EATING THE WEST

MOAB – This year’s Confluence, a four-day festival focused on great writing and great food, complete with writing workshops, panel discussions, presentations, author readings, food and beverage tastings, documentary films and walks through the red-rock desert of southern Utah, begins Thursday, Oct. 22.

Dubbed “Eating the West: A Celebration of Eating and Writing in Moab,” it is, foremost, a literary festival, begun last year to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the publication of environmental writer Edward Abbey’s classic, Desert Solitaire.

Taking place over the four-day weekend from Thursday, Oct. 22-Sunday, Oct. 25, this year’s Confluence features authors and conservationists, including Ann Vileisis, author of Discovering the Unknown  Landscape: a History of America’s Wetlands;  Gary Paul Nabhan, PhD.; Susan J. Tweit, author of The Great Southwest Nature Factbook: A Guide to the Region's Remarkable and Barren, Wild, and Worthless: Living in the Chihuahuan Desert; and Deborah Madison, contributor to Cooking Light, Bon Appetit, Fine Cooking and the L.A. Times. 

Moab is home to the late-lamented Canyonlands Field Institute Desert Writers Workshop that for nearly two decades brought Abbey’s fellows – writers like Terry Tempest Williams, Ellen Meloy and Scott Russell Sanders – to the red-rock desert of southern Utah to discuss and teach writing.

Seeking to rekindle the Desert Writers Workshop’s sense of a workshop community focused on the joy of the written word, Confluence reached more than 1,500 youth and adults in its 2008 debut as a celebration of reading and writing in the West, seeking to inform, inspire, engage and enrich the community through literary arts.

Perhaps the key participant, emblematizing the blend of food, philosophy and shifting paradigms America is experiencing today, is David Mas Masumoto, whose books include Epitaph for a Peach, Four Seasons on my Family Farm; Harvest Son, Planting Roots in American Soil; Four Seasons in Five Senses, Things Worth Savoring; Letters to the Valley: A Harvest of Memories; Heirlooms: Letters from a Peach Farmer; Country Voices: ‘The Oral History of a Japanese American Family Farm Community’ and Silent Strength.

I think of third-generation Japanese-American farmer Mas Masumoto as the Henry Miller of peaches – not because he writes lasciviously about that fleshy juicy stone-fruit, but because he used the story as part-memoir, part-historical journey and part-social observation, taking readers through his family history as lovingly as if it were the branches of a peach tree. With the blossoming, the ripening, the eventual death, the story of his search for the perfect heirloom peach is as fraught with trials, poverty and drama as his side-by-side family history, with its own natural cycles of growth and decline. In chapter one of Epitaph for a Peach, for example, he writes: “I walk up and stand next to Dad by the tractor, and we lean together toward its thundering engine to listen,” he writes. “Then I look at his face. He is having a stroke…”

After the stroke, Mas Masumoto walks the farm, chronicling the wreckage after his father, having suffered a stroke working in the fields, drove the tractor as close as he could get to home, chronicling what he sees in the dispassionate voice of the shell-shocked.

“At that moment,” Mas Masumoto said, of actually viewing the destruction from his father’s desperate tractor-ride, “it was that emotional journey, not just to find out what happened to my father, but also from a farming viewpoint, looking at the damage. “ But for him as a writer, Mas Masumoto he explained, “The journey began in reverse order,” beginning where his father’s journey ended.

Even though he had taken notes at the time of the stroke, he said, “It wasn’t until years later that I wrote it. I think I just had to process it.”

And once processed, his descriptions of the severed young plants and deep-in-the-earth tractor-dug divots marking his father’s erratic path home came to echo the Masumoto family’s journey from Japan to Fresno, Calif., where third-generation Japanese American farmer Mas Masumoto farms the family’s land today.

His grandparents, who emigrated from Kumamoto and Hiroshima, Japan, in the early 1900s, found farm-work around Fresno.

In 1942-46, the family was forced, along with many Japanese-American families, to the Gila River Relocation Center, in the deserts of Arizona. They eventually returned to California to begin farming again. Masumoto’s father became the first land owner in his family in the United States.

Mas Masumoto became his father’s caregiver and teacher, after the stroke, helping him learn to farm again as part of his recovery. In “Back in Saddle,” a touching and humorous story, he writes of coming to the realization that “I had become the teacher, my father the student, and the farm was going to be on my shoulders. I was in my forties, not in my twenties, the process was gradual and in the rhythm of farming. I am of the belief that it takes a decade if not longer to master something, and it took me that long to be prepared to take over.”

