We do what we can.



I've learned to find hope in the small things.

 

When a lovely birch-forested corner of Far North Bicentennial Park in Anchorage was threatened with development, an anonymous group of artists began a campaign to tie red ribbons around all the trees that were at risk of being cut down.  I joined in, writing the name of family members on each of the ribbons I tied.  Well, the development happened, the trees, festooned as they were in red, were cut down...almost all of them.  Exactly at the edge of the newly-razed site were some trees still fluttering red, and one of those had the ribbon on which I'd written my eight-year-old son's name.

 

 

 

I was reminded of our red-ribboned trees by this story in September 2012.  These Indian artists are painting leaves along the state highway as part of a campaign to protect the environment.  According to the Reuters report posted on Planet Ark, "...dozens of artists in the eastern Indian state of Bihar are painting roadside trees and their leaves with colorful stories from Hindu epics, hoping to save the region's already critically sparse greenery.  The unusual campaign, using coats of paint and brushes, has been launched in Madhubani, a northern Bihar district known for its religious and cultural awareness, resulting in hundreds of otherwise untended roadside trees covered in elaborate artwork."

Each of us, we do what we can.


 

WOLF: A Renegade Book, Free of Charge.

In mid-February, I received an intriguing email from Jeff Clark, a community activist, writer, and book designer in Ypsilanti, Michigan. Here's what he wrote, in part:

"In the tradition of radical pamphleteering, I'm designing and publishing a book of rough, radical, activist work on wolves. The book will be well-designed and -printed, and will be available in a gift economy--freely disseminated locally as well as nationally. I'm assembling a really diverse group of writers, most of whom are also activists of one stripe or another. Already of few of the country's most compelling and/or unruly activists and writers are on board.

If I can accomplish my dream, the book will be a very timely, non-academic, renegade publication in the struggle against wolf-hunting and -ignorance. Locally, our legislature voted to allow wolf hunting to resume this fall in Michigan. I'd like for this little paperback to be a tool of information and passion in the struggle that's mounting against that and similar rulings.

The big kicker is that I'd need your text (either short or long, as you see fit) by March 15 at the latest. It's okay—actually, it's encouraged—that the piece be timely, rough, topical, or raw. That will be the spirit of the book. I hope to have it hit the streets by May Day."

In the midst of working on Among Wolves, I was swamped with work and unable to see how I could find time to send something to Jeff in less than a month. But I also couldn't say no; I loved the radical idea of a free book, and I couldn't pass up this opportunity to help out. So I resurrected an essay I'd written a few years back, dusted it off and polished it up with some revising and updating, and sent it to Jeff.

Jeff met his May 1 deadline; WOLF was released on May Day. And my essay, "Toklat," is in there along with essays and poems by a wide range of wonderful people, including some whose work I've long admired, among them Jack Turner, Terry Tempest Williams, and Derek Jensen. The pieces cover the territory of wolves in the US: Alaska's predator control; the reintroductions of red wolves in North Carolina and Mexican gray wolves in Arizona; the delisting of gray wolves and resultant slaughters in Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming; the effects of delisting in Jeff's home state.

It's a beautifully diverse and complex collection--much like wolf society itself. Christine Hume's evocative "Reciprocity" about wolf howling stands alongside Norman Bishop's "The Wolf Issue," which almost reads like a Harper's Index in the barrage of statistics showing there's no logical reason for the western states' rampant wolf killings. Ken Lamberton's essay about the Mexican gray wolf's problematic reintroduction shares a cover with Paula Underwood's poetic retelling of an Iroquois tale passed on to her through generations of Native Americans.

So, if you'd like to read these fine pieces, or if you just like the idea of getting a free book (say that three times in a crowd and see what happens) then here's what you do:

1. Comment on this blogpost between now and June 1.
2. Raffle-style, I'll pick two names to get a book; the rest of you will get the book in a PDF. Check back after June 1, and if you're a lucky winner, send me your address.
3. Check your mailbox or your inbox.
4. Prepare to be amazed.

