Efi Theodoropoulou

Efi Theodoropoulou on “Utility”

As a comic artist and an illustrator, I am used to collaborating with writers and other comic artists often. The collaboration with Ivan was something different because it was the first time I did something based on a script by a foreign writer (by ‘foreign’ I mean that I didn’t know him in person and had met him almost a year later). It was very interesting and we managed to cooperate easily, chatting via email and Messenger. Ivan gave me the option to choose among some scripts, and so I did.

I chose “Utility” because at that time it was one of my forthcoming plans to make an illustration which had something to do with a story taking part in the woods. It was a challenge for me to see what drawing style I would use to design the scenery of a thick forest and the characters of an explorative teen girl and her loyal dog. In my mind I had set it up as more of a children’s book illustration, giving color and some kind of child-friendly style to the scenes and characters. I also appreciate it when the people I collaborate with give me the freedom to improvise and bring their work closer to my style and taste. Ivan asked me only for a few changes that would look better to the eye of a reader.

It was very interesting to finally meet Ivan a year later, after our first digital acquaintance, getting to know the person behind the script I worked on and talk about it and all the creative process behind it, but do it in person this time. I think that this collaboration was fun for both of us, for him to get to see his script and characters coming to life and for me to experiment with different drawing styles and techniques.

Alison Palmer

Alison Palmer on “Last Line Storm Song”

In my poem, “Last Line Storm Song,” I immediately begin to construct my central questions: what can be stolen from us and who or what has the power to steal? While in the Bahamas for my brother’s wedding in August 2017, my father’s life is stolen from him, and in turn, the rest of my family’s lives are taken, as well. A set of stairs outside our beach-front cottage collapses with my father on them—he becomes paralyzed from the shoulders down. This tragic accident begs all the questions of nature, fate, coincidence and God. No matter who or what is responsible though, these catastrophes occur every day. As you sit with this poem, my hope is that you’ll begin to hate this thief as much as I.

In Eleuthera, after the fall, it takes island EMTs what seems like an hour to arrive because they have to be woken from their homes. Then, the airport has to be opened, all the lights turned on, in order to airlift my father first to Nassau late that night and then to Miami the next morning. However, once my father lands in Miami, a whole team of doctors are ready and waiting for him at the Ryder Trauma Center, a world-renowned adult and pediatric Level 1 facility. Not long after we find out Miami will be our nightmarish second home for months to come, Hurricane Irma heads straight for Florida, and we have to evacuate, leaving my father behind. “Holding our faces against this hurricane, / we never speak / again,” and no, after that, we never speak in the same way.

Using a storm both literally and metaphorically for my family’s situation helps me with another metaphor: “the tree should bend through / the gusts, surrender / auspiciously . . . .” My father becomes the idea of something refusing to uproot. Even though he will never again move his arms or legs, and even though it takes months for him to be able to speak again, my father’s mental toughness constantly reminds me, “even as I take the saw / to deeply, wistfully, cut / at a slight angle: my heart,” it would be like cutting my father down too. So, I decide to live inside my best memories of him.

The final what I’ll call two stanzas, really exemplify what I feel white space and enjambment can achieve—if the devices are successful, the reader lingers on each line because it’s a complete thought. Then, the thought continues into the following line, another world but invariably linked to the previous one. I literally describe the aftermath of the hurricane, but I also attach the idea to my family’s situation, for “We haven’t the ability / to estimate the death toll, / yet. So far I count five of us,” my father, me, my twin brothers and my mother.

I also highlight the idea of “voice” in the face of tragedy: losing it, chasing it and gaining it back. I want the reader to notice that as conversational a poem as this may seem, I create a motif of silence and reference silence several times. After the fall, my family must re-focus, and all that matters is caring for my father to give him a voice again. We do this with absolute commitment and tenderness, even though we are part of “[t]he most severe casualties in my father’s war . . . . ” Our voices, although seemingly returned, are invariably tremulous from this trauma.

My father passed away in February 2019 due to complications from the fall. The closing willow tree image represents the end of his life. With my father’s legs thinned down to almost nothing, he’ll remain like the tree, “the more slender / its trunk, the more graceful / in the wind.”

Michael Garrigan

Michael Garrigan on “Deer Mountain”

We were camped right along the Canadian border of New Hampshire when a wicked lightning storm charged through. We could hear the rolling thunder for a good few hours before we felt any raindrops or saw any lightning. There was this anticipation of something brewing, about to be created as the storm got louder, got closer. At one point, we ran down the dirt road from our camp to the main road where we could see the horizon out past the forest and mountains just to see what we could see and to maybe prove that what we were hearing actually existed.

