Plurality of Place: A Critical Walk Through the Ananda Meditation Retreat

Author

• Heidi L. Cram, Cal Poly HumboldtFollow

Graduation Date

Spring 2026

Document Type

Project

Program

Master of Arts degree with a major in English, emphasis in Applied English Studies

Committee Chair Name

Janelle Adsit

Committee Chair Affiliation

Cal Poly Humboldt Faculty or Staff

Second Committee Member Name

Renée Byrd

Second Committee Member Affiliation

Cal Poly Humboldt Faculty or Staff

Keywords

Walking methodology, Process-led research, More-than-human-world, Literature of place, Autoethnography, Gary Snyder, J. Donald Walters, Creative nonfiction, Intentional community, Interpretive mapping, Yuba River, Ananda, Zendo, Meditation Retreat, Post-oppositional, Northern California

Subject Categories

English

Abstract

This autoethnographic research project is located in the fertile literary world of authors Gary Snyder and J. Donald Walters’s historic Bald Mountain land cooperative in Northern CA. This is the site of Walters’s Ananda Meditation Retreat, and Snyder's Ring of Bones Zendo. The project takes a creative embodied approach to analyzing and contributing to this location's literature of place through the genres of creative nonfiction and interpretive mapping. The cooperative's focus on Eastern and Indigenous spiritual practice seeded the countercultural bubble which surrounds these two institutions and generated a ripple of rich and varied literature of place. Through autoethnographic inquiry, this research makes space for the contradictory nature of the co-existing world views present in this literature of place, exploring what it is to move through a place layered by decades of memory, literature, and the realities of what it is to exist as a human in relation to the natural world. The creative flash nonfiction pieces and interpretive maps, juxtapose current phenomena with memories of the years the author lived on site as a child. These memories are nuanced by family newsletters and journals of their life at the Ananda Meditation Retreat. Using critical walking methodology, coding of archival literature and reflective reading responses, this project foregrounds the productive inquiry of process-led research in which the author asks herself: what are the pluralities of this place and how can I resituate and transform my understanding of them into an assemblage of peaceful co-existence? To order a print version of the book, please go to: https://www.lulu.com/shop/heidi-cram/plurality-of-place/paperback/product-95dvedv.html?q=Heidi+Cram&page=1&pageSize=4

Citation Style

CMOS

Recommended Citation

Cram, Heidi L., "Plurality of Place: A Critical Walk Through the Ananda Meditation Retreat" (2026). Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects. 2563.
https://digitalcommons.humboldt.edu/etd/2563