The Idaho Humanities Council is inviting the public to three free programs in the next week exploring “Wallace Stegner and the Consciousness of Place,” including a lecture, an author interview, and a humorous reading. The events, all at Boise State University, are part of a week-long institute for Idaho teachers focusing on Stegner, the author and conservationist whose novel “Angle of Repose” won the Pulitzer Prize in 1972.

The lecture, “Stegner’s Dream of the West” by author and Stegner scholar Sharon Butala, will be Sunday, July 16, at 7 p.m. in the Bishop Barnwell Room at BSU’s Student Union.

On Monday, July 17 at 7 p.m., also in the Bishop Barnwell Room, the program will feature “A Conversation with Richard Etulain,” author of “Conversations with Wallace Stegner on Western History and Literature” and an emeritus professor of history at the University of New Mexico who interviewed Stegner multiple times in the 1980s. Etulain, the author or editor of more than 50 books, will be interviewed by BSU English professor Tara Penry.

On Thursday, July 20 at 7 p.m., in the same location, humorist Michael Branch will read from his work and share his insights about living in the high desert. A professor of English at the University of Nevada-Reno, Branch is the author of “Raising Wild: Dispatches from a Home in the Wilderness” and “Rants from the Hill: On Packrats, Bobcats, Wildfires, Curmudgeons, a Drunken Mary Kay Lady and Other Encounters with the Wild in the High Desert.”

There’s more info online at www.idahohumanities.org.