Wouldn’t you read an article titled, “Go Take a Wok in the Woods”? I would. This was one of George Stratton’s first nature-travel pieces, about cooking Chinese food while camping in the wilderness, and he believes it was the title which sold the piece. I have known George and his skillful, beautiful poems since he was a student in my poetry workshop in the early 1990s. Reading his poems is like reading extended haiku, as in this short poem, “The Secret of My Art”:

a small child

squatting in the sand

examining closely

a perfect piece of beach

between his toes

Concise and imagistic, this poem states its message in the first three lines, then demonstrates it in the final six.

Stratton was born in 1927 and grew up in Palo Alto. When asked what influenced his nature writing, he said his father, an insurance executive for Hartford in San Francisco, would drive the family to Tuolome Meadows to camp for two weeks at a time.  

When did he begin writing? “In high school I had an English teacher, Miss Preston,” he said. “We read the Romantic poets, Byron, Shelley, Keats.”

Lew Welch, a well known “Beat” poet, was Stratton’s classmate. Did Stratton and Welch work on their poetry writing together?  “No, we played football together. We were running backs.”

Stratton taught and was an administrator in elementary schools in California and then in Hawaii. After retiring, he and his wife moved back to California, purchased a small camping trailer and travelled to all of the state’s “national forests” until he had enough information to write a travel guide. At the time of publication of his book, “Camping California’s National Forests,1991,” there were no books on the national forests.

 “I learned that you can starve to death very ‘genteelly,’” Stratton said. “When I finished this book,  I wanted to make my change over to fiction and poetry. Period.”

Since the early ’90’s, Stratton has concentrated on poetry writing, beginning with the poetry workshop and creative writing class at Napa Valley College. He has kept writing and attending writers’ conferences (such as Squaw Valley and the Napa Valley Writer’s Conference ) studying with Brenda Hillman and Jane Hirshfield, among others.

Meanwhile, Stratton fulfilled his dream to be a “park ranger,” and got hired as a park aide until he was let go because of budget cuts. He was rehired later as a “park interpretive specialist” working primarily at the Bale Grist Mill.

 “I had been learning how to operate the mill, the Bale Grist Mill, and had been operating as the miller.” 

He worked there for 12 years and still volunteers at Bothe State Park once a week.

What influenced his writing?

 “I’m not sure. Still, a lot of my poems are about nature, and a lot of them. . . [are about] spiritual experiences with nature.”      Largely, Stratton’s poems have been influenced by living in Hawaii (the aunties who, “talked story”), all those camping trips to the Sierra, and reading Robinson Jeffers, Gary Snyder and Robert Hass as well Chinese and Japanese poetry.

Asked about his “writing process,” Stratton read this quotation from his notebook:  “All books about writing tell you that you must write every day. Most say you must write for a  specific amount of time or a specific number of pages. I’ve never been successful. I have made it for one day straight several times, but never more than that.

“Also, I cannot do ‘cafe writing.’ I have a place at home where I write.” 

Readers can see Stratton’s influences in the following poem, “Meditation at Lake Alpine”:

Sunlight and southwest wind

dance the water of Lake Alpine,

where we meditate

leaning back in our granite chairs

only three feet of sand

separating us from mallard hens

and California gulls.



Brewer’s blackbirds stalk the beach

picking at minute flotsam.

In the red firs and lodgepole pines

behind us, Stellar jays mutter.

On a top branch, a Clark’s nutcracker

watches in unusual quiet.

We spend an hour waiting

in the silence for another voice.



Stratton has published poems in many small magazines across the U.S. and in Japan, and now, at 81 years of age, has his first poetry chapbook,”Granite Land, Lava Land,” published by March Street Press,  (2008). He also teaches a creative writing class in St. Helena through Napa Valley College Community Education on Thursday mornings.

Watch for upcoming columns  and for information about poetry events in the county, and check the Arts Council calendar, www.nvarts.org.