PS: The first printing is nearly gone. Here's a post about the book and the wolf issue in Michigan.

Art and Activism.

(photo: Wolf eel in Prince William Sound.)

In college, I read Edward Abbey’s Monkeywrench Gang, and sat up late nights with friends, plotting ecotage on the nuclear power plant under construction a few miles from campus. Should we pour sand in graders’ gas tanks? Bury spikes in construction roads? Spraypaint messages on new cement? In the end, all we did was make banners, pile into a van, and join the No Nukes rally in Washington, D.C..

It took a few more years—during which I finished my degree in Environmental Science and worked for the state’s alternative energy division (the first time around that we tried to kick our oil addiction)—before I realized what Abbey’s book had to say to me. Words have power. Literature is a primary force for instigating change. Think Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Think The Golden Notebook. Think Silent Spring.

So, yes, I was an environmentalist, and an environmental scientist, before I was a writer. It was just a matter of time before I put all my loves together: reading, nature, wildlife, justice.

Still, the primary tension throughout my writing life has always been whether to pick up the pen or the banner. I oscillate. I try to do both. In some ways, they help each other. In other ways, not so much. So I’ve learned a few things about working in the intersections of writing and activism. (Caveat: These are, as they said in “Pirates of the Caribbean,” more like “guidelines.”)

1. I can’t escape it. I don’t have the patience to write about subjects that don’t engage me, and what engages me are those where I believe something vital is at stake, and I have some new thing to add to the conversation. It’s the only way I can sustain the effort it takes to bring a project to completion. The driving force for Crosscurrents North was political: to amplify voices who speak for Alaska’s wild. This carried co-editor Anne Coray and me through many travails with the publishing industry. Susan Griffin once told me, follow your obsessions. They’ll lead you to your best work. I believe her.

2. I get my message off my chest right away, and then keep writing, researching, thinking, so the work (hopefully) moves beyond my initial assumptions into new territory. As Robert Frost wrote, “No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.” Open-mindedness allows for wonder and imagination, as I try to illuminate my own blindness. How to do this when I also come to the subject with a burning passion to save polar bears or prevent the next oil spill? In “What Happens When Polar Bears Leave,” I expressed my astonishment immediately, and then dissected the ways in which their fate haunted me, with hope of some solution or at least some new comprehension.

3. I avail myself of all forms. On the oil spill, on Prince William Sound, I’ve written radio commentary, op-eds, poems, essays, and my book, The Heart of the Sound. On polar bears and climate change, I’ve written essays, poems, a short story, a white paper for Defenders of Wildlife, and a talk on “Climate Change and the Literary Imagination” (a livestream video, introduced by Sue Ellen Campbell and with Linda Bierds). Multiple forms allow me to approach the subject from different angles, like a prism, generating more illumination with each turn.

4. I don’t force resolution. As a writer and teacher, I’ve seen how forcing a resolution can damn an essay faster than you can say “rejection.” As a culture, we like the quick fix, the clear solution. But increasingly, in the complex world we have created for ourselves, there are no easy answers. At least, not to the questions I am obsessed with asking. (This is also my excuse for why I’m such a damn slow writer.)

5. Sometimes I drop the pen, but not for long. It’s easier when there’s an end date, like an election: when Sarah Palin got nominated for V.P., I campaigned for Barack Obama. It’s more tricky when the issue is never-ending. I often think about Nigerian novelist Ken Saro-Wiwa: he dropped his pen for political action, only to die for the cause. What new light might his novels have shed?

In the end, they’re the same—writing is action. It’s in the interplay between the two that I’ve arrived at my favorite work. Immediately after the oil spill, I was driven to sop up oil, rescue birds, clean sea otters. Much later, in The Heart of the Sound, I wrote about those experiences and what they meant—for the otters, the Sound, and the Big Picture in which we all stand.

My moral obligation is the same as it is for anyone: to leave the world a better place than when I found it. (This is something Grace Paley once said, and something she cleaved to in every story she wrote.) As an artist, a writer, that way is through understanding something that hasn’t been understood, seeing what hasn’t been seen, illuminating something that hasn’t been lit.

