Writing Wild.

 
 

Two summers ago, I spent a week kayaking in the Tongass National Forest wilderness with two rangers and a photographer, Irene Owsley. Irene and I were artists in residence, there to experience the Tracy Arm Ford's Terror wilderness and create art from that experience. As soon as we landed in Holkham Bay, Irene got busy with her camera and tripod and an array of gear. Me, I sat on a rock and stared at the water.

A writing friend once noted that writers often look like they're just wasting time when really they're working. Being a writer means spending lots of time thinking, imagining, noticing, experiencing, staring out a window, she said, but to others it looks like you're just, well, staring out a window.

And that's why I sometimes felt awkward on that kayak trip. Irene was so obviously working, sitting under her umbrella changing lenses, switching filters, clicking away, while I mostly looked like I was goofing off. Sure, I had my rite-in-the-rain pad and pencil always at the ready, and scribbled whatever little image or phrase surfaced in my consciousness, but mostly I was just there, kayaking, looking, listening, letting my hand dip into the cool glacial waters. Not until I got home did I get down to the part of writing that looks like work.

 

 

                                                

So, on this past summer's kayak trip to Shuyak Island in the Kodiak Archipelago, I did my usual thing: while out there, I was just there. Rite-in-rain pad, check, and morning pages most days, check, but mostly I just soaked up the experience like the sphagnum moss that lined the edges of forest and pond. I paddled through sea otters bobbing among bull kelp so thick it was like paddling through spaghetti; I walked outer coast beaches resplendent with wildflowers and washed up treasures; I climbed into old-growth Sitka spruce forest, padding upon layers of moss so soft I could have slept away my life there; I brushed my teeth at water's edge while watching barnacles and sea stars and hermit crabs carry out their lives.
This trip didn't come with any outside expectations that I would create anything from it, since it wasn't an artist residency but was simply an adventure with three friends (one of whom, Carol Hult, is also a writer.) Still, I did what I always do: soaked it up, scribbled down a few things, and then, once home, stared at a blank page.

After an adventure, I try to devote at least a full week's worth of writing time focusing on nothing but that adventure time. I want to do it right away while the experience is still so fresh in my mind that the seas still sway me and the forest wet still drips on my head. I sit in my familiar office, in front of my familiar blank screen, and let the images flow. I recreate scenes. I capture bits of conversations. I describe each day with the detail of a diary entry, eyes open to the outer events of the day and the inner responses of my own mind and heart. I move from this sort of freewriting into essays, poems, short stories, scenes for a novel... I let the work take shape as it wants. In the poet A.R. Ammons' words, I "look for the forms/things want to come as."

 

 

   

This pattern works for me. For the Tongass trip, I ended up with two poems, an essay, and a magazine article that was published in Canoe and Kayak magazine and graced with Irene's incredible photographs. For the Shuyak trip, so far I've got a brief essay and three poems. I'll share below one of the poems, as long as you promise to see it as a work in progress, but one that nonetheless captures some of the feel of that time on the water.



The Outer Coast

I have dreamed
this have dreamed
long swells rocking
and the light swaying
westward have
dreamed the round blue
of sea meeting nothing
but lambent sky. from
where this longing for
something beyond the
familiar? where
this dream of floating
far from what I love
to call my own? remote
as stars glinting among
undulations of kelp
these seas and yet
home to some deep
sounding of the heart,
a primigenial memory
of a time when I, like
these moon jellies I
paddle softly through,
spent my days adrift
aimlessly aimed for what
i could not yet see.

Q&A with Mimi White.

(Schoodic Peninsula, Acadia National Park, Maine, USA.)

I recently had the great pleasure of meeting New Hampshire poet Mimi White. Her poems and activism on behalf of the natural world are exceptionally inspiring, both for their attention to the details of a rural life in New England and for their far-reaching vision. No wonder that Mimi’s poetry collection, The Last Island, won the 2009-2011 Jane Kenyon Award For Outstanding Poetry. She’s also published two chapbooks, one of which was selected by Robert Creeley as the winner of the 2000 Philbrick Award.  Mimi has taught at several universities and was poet laureate of Portsmouth, N.H. And on the direct activism side of the equation, she was also chair of the Rye, N.H. Energy Committee. She was also Artist in Residence at the Schoodic Peninsula of Acadia National Park in Maine.