The storm came and drenched the woods all night. There’s something incredibly intimate and immediate about camping out in the rain in the middle of nowhere. All night we laid there, with our dog at our legs, listening to the torrential rain and thunder. Nothing else existed. The next morning was cloudless, the ground of pine needles was saturated and the creek behind our camp was loud, running high. I sat by its side and watched the caddis flutter off the alder and tap the water, laying their eggs, and slowly “Deer Mountain” wrote itself.

I’m always amazed at how many lives a river has. Just yesterday, it was a creek that I could easily rock jump across. But today after the storms, those rocks are gone under the runoff and it’s a raging stream. However, those rocks still existed and still held power over that water. Yesterday they were creating eddies in the water, today, they are creating rapids. I think that’s one thread I was following as I wrote “Deer Mountain” — what we don’t see, or what we only hear off in the distance, still has incredible power and influence on us.

Jim Johnson

“I Usually Don’t Like Nature Poems”

Another poet once told me.  

And I thought, I usually don’t like selfie poems.

Robert Frost was a good observer, though perhaps not a good woodsman. I apologize for picking on him, but the poem “Two Look At Two” that has had so much popularity has become a formula for the casual stroll into the pastoral, two holding hands seeing another, and, of course, connecting. This has become the clichéd nature poem so many who don’t like nature poems don’t like.  

A nature poet must study their text.  

That by writing about my place, the area that I know, I suppose I am a regional writer and often not considered a part of the larger conversation. Yet I remind you, as I must remind myself, that in order to perceive our world, we need to see first from where we are. This extends to the natural world where if we don’t learn to perceive what is going on soon, there will be no larger conversation.  

Aldo Leopold wrote in the 1930s about the need to see in our own backyards instead of driving all over the continent. The prevailing assumption was that wild places are of no use unless seen by humans; therefore, roads needed to be built. That explosion of roads without an understanding of sustaining ecosystems has not only threatened our wild places but also the existence of our species.

When I began writing, I was fortunate to have attended a writing workshop taught by Sigurd Olson. He had parkinson’s disease then and I don’t remember learning about writing, yet I was inspired and decided I wanted to write about the wild. But I wanted to write poetry. Poetry, I thought, was a way to see, as to perceive, using all of the senses. Poetry I felt was a way in.

I published nine books of poetry. The first books focused on Northern Minnesota history and culture, particularly my Finnish-American experience, and natural history. As we cannot deny the importance of the local, we know we must also respect our plants and animals. We are not the only species and, instead of dominating, we must learn how to coexist. In the same way that we have learned how to make our bodies healthier, we need to extend that awareness to the natural world that we are inseparably connected to. If we stop feeding the land a toxic diet, as well as purging and plundering and destroying habitat, then the planet might have a chance to survive.

But as Leopold wrote, to build a road is so much simpler than thinking of what the country really needs.

In my three recent books—The First Day Of Spring In Northern Minnesota, Yoik, andText for Our Nomadic Future (Red Dragonfly Press)—I tried to write for the plants and animals. Of course I don’t know what plants and animals think. Scientists have discovered, though it takes them so much longer to learn what we poets already know, that trees communicate with their own and other species. If a plant or animal is only a name in a textbook, who will care? So I not only identify plants and animals, I tried to give them a story.  As the Uruguayan Eduardo Galeano wrote, scientists say the world is made up of atoms, but a little bird told me it is made of stories. So I listen to birds.

Although the translation can be difficult. I realized that as ecology has taught us to search animal populations for analogies to our own species, looking from the other way, the stories we tell may not be far from the stories told by plants and animals. This is because poetry is possibility. So I suppose I shouldn’t dismiss Frost but instead take this idea further.

Recently I put together a collection of my poems featuring plants and animals into a manuscript titled Selected Poems: One Morning In June (to be published summer 2019) to focus my concern for the natural world into one volume and, hopefully, reach a larger audience.

So when I go out into the wilds, beyond the end of the road, on a trail or through the brush, I go out into a larger conversation. What Leopold called the chit-chat of the woods that is so difficult to translate.  And isn’t this the larger conversation we now need in this time of climate change, extinction of species, catastrophic weather?  Shouldn’t we go out and engage in that conversation and try to understand?