On April 27, William Warner gave a reading in the Norman James theater entitled "Into the Porcupine Cave," and held a small book signing. Warner is an author of several nature books, and is most famous for Beautiful Swimmers, a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel that centered around the Chesapeake Bay blue crab and the Eastern Shore culture that has been influenced by it.
Warner is also the author of Distant Water: the Fate of the North Atlantic Fisherman, and "the first and only academic book I wrote," At Peace With All Their Neighbors: Catholics and Catholicism in the National Capital 1787-1860.
Warner based his reading on his most recent book, Into the Porcupine Cave and Other Odysseys: Adventures of an Occasional Naturalist. The book consists of a series of adventures involving the natural world, two of which Warner spoke about.
The first, the title story, occurred when Warner was in college. A friend had convinced him to come with him to a porcupine cave and help him capture two porcupines. According to Warner, his friend had a sizeable interest in how porcupines mate. He believed that the porcupines were hibernating, but once the two entered the cave, they found quite the opposite. After a near-incident involving a long line of porcupines waiting to leave the cave that Warner and his friend had to join, they escaped.
After managing to capture two porcupines outside the cave, they drove back to college and tried to sneak them into the basement of their dormitory. But the next morning, they were called to the office - "We've been betrayed!" his friend had exclaimed - and were reprimanded, and forced to return the porcupines.
The second story was about the time he spent in Guatemala in the Foreign Service. A superior asked him to accompany him on a camping trip into the jungle. After a long day of hiking, they settled into their hammocks. Unfortunately, after several hours, a group of howler monkeys came across them and began to live up to their name. Their howls are ear-splitting, able to be heard from huge distances away.
"You get to kind of like them," Warner said, though. In his essay about howler monkeys, he wrote about how the habitats suitable for howler monkeys were swiftly disappearing, and that someday, the only howlers left will be in captivity.
After his reading, English professor Bob Day presented Warner with the Washington College Literary Award, which has been awarded to such distinguished writers as Toni Morrison and John Barth.
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