Here are Mimi’s generous answers to a few of my questions, followed by two of her  luminous poems.

Marybeth: Tell us about the path have you walked to become the poet you are today.

Mimi: I grew up in suburban Boston with little access to anything one might call “wild”, but I was lucky enough to live around the corner from Crystal Lake which in the late 1940’s and early 50’s was still crystal-clear. There I learned to swim, ice skate ( the lake no longer freezes), and fish for all species of warm water fish including pickerel, sunfish, hornpout, and carp. I explored most of my neighborhood and beyond on foot. I think these early explorations set me on a path of inquiry into what else the world might offer in the way of a less tamed universe. Later, when I was in my early teens, I went to Camp Blazing Trail in Denmark, Maine. There I fell in love with the wilds of western Maine. This all girls camp was a training ground for learning how to live in the wilderness. We felled small trees with axes ( I did get a rather nasty cut.), built fires, cooked and baked over an open flame, created hiking trails, learned how to navigate white water in our large canvass covered canoes, and hiked several mountains, including Mt. Katahdin, the tallest mountain in Maine. I was just beginning to develop my reading life and it was at camp that I declared myself a Transcendentalist.

Marybeth:  Ah, you and Thoreau. How does the natural world inspire and inform your creative work?

Mimi: I live on a small farm, 11 acres, in a small NH seacoast town. The land informed me and created the avid gardener and orchardist, really my husband tends the fruit trees. Over the years I have walked thousands of miles back and forth to the harbor with a dog always in the lead. I have weeded, pruned, planted, harvested, canned and tended. Maybe it is the tending that connects to writing poems. I started writing poems at about the same time we bought this home and the two have always been entwined. A few years after we bought the farmhouse we bought an island home on a lake in Western Maine, my old camping stomping ground. Both the island and the farm stimulate my imagination, root me in place, and give my writing a true sense of home.

Marybeth:  What do you do to keep that inspiration alive and flowing?

Mimi: Walking and swimming make me happy and keep me sane in a world that often feels foreign and unfamiliar, snowless winters, shrubs flowering in January.

I once read that what the world needs is more people who feel alive—to find the thing that does that for you and do it. Walking, swimming, and writing make me feel most alive—they feed off of and nurture each other.

Marybeth: How does your love of nature and your creative work intersect with advocacy?


Mimi: Of course I am saddened and shocked by our changing climate. And that we are responsible for these drastic changes—that we may take so many species with us as we destroy where we live— is almost beyond comprehension. About 7 years ago my husband and I started the Rye Energy Committee—its mission is to educate town residents about climate change and what actions they might take to lessen its effects. I worked five years on that effort until I knew the committee was self-sustaining and then I resigned. Poetry??? I had so little time to address that issue in my poetry when I was working on the committee, yet I kept writing. Now, when I look back on what I wrote, I see I was struggling to make sense of the world I was living in. Birds, orchards, bats, dogs, my daily walking, trees—I recorded in my poems the land as I knew it. I think I was trying to save it as if it were a snapshot or memoir in brief lines.

Marybeth: How do you see the role of artist in advocating for nature? What unique ways of thinking and acting does an artist bring to the task?

Mimi: The poet lives in two worlds---the one we see with our eyes open, the one we see with our eyes closed. Both carry the freight of being human. Poets and other artists ask questions—we have no answers. Only inquiry and passion will lead in an uncertain future.

I designed art/energy projects when I was on the energy committee. The first project was called The Wash Day Project. The goal was to get people in Rye to forgo their dryers for the clothesline. The act of hanging out laundry is deliberate—one small step to reduce one’s carbon footprint lead to other steps—all working toward the same goal. Artists then painted these lovely clotheslines. The project culminated in an art show and talk at the local science center where we addressed climate change and what actions we could all take to curb its impact. Art transforms behavior—it is not all science and numbers.

And now? After 40 years of living on this farm we are buying land in southern coastal Maine and building a zero net energy home. It is time to live as consciously as we can about how we live—to leave a legacy for our children—a home that will require almost no fossil fuel, that might have a charging station for an electric/hybrid vehicle, that will use the sun to power our needs. We will continue to grow as much food as we can, to support our local farms and fisheries and I will continue to write poems.

