Erin Coughlin Hollowell

Erin Coughlin Hollowell on “Instructions for compass truing”

Just about every Sunday you can find me in church, a strip of rough shoreline called Bishop’s Beach by the colonizers and Tuggeht by the Indigenous people in Homer, Alaska. Walking the beach is part of a long-term dedication to a place for me, someone who lived in twelve different parts of the United States by the time I was thirty. Deeply learning a singular place has been something new to me. For the last eleven years, I’ve been walking Bishop’s Beach and paying attention, purposefully.

“Instructions for compass truing” is part of a collaboration with artist Andrea Wollensak, sponsored by the Rasmuson Museum in Anchorage, Alaska. When Andrea tasked me with writing poems about water, specifically someplace that I had a relationship with, I thought of Bishop’s Beach and Kachemak Bay. The beach faces a mountain range with several glaciers, and the water is always changing with the weather which is restless, fickle, and often fierce.

Andrea asked me to pay specific attention to the sounds of the beach, to write as many poems as I’d like about that liminal space where the water and land carry out their long relationship of change. The end product was a set of my poems and a set of another poet Jen Stever Ruckle’s poems that were “illustrated” by a computer program developed to create artifacts that looked like wave-smoothed stones and crystalline structures all triggered by the speed and pitch with which we read the work out loud.

But the beginning evocation, to write about the water was a bit daunting. To write about a place like Bishop’s Beach is to risk falling into cliché. To describe it might lead one to vast gestures but none of the intimacy that walking a strip of coastline several times a week brings. So I began to look for other forms that the poems might take that would express the “why” of the act as well as the great churning mystery of the place itself.

I made a list of forms gleaned from other sources: invention, charm, recipe, map, vow, conversation, almanac, instruction, catalog. I felt like having an external form might push me past the cliché of the description of the ocean and allow me make imagistic leaps that might otherwise feel out of place.

I tasked myself to write poems that encapsulated what I felt and thought as I walked along the beach each week. How the beach is the place that I bring my hardest feelings to sort. I walked along Bishop’s Beach while one of my best friends was being removed from life support. I walked along the same shore when my father died. When I had to put my seventeen year old dog down. Always along the water to right-size my emotions which can be tremendously large in my heart and comfortingly small and brief when compared to mountains.

“Instructions for compass truing” is a poem about those emotions and how walking along the beach can assist a person to get their compass trued. Compass truing is a method of calibrating a compass so that it reads correctly for wayfinding. And perhaps that is truly what I’m doing as I walk along Bishop’s Beach – finding my way in the world.

CLAIRE JUSSEL

“Regarding the wildfire smoke covering the sky that originated 1,000 miles away” emerged in summer 2021—specifically in the few weeks that felt too apocalyptic for comfort as pandemic anxiety leading into climate crisis anxiety and the long days filled up with dead grass and thick smoke that yellowed the sky. Growing up in Idaho, I was accustomed to dry grass and wildfire smoke in late summer, but I was aware that this was not the norm for Minnesota, where the park grass normally stayed lush and verdant all season. I had never seen smoke that dense while being so far away from the source fire(s). It was a sullen time, commuting through the smoke that accumulatted over the upper Midwest from numerous megafires burning miles away, drumming my steering wheel to Big Red Machine’s “The Latter Days” on repeat.

If not already obvious to you, reader, it was an angsty and dread-filled time for me. In that season, I also found it very difficult to write. This poem was guided into creation through a class led by the wonderful J. Bailey Hutchinson via the Loft Literary Center. The class was dedicated to offering attention and celebration to the everyday, the mundane, and even the ugly. Ultimately, the prompts and conversations in the class allowed me space to let what was troubling my mind spill out into a poem. Part of the class addressed how to write about fearful subjects, offering approaches to either subvert the topic or to state and acknowledge the very reasons why it induced fear. 

This poem originated in an attempt to do the latter: to reject any effort to wrangle beauty out of the smoke and instead make room for my despair on the page. The poem in its final form exists in three parts, the first of which names this refusal. There are many doorways through which I could wax poetic about a smoky sky—the bright dark power of a full forest blaze, the searing red sunsets brought on by smokescreen skies—but here I (perhaps stubbornly) wanted to address the evidence of loss, of catastrophe, of irrevocable change, and the suffocating exhaustion that came from witnessing this evidence day after day.

The second part of the poem, an interlude of sorts, was recycled from a cruddy draft of a different poem about fear and my sister’s childhood fire phobia. This resulted in a silhouette version of my sister (thanks, Anna) as a sort of archetypal oracle figure that riffed off the mantra to “protect the planet for future children” while also reckoning with the impact of climate change only a few decades removed from my own childhood. This middle section of the poem was meant to evoke an ominous, fretful tone and to compare a house fire with wildfires threatening a larger-scale home place. As I allude in the transition between the second and third section of the poem (“I’ll be heavy-footed. My skull / is too choked for delicacy”), at the time of writing I felt that this comparison was both a bit heavy handed and that it suited my mentality at the time (which could be boiled down to throwing my hands up and saying “screw it!”). In trying to processes mourning on a large scale, it felt somewhat appropriate to lean grandiose. Additionally, this section is an attempt to inject a global, zoomed-out view with a brush of the personal and anecdotal to transition towards the last part of the poem. 

