Shakespeare & Co. is delighted to host a reading and discussion with Missoula-based author Gary W. Hawk on Thursday, September 25 at 7:00 pm. Hawk will read from his new book Into This Radiance: Kayaking Flathead Lake (Quercus Publishing, 2025). This event is free and open to the public.
About Into This Radiance:
In Into This Radiance Gary Hawk shares his complex relationship with an immense place—Flathead Lake, the largest US body of freshwater west of the Great Lakes. Hawk has paddled a sea kayak for over nineteen years, and he takes the reader along with him as he explores the lake’s bays, islands, and the distances between them. In the process, he shares his reverence for this inland sea, his keen naturalist’s eye for detail, and his observations, questions, and insights from various wisdom traditions.
Year after year, in many kinds of weather, he encounters, grows to understand, and attends to the lake as though it were a sentient being. But even as he turns his attention outward toward the lake and all who depend on it, he delves into an interior landscape. Here, he invites the reader to stay open to what at first seems strange or threatening.
The book’s short, lyric essays and poetic passages offer encouragement to live wisely and thoughtfully in a fragile and changing world.
Author Biography:
Gary W. Hawk began his higher education at Stanford University and continued his studies at The Pacific School of Religion. After serving two churches in Northern California and one in Helena, Montana, he balanced three careers, teaching for nineteen years in the Davidson Honors College at the University of Montana, practicing the craft of fine woodworking, and listening to people in a counseling office. He also continues to write. Poems and essays have appeared in Camas, Gray’s Sporting Journal, The Christian Century, Connotations, Northern Lights, and Awake in the World, Vol.3. He is the father of two grown sons, Andy and Kyle, and is married to psychologist Joyce L. Hocker. He paddles a sea kayak named Bluebird and, paraphrasing poet Theodore Roethke, ventures out on the wildest wave and tries to be still. Gary lives in Missoula, Montana, writes at www.ospreypaddler.com.