 

 

Hunger

 

I had not thought the body

would be a hill

that I would need to climb every day

the table set for a stranger

even the spoons restless fidgety

cereal waiting for someone else

yet the fridge humming

the view to the orchard

known since childhood

Once a snake frightened a friend

who stopped by to visit

a small coil of happiness

sunning by the back door

but I was not there

to hear her scream

nor to tell her

they mean no harm

My oldest friend befriended snakes

in his garden

touched lightly

his skin to theirs

I had thought their hiss

the switch

that  turned on the sun

or best

the moon

like the one that rose over the hill

and I ate it whole.

 

What the Wind Says

for David Carroll

There is no sadness

when wind topples a pine
and leaves a hole for light to find
and darkness, too,

just the letting go

of boughs across the century,

then the long, green return.

The mind inhabits,

slowly, methodically - -
birdsong, shelter.

But imagine an emptiness so vast,

no forest, field, or rabbit hole;
no warren, den, or hollow log;

no voice in the wilderness,

who then will scribe for the wind
when the wind has nothing to say
and no place to go?

 

Wild Artist Residencies.

(Photo: Ranger Solan Jensen paddles near surfacing humpback whales in Holkham Bay. c. Irene Owsley.)


I've just returned from the annual Associated Writing Programs conference, this one held in Boston. It's a massive gathering - 12,000 writers, editors, publishers, and agents. Heavy on the writers. One of my panel presentations, on "Wild Writing Residencies," mercifully took that roomful of writers out of the sterile Hynes Convention Center, off the busy streets of Boston, and into wild places where artists can find what one keynote speaker, the poet Derek Walcott, said all poets must first cultivate: silence.

A poem comes out of silence first. In all the arts you have to recognize the real silences that arrive.

Four of us spoke from our experiences with artist residencies in some of America's wild public lands. Gary Lawless spoke about his time as Artist in Residence (AIR) in Isle Royale National Park, a wild island full of moose and wolves. Nancy Lord spoke about her time in Denali National Park, where she was finally, she said, called to write poetry for the first time in her life. Mimi White spoke about falling in love with the Schoodic Peninsula of Acadia National Park. And I spoke about my AIR in Denali National Park and in the Tracy Arm Ford's Terror Wilderness of the Tongass National Forest.

These residencies are part of a long tradition of artists in America's public lands, going back to Roosevelt's New Deal Works Progress Administration - between 1933 and 1943, hundreds of artists were gainfully employed in our national parks. Today these residencies (no, we're not paid) recognize art alongside science as a way of interpreting, understanding, and creating awareness of these wild places. A necessary, vital thing.

They're different from other writing residencies in that you don't just hole up in a cabin and work on a project you've brought with you. Instead, you immerse yourself in the place, and then create art from that experience. Then you donate one piece of art (in my case, an essay) to the national forest or national park for their use.

How do these programs enhance an artist's work? Inspiration, most certainly. For me, a major inspiration was collaborating with other artists. In the Tongass, I was paired with photographer Irene Owsley, and she and I have gone on to work on several collaborative efforts. In Denali, I have worked with artist Rika Mouw on a joint project for the National Park Service. And it was these collaborative projects, these artists, who inspired this blog.

But of course the benefits of such unmediated, uninterrupted time in a wild place are much more subtle. With such time, I could sit and observe the pattern on rock in front of Sawyer Glacier; I could notice the gray skin of a harbor porpoise breaking the milky blue of glacial silt waters; I could bend down to view the quality of sunlight from within a whitish gentian on the slopes of the Alaska Range.

As panelist Gary Lawless said -

A symbiotic relationship is created between the artist and the wild place.

The benefits come from diving deep into a wild place, from relearning the vocabulary of interracting with the more-than-human world. A vocabulary we all once knew, and need to relearn for our own, and the wild's, survival.

On the wall of the AIR cabin in Denali was a quote by Edward Abbey, one of the writers who was instrumental in inspiring my own life's work:

If we could love space as deeply as we are obsessed with time.

It's just a phrase, not a complete sentence, but to me that makes it all the more perfect, because these wild residencies left me open-ended and awake.