Cathy Barber

Cathy Barber on “Cicadas”

I spent the first ten years of my life in southeastern Ohio near Steubenville. At that time, it was named “the dirtiest city in the country,” a title earned by virtue of coal dust and factory output. Houses blackened with soot and homeowners hosed them down periodically to clean them like most people wash their cars. My father was an insurance salesman and my mother a housewife, so my family wasn’t dependent on a smog-creating industry for our livelihood, but we had a coal-burning furnace and a coal bin full of fuel to stoke the fire. We put out our share of soot. 

Mine was a typical childhood of the 1950s—lots of unsupervised outdoor play with the neighborhood kids—travelling via bikes; exploring yards, woods, a small swamp behind us, and the junkyard across the street; playing all the games of the era like “Kick the Can,” and “Relievio.” But our young lives were entwined with nature. For better, or often worse, we lived at ground level, picked up worms, caught lightning bugs, pulled legs off Daddy Long Legs and petals off flowers; scooped Crawdads and threw them back. We crawled under the bushes and up the trees. We knew the terrain and the roster of common creatures—when the unfamiliar cicadas arrived, they truly were an event. 

My dad, and possibly the whole neighborhood, called them Seven Year Locusts. The nomenclature was off, but the insects were fascinating—their sudden appearance in our lives; those two phases of shelled and unshelled; the slightly tinted, intricately-laced wings attached to military aircraft-shaped bodies. Their flight looked unlikely at best. And the sounds! They made crickets look like amateurs.

I’m a fan of pop culture, did my MFA thesis on the poetry of pop culture, so the superhero metaphor came very naturally to me. I liked Superman comics particularly, how Superman would dash off to stop an out-of-control train, then dash back, resume his identity as Clark Kent and accept the berating he got for missing something important. Those cicada shells somehow evoked a sudden departure.

Much of my work is autobiographical and I guess it goes without saying that this poem is as well. My dad followed the trail north for work, just like many others from southern Ohio, West Virginia, Kentucky. Dad was happy to be nearer his sister, already in the area; the three of us kids adjusted quite quickly as kids do; but Mom never got over the move. She missed her sister, two brothers, a passel of nieces and nephews, all churchgoing strong believers. My sister and I grew progressively more problematic for her as the hippie era dawned and we were swept up in it, or rather leapt into it. We heard the music, we embraced the change, we felt we’d found our kin. Mom struggled with what we became. She longed for her old days and her extended family connections, but my sister and I joyfully headed for the new.

Brian Doyle

Brian Doyle on CONSERVATION & WILDLIFE PHOTOGRAPHY

My name is Brian Doyle, a conservation and wildlife photographer and instructor based in Minneapolis. Photography is my creative outlet, my greatest passion; but it's also how I connect with the world around me. I draw my inspiration from the moments of awe I have felt so many times in my career, guiding in some of the most remote places in the world, and try to put a little piece of that feeling in every photo I take.

Every capture has an image narrative and a written or oral narrative. Images tell us a story – as we know from the famous phrase – but the addition of visual language creates a humanized and emotional connection with its audience. Together, these narratives strengthen the power behind the photo, creating a multisensory reaction.

To create this experience, research is essential. I begin with researching the landscape or the animal and the time of day I am interested in photographing. Like most landscape photographers, I scope out the locations prior to my designated shoot to notate high-traffic areas and times. Depending on the photograph I envision, I utilize certain apps to assist me – including Photopills. With these apps, I am able to pinpoint best moments for details such as golden hour, blue hour, nautical twilight, elevation, and angular diameter. Photographing wildlife takes more patience, learning the natural habitat of the animals and ensuring the animals feel comfortable enough with me in their surroundings. The most important aspect of photographing wildlife is the understanding of my equipment. Wildlife can react in a given moment, so being ready to change my aperture or shutter speed is crucial. Together, with these tools, I aim to capture and blend moments together to instill a sense of time in my artwork.

These connections provide us the platform for protecting the voiceless wildlife and preservation of our environment. Now more than ever, at the environmental crossroads we as humans all face – and with access to near-infinite information in our pockets – the moral imperative to help shape how people understand, interact with, and interpret the world we live in for the better is undeniable, and the effectiveness of photography and digital media unmatched in helping us to realize this massive endeavor.

Anne Myles

Anne Myles on “Lock and Dam No. 10”

The scene portrayed in “Lock and Dam No. 10” took place several years ago. My close friend in California, who was my girlfriend over a decade ago, did visit me in Iowa, and we did spend time in the northeast Iowa river town of Guttenberg, located about an hour and a half from where I live in Waterloo. Beyond that, anything I imply here should be taken as fiction, or at least shaped for the poem’s purposes. (I confess I only learned about the Bible facsimile in the library while working on the poem, and have not yet seen it for myself.)

