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 In 1993 I moved to the sleepy little college town of Redlands, California. Wedged between two mountain ranges, the Mojave desert, and Los Angeles, Redlands was a good base camp for the hiking, climbing, skiing and body surfing I hoped to get out of college. 
 
-Redlands was also one of a handful of colleges where you could write your own degree program, which I thought sounded like a swell idea. It turned out to be a good deal more work than I imagined, or was willing to put in, but I originally planned to write a major that was one part photography and one part "nature writing". 
+Redlands was also one of a handful of colleges where you could write your own degree program, which I thought sounded like a swell idea. It turned out to be a good deal more work than I imagined, but I originally planned to write a major that was one part photography and one part "nature writing". 
 
 I still think it was a good idea, one I could never let go. Luxagraf is more or less the third draft of this idea. 
 
-But the first draft did not take off. I dropped out after two semesters. Before slinking back down the freeway to Los Angeles I did manage to write and complete a couple of classes. One was akin to Nature Writing 101, if such a thing existed[^1]. I tried to keep it simple, I had a lot of photography and climbing and hiking to do as well. So I read and wrote about authors I'd already read before. I didn't get too creative, mostly the usual American "nature writing" suspects -- Thoreau, Muir, Leopold, Abbey, Dillard, Lopez, Stegner. 
+The first draft did not take off. I dropped out after two semesters. Before slinking back down the freeway to Los Angeles I did manage to write and complete a couple of classes. One was akin to Nature Writing 101, if such a thing existed[^1]. I tried to keep it simple, I had a lot of photography and climbing and hiking to do as well. So I read and wrote about authors I'd already read before. I didn't get too creative, mostly the usual American nature writing suspects -- Thoreau, Abbey, Dillard, Lopez, Stegner. 
 
 Fortunately, my advisor in this project, who looked like a heavier-set John Muir, threw in a few authors I was not familiar with. I remember thinking damn, I *am* going to have to do some work. But that's how I first heard of Mary Hunter Austin.
 
-Mary Austin remains an overlooked author of the west. Austin is best known, when she is known at all, for a book called <cite>The Land of Little Rain</cite>, her <cite>Walden</cite>, with the Mojave desert starring in the role of Thoreau's pond. 
+Austin lived and travel in the Mojave desert for 17 years, studying the wildlife, as well has human life. She documented native and immigrant life in the region long before anyone else. But she is probably best known for a book called <cite>The Land of Little Rain</cite>, her <cite>Walden<cite>, with the Mojave desert starring in the role of Thoreau's pond.
 
 Perhaps she came to early. The west, especially the Mojave desert, wasn't fully settled when Austin went exploring and writing. She began traipsing around the desert in the 1890s, no one wanted to think about anything but silver and gold and pick axes and railroads. Austin's sensibility as a writer was colored by three things that flew in the face of her time, and to an unfortunate degree, ours as well. Mary Austin was three things that a nature writer shall not be: a woman, a mystic, and a defender of rights and lives of native people. It was the middle thing that intrigued me then, and it still does today because, I think it's what grew out of the other two things.