But an even harder lesson, he writes, was “seeing all of the welded things that Dad had fixed and the realization that he wouldn’t do that anymore; something was being handed over. And knowing the loss in his life, too, as he could no longer fix the things.” Masumoto began to care for the family’s 80-acre organic farm south of Fresno, a guardian of its inseparable ”flavors and traditions,” which are, he writes, “woven together….Traditions are alive and full of life, they are full of flavor. That flavor is very subjective and emotional. Tradition has that deep emotional connection also. Each generation reinterprets the meanings of traditions and of life.”

Contrary to the idea that life is simpler in the country, Mas Masumoto praises the complicated and the hard-won. With the angst of an artist he suffers, watching the peaches rot on the branches, realizing that the harvest would have cost far more than these perfect peaches could ever bring in.

“Life is much simpler when you only believe in ‘good enough,’” he reflects.

Now, referring back to that passage, in the book, he says: “I think it began when I was younger, and the personal relationship that I had on that family farm. Did we really have to dig out all the weeds? Yes, Dad wanted it done a certain way and that is how we did it. We lived with our work, and work lived with us. It wasn’t about just doing things good enough, it was this quest for perfection. You are going to do your best, [and] you hope quality is the reward.”

In the foreword to Mas Masumoto’s book, Wisdom of the Last Farmer, Dan Barber, chef and co-owner Blue Hill Farm, recalls a Masumoto Farm peach served alone, unadorned, on a dessert plate at Chez Panisse, as the best peach of his life.

From an environmental standpoint alone, Wisdom of the Last Farmer offers a refreshing absence of the standard clichés – sustainable-versus-organic, good-versus-evil – that cloak the movement, and focuses on simply telling the story of food coming from farms whose owners and workers love that food.

“Farmers are the invisible part of food,” Mas Masumoto writes, and “part of the reason to write is to be no longer hidden.”

With his overview of human and plant relationships as the touchstone for his abundant stories, references and themes, Mas Masumoto brings his family’s most private stories along with their carefully tended produce to the table.

“Our story, the history of our family and the history of the Japanese American immigrant culture, what is visible and invisible,” he writes, “it is also the history of agriculture.“

Thursday, Oct. 22

Two-Day Writing Workshop Begins
Students gather at 9 a.m. to work with authors Ann Vileisis, Susan J. Tweit and Deborah Madison, in various locations

Mountain Film in Moab
Telluride Mountain Film showcases independent documentary films about food and sustainability at 7 p.m., at Star Hall

Friday, Oct. 23 Local Flavors Tasting Event
Local wines, cheeses, honey, bread, meats and more at the Moab Arts and Recreation Center, 2 p.m.


Writing Workshop with David Mas Masumoto
The theme is the integration of nature and word; students will spend the afternoon doing writing exercises with David Mas Masumoto, the father, farmer, and author, who promises to “to share thoughts about writing and then to do a lot writing” – indoors and outdoors.

Mountainfilm in Moab
Telluride Mountainfilm showcases independent documentary films about food and sustainability at 7 p.m., at Star Hall 


Saturday, Oct. 24


Farmers Market Book Signing

Meet guest authors at the Farmers Market in Swanny City Park, starting at 9:30 am.

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Team up with organizations all over the world to celebrate October 24, the International Day of Climate Action, at Swanny Park, 11:30 a.m.

Food for Thought
Panel Discussions
Join guest authors in a discussion of issues surrounding local food production at Grand County Public Library, 1 p.m.


Tequila and Tastes of the Southwest Fundraiser
What binds landscape, lore, food, fun, and frolic together in one magical and mystical beverage? Tequila! Tasting with Gary Paul Nabhan at Call Cochitta Bed and Breakfast, 4:30 p.m.

Kitchen Literacy

Ann Vileisis’s 40-minute power point presentation about the history of food, Grand County Public Library, 4:30 p.m.

Readings and Ramblings

Guest authors read from their work. Their books will be available for purchase at the event, at Star Hall, 7 p.m.



Sunday - October 25, 2009 Sunday Morning Jam Session

Literally. Apple jam, peach jam, strawberry jam – an honoring of preserves, Arches Book Co., 9 a.m.