And finally, at the end of the poem: the tomato, my small scope salvation. The tomato plant, both in the poem and in my lived experience that summer, was a small way forward, a kind of tangible evidence of things growing, greening, continuing, even in the midst of calamity. My friends I lived with at the time and I decided to buy a few potted tomato plants to grow in on our deck. I was comforted by seeing them when I returned home, stooping down to check how they were doing, the ritual of watering them, smelling their leaves and admiring (and later, eating) their beautiful red fruit. We did our best to tend to them despite not really knowing what we were doing. The “vine held up / by drum sticks and duct tape” is both an homage to our DIY garden stakes and to the sentiment that we did the best that we could and figured out how to keep things alive and thriving as we went along despite this uncertainty. In addition to being a reprieve of domestic delight, the tomato became a way to shift focus to the world within reach: an anchor that was not an entire solution to the ongoing troubles, but certainly a balm for the burns.

William Johnson

RIBS, A TROUT AND A LILY

by Willam Johnson 

The making of a poem can be reckless and unpredictable, a groping after voice and form.  “Cathedral” was a long time coming, and, I now think, will never be complete.  Officially, it began on a backpacking trip I took with my two sons.  Memory says we fished into evening at a mountain lake.  In rain the boys hiked to camp without me.  Worn out as darkness fell, I carried a rod, pack and lunker trout after them.  When I rested under a cedar, something stirred in me.  It was a presentiment, held by rain, lightfall, the woods and a growing awareness they bore me.

My sons appeared in early drafts, and I strove to keep them in.  They remain as an invisible breath.  One image became central:  a rib-cage that lay near the trail.  As I worked on the poem, I began to feel these bones had waited a long time for me.  In near-dark I couldn’t see them clearly, but rain soaked the woods with expectation. 

And dread arose—over the trout, whose life I had taken, the bones themselves, and my feeling “parched and bitter” and alone.  If fear has an object, dread is faceless, an encounter with pure nothingness.  Out of it floated a solitary lily.  It grew in the bone-house where it tipped spilling rain.  If “Cathedral” has a sanctuary, it harbors not only a flower, but the ineffable mystery of being here.

Over time the poem became less narrative (‘what happened’) and more lyrical (‘what it felt like’).  A lily—floral Persephone?—sprouted in the house of death—well-spring of lives and poems.   Even this draft only scrapes the surface rain washes away.  If poetry bears a felt change of consciousness (Owen Barfield’s phrase), then “Cathedral” houses indwelling life, as a kinship with death. 

The poem’s last line came as a shock.  The power of dread, I now see, came to include our ecological crisis, which was less apparent to me in the early life of the poem.  That rainy hike now traverses a planet on fire.  How nourishing those raindrops have become.  The ribs, elk perhaps, offered me a gift both beautiful and uncanny. 

The forces that would make our earth, and us, dead, inert things, are tenacious.  Our call is to nurture not things, but images, the lilies within and without us.  The difference between an image and a thing is that a thing is drained of life, while an image bears it within, where it can be shared.   In a cage of bones, a lily tips, spilling rain.

Elizabeth Carls

“on Trespassing”: A Walking Meditation on Borders Real and Imagined

I’m interested in boundaries both real and false—the ways in which we as human beings attempt to compartmentalize and contain, the ways we divide our landscapes into states and nations, the ways we assign genres to the things we read and write. This is a theme I explore frequently in my writing in general and in the essay, “On Trespassing” specifically. Metaphorically, borders real and imagined show up in this essay in several ways—my own act of trespassing, the coyotes and beavers who cross property lines, even the micro-organisms decomposing the porcupine defy containment. It is an expansive essay, as was the walk that inspired it. As such the essay also contemplates, as I frequently do, the ill-defined border between ourselves and our environment.

The boundary between ourselves and our environment is permeable. There is no real barrier that separates us from nature nor it from us. I am interested in exploring through my writing practice the way the places we dwell affect us as much as we affect those places. How we carry the places we interact with in our bodies, how our environment has an emotional and sometimes physical impact on us, and how in turn, we have an impact on the natural world. “On Trespassing” is an essay very much about people’s relationship to the land, the idea of land ownership, land use, and land abuse.

I have a background­—both through education and vocation—in Conservation Biology. Because of this background in the natural sciences, I feel an obligation to resist describing an overly idealized version of nature in my writing. I’m compelled to be honest and accurate in my descriptions—to discuss the extirpation of animal species, or the conversion of forest and prairie to agricultural land, for example—while simultaneously being artful in the expression of my ideas, being mindful to not produce writing that is overly academic or dry. I am always aware of how the line between art and science gets blurred in the practice of writing, especially writing concerned with the natural world. I am mindful to walk that line carefully.

“On Trespassing,” is in many ways a walking meditation on borders both real and imagined. What I hope to have accomplished in this essay is the same thing I hope to accomplish in much of my writing—that is, to gently invite readers to join me on this walking journey, to contemplate along with me the ways in which we engage with the natural world, and to consider how we impact the places we engage with just as those places impact us.