Hunting for oil is like hunting for hidden treasure, says petroleum geologist come nature writer Rick Bass.

“It was exciting when you found it, and when you didn’t find it,” he said.

A Texas native and the son of a geologist, Bass took an interest in nature at an early age. His curiosity turned into a college major and he went on to earn a B.S. from Utah State University. Post-graduation, Bass spent nine years prospecting for new oil wells, an experience that formed the basis for his book Oil Notes, published in 1989.

However, Oil Notes was not Bass’ first foray into the writing field. In college, Bass also studied essay writing. Bass, who will headline Western Carolina University’s Literary Festival with readings from his works at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, April 7, in the auditorium of the Forsyth Building, applied these lessons to those learned in the oil fields — imagining, tracking, constructing a mental picture, building a narrative.

“Learning how to look underground without any data was very good training for how to become a writer,” Bass said.

His first collection of short stories, The Watch, won the 1988 PEN/Nelson Algren Award. Bass continued to write, both fiction and non-fiction, but it was 10 years later in 1998 that Bass wrote his first full-length novel, Where the Sea Used to Be. Today, he is the author of 21 books of fiction and nonfiction.

Bass’s non-fiction works often are given literary treatment — some days being generated by emotion and imagination, other days driven by fact.

“I can’t tell when it’s going to be one or the other,” Bass said.

His writing has earned accolades of being “at once comprehensive and personal ... meditative and lyrical.” It is the natural world with context.

“Having an authorial presence in a non-fiction piece can sometimes be viewed as a lesser type of journalism, but I wouldn’t ascribe to that,” Bass said.

Bass’ material typically is the outgrowth of his personal activism.

“I go in looking at the topic more than writing about the topic,” he said. “That said, I am looking at some projects now where I’m going to try the other way where I’m going to learn about the subject with the presupposed goal of writing about it.”

The project underway focuses on the plight of the black rhino in Namibia, a large species that depends on a large tract of open space to survive. It will be Bass’ first writing based on the African continent.

Bass traditionally is characterized as a nature writer; however, his works go beyond the biological into the political.

His 2004 Sierra Club book, Caribou Rising, recounts a caribou hunt with the Gwich-in people on the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, one of the most pristine landscapes on Earth. A hunter since childhood, Bass pursues that which some may call a sport with an environmentalist’s conscience, hunting to provide most of his family’s meat supply in the Yaak Valley of northwestern Montana, where he has been campaigning for almost two decades to obtain preservation status for the valley, one of the most biologically diverse ecosystems in the northern Rocky Mountains.

In his quest for a caribou, Bass aimed to enter the lives of the Gwich-in, who have lived off the animals for 10,000 years, and come to understand the ecosystem that lies so close to ruin should the refuge be opened for oil drilling. The U.S. Senate this year has moved toward approving drilling.

“The decision to include it in the budget bill is a preliminary first step, it’s still a long way from having that money appropriated,” Bass said. “We’re not going to give up on it for any means.”

Approval of Alaskan drilling would represent a step back for the conservation movement as a whole. As Western North Carolina faces many of the same concerns — privatization of lands, logging, pollution, obstruction of water ways — Bass, as much of an activist as a writer, said he could not prescribe a course of action for maintaining the region’s wilderness.

“If I lived in Western North Carolina I would not want someone from Montana telling me what should be done about it,” he said.

However, community based involvement and using “old fashioned activism” — not necessarily to agitate against a cause, but to find an equitable solution — is key, he said.

Bass’ newest book, The Diezmo, a historical novel based on the Mier Expedition, one of the most absurd and tragic military adventures in Bass’ native Texas, will be published in April.