When I get overwhelmed by all that remains in the dark, I recall what a Buddhist monk advised: you can’t enlighten the entire world, so just shed light on your little corner.


note: an earlier version of this post was first published on 49 Writers.

 

Goethe.

"Nature and Art are too sublime to aim at purpose, nor need they, for relationships are everywhere present, and relationships are life."

 

Another quote I've carried around for years, by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, writer, artist, and politician.  

Three Books, 25 Years.

Last Sunday, March 24, was the 24th anniversary of the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill in Prince William Sound, Alaska. Though I still shudder at using that word, "anniversary," for something so dreadfully damaging. Prince William Sound, as well many other beautiful and fragile marine areas along Alaska's southcentral coast, from Kodiak to Kachemak Bay to the Barrier Islands, has not yet recovered, and most likely never will be.

In honor of the places and wildife and people harmed and killed by that technological disaster, I am highlighting a trio of books that speak of it, using story as a window for the reader to enter, and experience as the hardwood floor upon which it stands.Two of these books are just out, reminding us of the longevity of trauma; one is my own, released 15 years after the spill and then re-released in 2010.

My memoir, The Heart of the Sound: An Alaskan Paradise Found and Nearly Lost, is a love song to Prince William Sound, from my first years spent along its shores, through the oil spill, to the turbulent years of restoration. Twining together the destruction of an ecosystem, the disintegration of my marriage, and my emerging identity as a new mother, I explore the resiliency of nature - both wild and human - and the ways in which that resiliency is tested.

In Mei Mei Evans’ novel, Oil and Water, the narrative begins with the spill itself and follows four main characters as they deal with and respond to the first year of the disaster. Evans takes us back into a disaster we’d just as soon forget, but with such real characters that we are compelled to keep reading. Evans makes use of the freedoms of fiction and the constraints of reality to dig deep into the human effects of an environmental disaster, allowing us to see what has not before been seen, understand what has not before been understood. It is an unflinchingly clear and brave look at a hard subject that affects every one of us, no matter where we live.

In Into Great Silence: A Memoir of Discovery and Loss Among Vanishing Orcas, Eva Saulitis charts the lives of a single extended family of orcas in Prince William Sound, a family so devasted by the oil spill and subsequent changes that they are now on the verge of extinction. With scientific clarity and poetic intimacy, Saulitis describes her research and first-had experiences with these whales. It is, truly, “a moving portrait of the interconnectedness of humans with animals and place-and of the responsibility we have to protect them.” Lovely and heartbreaking, this book cuts to the core—which is exactly where, at this time of mass extinction and global warming—we need to be.

Our stories, our art, cannot replace what was lost, but they can stand as testament to the power of the natural world and our own human creativity to witness, honor, restore, and protect, so that we may find our way to a more harmonious relation with the more-than-human world - and with our one and only home planet.
 

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.
 

Inspirations.

I suppose it all started with piano lessons. After a stint in childhood, I started them up again when my son, at eight, started his - as a way of supporting and encouraging his efforts, but mostly just because I wanted to. What I found, to my surprise, was that the hours practicing scales and tunes actually enhanced my writing efforts - rather than one taking time and creative energy away from the other, I found the opposite to be true: one enhanced the other.

Or maybe it started with my sister's ceramic sculptures, and seeing how each abstract object she created had its source, its inspiration, in something from the natural world. Once I went to visit her in West Virginia, and she showed me a small piece of driftwood on her shelf. "You gave me this," she said, "and I've used it many times as a template for my sculptures." It was a revelation to me. But of course art is inspired by the natural world. It is all around us. It is us.

So this blog explores that, and goes another step beyond, into what this connection and inspiration moves us to do beyond the art. For this I'll turn to such organizations as Artists for Nature and the Cape Farewell Project, which incidently inspired Ian McEwan's novel Solar. I'll also interview artists, such as Rika Mouw, whose art is inspired by nature and dedicated to protecting it.

 

Inspiration is all around us.