Though it comes from an earlier memory, this poem will always remind me of 2020, since the only traveling I did during the pandemic year was to the Upper Mississippi. Part of the Driftless Region, it’s a landscape that feels distinctively different from the more typical midwestern farmland that surrounds me, yet it’s close enough to reach without having to stop along the way. A different poem emerged last fall from two trips to the Wisconsin side, where I found the Mississippi taking on life as a personal symbol in a way it had not previously done. In that poem, I mention the river widening and pooling as it’s held back by locks and dams, an image I felt had considerable resonance in my emotional life. It was my MFA advisor who suggested that that motif might be worth exploring further in other poems. That struck me as a promising idea, but the only starting point that came to mind was the Guttenberg visit, along with the childhood memories of fishing with my parents near Chaffey’s Lock on the Rideau Canal in Ontario I layer in. The title reminds me, however, that there are other locks and dams, external or internal, I might yet discover. . . .

Everything takes a long time until what happens next, I write. This has perhaps been truest in my life regarding poetry itself. I lost my connection to poetry for about three decades as I got taken over by academia; if there’s a damming in my life I truly regret, it’s that. However, since poetry returned to me in 2018 things have in fact happened very fast; I left my academic position and am currently in my final semester of MFA work. So much of the inner part of this experience has felt like an effort to unlock, to flow down into the heartland, which also involves not hiding from patterns of loss, longing, and unfulfillment in my relational life. That too is in the poem, of course. And it connects back to the suspended waiting that many of us are experiencing during COVID-19. Something does happen next, but I don’t—we don’t—know exactly what it is.

Poems come to me with a distinct sense of rhythm, syntax, and line, usually very different in each poem—I’d say that’s what I usually encounter first, before phrases or images, and if I don’t hear a particular rhythm it’s very difficult for me to write. I didn’t know exactly what would arrive in this poem in terms of content after I placed two women on the shore overlooking the lock, but I knew I wanted the prose lines, the slow movement, the sentences with their heavy ends—the heat-drugged torpor of an August afternoon, the long wait for the lock to complete its process, what it feels like to think of something you might say and then choose not to. A rhythm of regret, perhaps, but also acceptance, because what else is there?

Thom Tammaro

BEHIND THE LENS: Thom Tammaro ON “Calved Glacier Chunk, Jökulsárlón Glacier Lagoon, Iceland”

Say azure. Say cerulean. Say turquoise. Say maya. Say cornflower. Say ice blue. 

We approached Jökulsárlón Glacial Lagoon as we drove west, on the last leg of a nine-day drive around the Ring Road (about 850 mi.) that circles the island of Iceland. You will find the lagoon about five-hours (235 mi.) east of Reykjavik. The lagoon—Iceland’s deepest lake at 930 feet—is difficult to miss, as the Ring Road bridge carries you directly over the lagoon, which is then easily accessible, just a short walk from the car park. There is no admission. Consequently, it is one of the most popular tourist stops in Iceland. But don’t let that hinder you from going there. With its milky-white-and-blue coloring, the lagoon is one of the most stunning landscapes in Iceland. Say azure. Say cerulean. Say turquoise. Say maya. Say cornflower. Say ice blue. 

Lagoon icebergs, varying size in the seven square-mile area of the lagoon, are made of 1,000-year-old ice. The lagoon forms naturally from the melting water of Vatnajökull, Europe’s largest glacier. If you are vigilant, you will see giant blocks of white ice “calve” from the glacier tongue as they begin their drift along the 1.5 mi. watery journey that gradually narrows then empties into the Atlantic Ocean. Once they leave the glacial tongue, their color turns milky-white or a brilliant blue. Glacier density—combined with air bubbles trapped within the ice and the dance of light and ice crystals—absorbs all colors of the spectrum except for blue. Some “calves” can reach well-over 100 feet high and just as wide. If you are lucky, you’ll witness huge melting chunks tip over as the warmer water melts the underside of the iceberg as it makes its way to the Atlantic Ocean. And if you’re even luckier, you’ll delight in watching seals swim among the many calved chunks and leap on and off temporary ice floes.

As the ice chunks move toward the Atlantic, wind and warming temperatures sculpt them into abstract shapes. Ocean waves polish some of the chunks to a crystal clear finish, while others turn into blue gems. The tides tow them back to the black volcanic sand shoreline, called Breiðamerkursandur—Black Sand Beach. The contrast of the crystal-clear ice chunks resting on the black sand beach gives the beach its more recent name—Diamond Beach. Most striking, however, are the blue ice chunks against the black sand. 

As I strolled the black sand beach that mid-September day, I made this photo. The tides and winds were rather brisk, so there was a great deal of action as the waves slammed against the stranded ice chunks. I wanted to capture the halo-like spiral patterns of the spray. I made this image with my iPhone 8 (having left my Canon back in the SUV). I made several images, as I waited patiently between the ebb and flow of the tide and the waves smashing against the ice chunks.

The overall experience of Jökulsárlón Glacial Lagoon is breathtaking. Lonely Planet describes the Jökulsárlón Glacial Lagoon as "a ghostly procession of luminous blue icebergs." Words like “other-worldly” and “surreal” come to mind, but don’t do it justice. Instead, say azure. Say cerulean. Say turquoise. Say maya. Say cornflower. Say ice blue.