Article by Lynda La Rocca
Local Arts – April 2004 – Colorado Central Magazine
If a “pilgrimage” is a journey to a sacred place, then Pilgrimage — the magazine — is the vehicle that gets you there.
After finishing the most recent issue, I was reminded of these lines by poet T.S. Eliot:
“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.”
The poems and essays in Pilgrimage initiate a journey of exploration to realms as vast and mysterious as the universe itself. And then they circle back again to gently return readers to a familiar, yet previously unrecognized path, one that connects with humankind’s deepest truths and leads, at last, to our own hearts and homes.
For editor and publisher Peter Anderson, Pilgrimage is more than a magazine. “I think of it as a community in print, a place for people to gather and find kindred spirits through writing that reaches out to what’s universal to us all,” he explains.
Founded in 1976 by a group of pastoral counselors, Pilgrimage was published for some 25 years by North Carolina writer and naturalist David Barstow. Barstow turned the operation over to Anderson in fall 2002, after Anderson answered an ad in Poets & Writers Magazine seeking an editor for a publication emphasizing “reflective writing.”
“He [Barstow] basically just passed it on to me,” Anderson recalls. “It was like a gift.”
And while Anderson is continuing the magazine’s tradition of publishing reflective writing, his vision of Pilgrimage also encompasses the theme of peace and social justice, and focuses on a “sense of place.” Literally, that place is the greater southwest. Figuratively, it’s the mind, soul, and spirit that can tap into and express on paper the feelings, emotions, and life-altering experiences common to all humanity.
“In its content and presentation, Pilgrimage has a simplicity that reflects the integrity of what’s inside,” says Anderson. “It’s a stripped-down, expressing-the-truth kind of quality that tells it like it is and declares, ‘This is what I saw and felt and experienced.’
“On the other hand,” he continues, “these are not obscure writings. The work in Pilgrimage goes beyond personal exercises to capture moods, events, ideas, emotions, things that mean something and that resonate with others.”
Anderson, whose first issue of the bi-annual magazine appeared last summer (the next is due out in June) practices what he preaches in his own writing. A poet who is currently completing a book of essays focusing on mountains and spirituality — a work he laughingly describes as “a memoir without a lot of ‘moi'” — Anderson has a Masters degree in divinity from Indiana’s Earlham School of Religion, where he returns quarterly to teach intensive, two-week programs on the ministry of writing.
ANDERSON’S OWN ESSAY in Volume 28, issue 2, titled “First Church of the Higher Elevations,” (also the title of his book) recalls, in part, a winter he spent as the only resident of the frontier mining ghost town of St. Elmo. There, at an elevation of 10,013 feet, the storms came hard, fast, and more frequently than this east coast native ever anticipated, and the solitude was both profound — and profoundly frightening.
[Grace, Rosalea, and Peter Anderson]
“If it was wanderlust that got me to St. Elmo, it was an intuitive sense of belonging there that lured me into staying…. That experience of mountain vastness, especially for a newcomer to it as I was back then, was surely enough to get a guy talking to himself, maybe even answering his own questions. But the refuge and finitude of that one-room cabin, with the stove throwing out a little light and heat, reassured me that I could handle a temporary overload of fear and wonder — that quality of experience we used to call ‘awe,’ before everything became ‘awesome’ and the word lost its edge.”
This region is significant to Pilgrimage contributors, yet their work simultaneously transcends it. The 96-page issue featuring Anderson’s essay also includes excerpts from the letters of D.H. Lawrence, who lived for a time in Taos, New Mexico. On both covers and scattered throughout this 6×8-inch publication, fine black-and-white photographs by southwestern photographers depict trumpeter swans and aspen leaves, desert landscapes and mountain vistas. And Colorado writers are well-represented, with poems by such well-known poets as Colorado Springs’s Jim Ciletti and Fruita’s Jim Tipton, and essays by Salida’s own poet and P3 emcee Craig Nielson and Colorado State University writer and professor John Calderazzo.
San Luis Valley rancher and “cowboy poet” Peggy Godfrey delivers an achingly poignant piece about her relationship with her aging, Alzheimer’s-afflicted mother (“I was in my late 30s before I realized the alienation I felt from my mother was not caused by me.”), where a deeper understanding and acceptance is prompted by Godfrey’s interaction with a recalcitrant sheep whom she guides into bonding with its newborn lamb.
Also noteworthy is Fort Collins writer Deborah Robson’s meticulous and incredibly evocative description of sharpening a pencil and printing with it, as a first-grader, on horizontal, blue-lined paper, a recollection that is certain to bring back memories to readers of a “certain age.”
Veronica Patterson’s poem, “Protocol for Coming Near” will resonate with anyone who has lost a loved one, while her essay, “Feast,” is a lush and luscious chronicle of a special meal prepared and served to honor a friendship that even death cannot diminish.
Pilgrimage is not only a gift to Anderson; it’s a gift to all of Central Colorado. We should be proud that a magazine of this caliber has chosen to call this place its home.
Lynda La Rocca writes prose and poetry from her home in Twin Lakes.