear my mind and show me what i should write. And so among the many other images to come to our story will start with this one. A bewildered and overtaken man, god written down on his knees begging that unseen power to unclouded mind so that he might write, so they might simply sit down and begin. Ammon is devoutly religious, and his religion was born in a mystical lighting performance. The book of mormon original golden tablets, allegedly discovered in the hillside in the famous burned over district of western new york were translated from an unknown ancient town with divine guidance at a cold flare uninspired founder and prophet of the latterday saints. Poorly educated but endlessly enthusiastic and possessed of remarkable imagination, Young Joseph Smith had dedicate dedih of his adolescence and young adulthood to a local craze, treasure hunting, which seems to have consisted largely of robbing the mysteries native American Group announced so, in theory. Unaware of the liturgical potential of his first literary work, smith hope his book of mormon would strike lucrative lead into the rich thing of the current mania for theories linking the origins of native americans to the tales of the old testament. His immediate hope seems to bent that the books success might save his parents farm from foreclosure. The book would not arrive in time to save the smith family farm but it came to do so much more, tapping into the current a powerful evangelical savings then convulsing the american frontier. It would utterly transform the light of its author and change the lives of millions and within the history of the Young American republic. America loves to make fun of its mormons. So many of the mormon cliches were already wellworn tropes of american popular religious experience even in the time of the prophet. But the love them often enough to ignore help definitely these elements of religious experience have found themselves reshuffled and newly deployed in hands of smith, a singular font of real american dynamism. Smith was a mastic indicator who intuited something bassinet of ultimate and of his times, what to ask for and what was possible in them. He called the ever evolving often cloudy but occasionally crystalclear understanding god. While ammons inspirations and intimations may not have matched the grantor of smith, if you did, his understanding of the whispering and emotions at this attempt and whitney kent and something about our time were very much in line with his profits. The two mens interpretation of the divine guidance they felt different only when it come to ammons emphasis on feeling. Smith describe the sensation of revelation as a pure intelligence that would enter him. It may give you sudden strokes of ideas so that by noticing that you may find it fulfilled the same day or soon. Those things that were presented unto your mind by the spirit of god. To ammon on the other hand, this external intelligence seems to present itself and primary as intensity of emotion, urge, obsession, sympathy, outrage, and need. The more you become emotionally involved in the tribulation of this one ranching family from oregon, the more ammon had come since of as as a conduit, a vee for the expression of god ceilings, god feelings about america. I begin to understand how the lord felt about the hammonds he told his internet friends on the first day of 2016. I begin to understand how the lord felt about Harney County at about this country. I clearly understood that the lord was not please with what was happening to the hammonds and that what was happening to them it was not corrected it would be a type and the shadow of what would happen to the rest of the people across this country. Mostly it wasnt too writing that ammon conveyed god ceilings directly into the lives of his followers. The intimacy of the facebook or Youtube Video is it to meeting of the loose cadre of you think that is the bungee revolution. In keeping with the formula anarchic tendencies of social Media Community has many members, many leaders and ever shifting priorities and towns over those attached to the bundy caused its single most important focal point and greater source of inspiration, a special feeling happening ammon itself. His life, his voice, his face. Especially his face. Theres an earnestness and open us up expression and churches face thats uncommon among men of the american right wing. Throughout all his intimate video addresses his beard count is poured out a live stream of concern into the camera in the heart of his viewers. His expression remained virtually unchanging, open, always open. From beginning to end in his videos his eyes are wide. Sometimes wavelengths you could see the delivered my commercial efforts to get his peepers fully open you can meet immediate hezbollah eyebrows are up within inward pointing to the crown of his head hidden under his cowboy hat. This urge to push back his brow thus enlarging his already fairly large and expressive noggin while his hands move in soft emphasis to the slow here r cadences of his twang. Otherwise had to sell at a slight sad puppy ductility. Theres no limbaugh like apathy, no snide breitbart affect year. Ammon is a different state of magically become a right wing for a sensitive man. His public face is a pure stream of realtime concert that he is consistently poured forth in every press coverage conferencm every appearance on the witness stand delivering his payload of sincerity each and every time. Few even among source enemies have ever doubted ammon bundy mostly means what he says that the full power of his direct address comes from his billy to make it clear again and again just how much he really means it. And maybe some poorly for the faithful, just how much to him his god really cares. He urges googling and writing were far from finished with him. Once god cleared his mind and the writing had, it went only to the filament of the stronger understanding and urges. Further revelations of gods desires and irresistible impulse to travel to know the land of oregon first and come to go to the place where all would be revea