When not teaching philosophy to college students, writing fiction that includes his just-published eighth book or traveling abroad, Dennis Vickers has been known to take a walk in the woods.
His rambles have become more than a pleasure walk. These days, Vickers is looking into the scholarly aspects of how different people experience the beauty of the forest in different ways, and the distinct perceptions of the Menominee and other American Indian people.
His observations will be shared in a free, public program at noon Dec. 10 in Room 225 of the Shirley Daly Hall at the College of Menominee Nation, N172 State Highway 47-55, in Keshena.
As a scholar, Vickers has a professional interest in the branch of philosophy known as aesthetics. As a faculty member at the College of Menominee Nation, he has a ready supply of informal research assistants.
“I’ve engaged my students in wandering the woods next to the Keshena campus,” he said. “What they see and experience has become part of my thinking on the idea that beauty is not in the eye of the beholder; it’s in the heart.”
His thesis is being developed in a paper tentatively called “Kin and Ken: Aesthetic Experience of the Forest,” with “kin” meaning a group’s common ancestry and “ken” their range of knowledge.
Along with considering how the Menominee community’s historic and deep relations with the forest are rendered in their aesthetic experience, Vickers is looking at how the sustainability model fostered by CMN’s Sustainable Development Institute influences awareness of beauty.
“Walking into the forest differs from walking into an art museum,” Vickers said. “It’s more like diving into a lake.”
The program is part of the college’s continuing Faculty Lecture Series.
Vickers’ latest novel, released in October, is titled “Mikawadizi Storms.” In it, Vickers has created a work of magical fiction “that explores outlooks, values, attitudes and actions circulating around a controversy like the one now unfolding over the Penokee Range” over Gogebic Taconite’s plans for an open-pit iron ore mine.
His other books are “Witless,” “Bluehart,” “The Second Virtue,” “Adam’s Apple,” “Passing Through Paradise,” and “Between the Shadow and the Soul.” He also has published a collection of short stories, “Double Exposures.”
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