BERKELEY — On a gorgeous spring morning, Eric Schlosser, investigative journalist and author of "Fast Food Nation" — the expose of the fast-food industry and how it manipulates customers to buy food that isn't good for them — is speaking to his latest audience: preteens and teenagers. Schlosser's new book, "Chew on This: Everything You Don't Want to Know About Fast Food," has just come out, and he and co-author Charles Wilson are testing the waters, giving a presentation to 600 kids at Martin Luther King Middle School.

WILMOT, N.H. — "There were times when I thought I'd never be published," Donald Hall was saying, just days after learning, by fax, that he had been named poet laureate of the United States. "Times when my reputation sank." After his 1978 collection "Kicking the Leaves," some critics argued that it was poignant to read a poet who had once shown such promise.

MINUTES from the shores of Lake Huron in western Ontario, three towns form an isosceles triangle, bounded by no more than 50 kilometers, that Alice Munro's readers may know well. Wingham (pop. 2,885) is where the author was born in 1931. Clinton (pop. 3,000) is where she now lives with her husband, geographer Gerald Fremlin, in the house in which he was raised. Goderich (pop. 7,500) — Munro calls it "the most beautiful town in Canada" — is the setting for much of her work. Here, where the mansions are dun-colored, the squirrels are black and the geese look slightly predatory, Munro and Fremlin take their constitutionals along the lake. It is a town with two dry cleaners, an evocative and imposing set of grain elevators, a restaurant called Bailey's and a used bookshop. "We don't get many of Alice's books," says the woman behind the counter in the bookstore. "Which is a good thing. It means no one wants to get rid of them."

SUSANNA MOORE writes the way Frida Kahlo painted. Bits of bone; quite a lot of blood; beating hearts; serious, beautiful women (often in white dresses); and in the margins of her extremely visual novels: gorgeous flowers and dark horsemen in black capes.

RON CARLSON is waiting for the cable guy. It's been more than a week now and he's trying a cowboy tactic, quietly saying exactly when he'll be available — something like staring a bull in the eyes to mesmerize it. Four months in Southern California and he's become the cable-guy whisperer.

THERE are career writers, authors whose every move seems to further their art or their marketability. Then there are the others — writers whose haphazard publications indicate the existence of equally important identities. This past Mother's Day, in South Strafford, Vt., Grace Paley, the 84-year-old poet, short story writer, activist, feminist, mother and grandmother, is a poster girl for the latter path.

TAOS, N.M. — John Nichols can't stop writing. He often produces 10, 20, 30 drafts of a book, some more than 1,000 pages long. Nichols saves them all and frequently returns to things he started decades ago. Threads of stories surround the writer like milkweed seeds with their gauzy fibers. His little adobe house in Taos is full of books and other projects. Overflow goes to one of several storage lockers.

USED to be, if you telephoned the poet Mary Oliver, her partner Molly Cook would invariably answer. She'd ask you to hold on a moment, feign footsteps and return to the phone as Oliver, making no pretense at a different voice (editors across the country routinely played along). Cook was, for many years, Oliver's agent. Oliver, everyone understood, was a bit of a recluse. She needed nature and solitude to create her poems. "Writers must … take care of the sensibility that houses the possibility of poems," she wrote in "A Poetry Handbook." Cook, who died in 2005 of lung cancer, at 80, was the sociable one.

Bill McKIBBEN'S writing — part art, part essay, part journalism with more than a smidgen of harangue — has framed the thinking on environmental issues for more than a generation. Two new books out this spring, "The Bill McKibben Reader: Pieces From an Active Life" (Henry Holt: 446 pp., $18 paper) and "American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau" (Library of America: 1,050 pp., $40), will impress on the reader how calmly, if not always quietly, he has illuminated paths to the future, thinking alongside us about what might be possible, even as information hurtles toward us, technology blinds us and being human seems to mean something entirely different than what any of us would consciously want.

PINEDALE, WYO. — ALEXANDRA FULLER is driving south from Jackson Hole toward Pinedale to visit the oil patch where 25-year-old Colton Bryant, fourth generation Wyoming oil worker and the subject of Fuller's "The Legend of Colton H. Bryant" (Penguin Press: 204 pp., $23.95) worked and died. On Valentine's Day night 2006, Bryant fell 26 feet from the catwalk around an oil well's conductor pipe. She is listening to Neil Diamond singing "Forever in Blue Jeans," one of Bryant's favorite songs. "Who the hell listens to Neil Diamond?" Fuller asks, turning it up to hear the lyrics: "Money talks, but it can't sing and dance."