KATIE KELLEHER

Katie Kelleher on “Empty Seat SERIES—Cowee Mountain”

The “Empty Seat Series—Cowee Mountain” is part of a larger photographic work. The Empty Seat Series of photographs was created through solo hikes up mountain trails and overlooks across beautiful Western North Carolina, explorations through windows of abandoned buildings and alleyways, treks across creeks and into tunnels, and emerging from exploding colored smoke. The empty chair represents that which is unseen yet is present wherever I go: my mental illness. To other viewers, it has represented an overseas or absent loved one, someone who has passed away, or even one’s own mind and sense of self in a Gestalt Therapy manner. Many of the locations, such as Cowee Mountain, were chosen for their natural elegance and to juxtapose nature with manmade invention.  

Elizabeth Kerlikowske

Elizabeth Kerlikowske on “Any Way You Slice It” and “Suburban Garnish”

My grandparents blessed me with boredom.

Growing up, my sister and I were taken from our city life and removed to a cottage on a lake in northern Michigan.  It was us and old people. They liked to go on rides to obscure (The Nook in the Woods, surely you’ve heard of it?) destinations, eat lunch, drive back to the cottage, Gran and her sisters or her friend Merle. Sis and I in the back seat, me reading, Sis biting her nails.  Every so often, Gran would turn around and yell, “Put that book down and look out the window!” Nancy Drew slammed shut, and I put my nose to the glass.

When it rained, I discovered rain drop wars, where individual drops blown against the window at 55 mph joined other drops, became rivers, invaded other pools and dissolution ensued. It is a short step from that to understanding that all objects have a voice, and if you look and listen, you can discover them. A healthy relationship with personification helps.  

In “Any Way You Slice It,” the toaster is a substitute for the wife, watching her husband go crazy, stuck in the kitchen, secretly glad all this bad stuff is happening to him. I don’t know that when I’m writing, though. It really is just a toaster. When he turns his violence to the toaster and she sails for the first time in her life, it’s a little like the end of Thelma and Louise: this moment of release, never mind what comes after.  Because the toaster has a good landing, there’s hope for a better life, that someone walking past just needs a toaster!

Even as a kid, I thought houses looked ridiculous in bows. They are the height of “Suburban Garnish.”  Lights are okay. Maybe candles in the window, which can also be kind of spooky. I wondered how the house felt about it. Neighbors decorating their houses the way you would dress up a dog or a kid, who then exhibit this passive yet slightly hostile patience. Because neither the toaster nor the house go anywhere, there is a sense of stability to them both I find comforting.

I became serious about writing when I was sixteen.  My junior year, I wrote a story for my English class that I thought my super-Christian teacher would love. He called me out into the hallway. Instead of praise, he said, “You should see a psychiatrist.”   That was when I understood the power of writing. I did not see a psychiatrist until 20 years later.

Kathryn Petruccelli

Kathryn Petruccelli on “Somewhere in New England“ and “Coastal Redwood”

The first year after I moved from California's central coast to western Massachusetts, when people would hear I'd relocated from the west coast, their eyes would get big. Some would press their palms to their chests. “Oh! How are you handling the New England winter?!” they'd gush, all concern, then think to tack on, “and you're from California?” 

When I'd admit that no, I wasn't originally from there, they'd stop short, hands falling limp from their breast, empathy all but evaporated in the dry winter air. Some would literally shrug and scowl as if wounded by being so mislead or shoo away an invisible nuisance in the air between us with a flick of their wrist.

I'm very interested in how we let each other in; and don't. I'm endlessly fascinated by the small town—what it gives us and what it takes away. What it allows in terms of connection, a lifting up of the individual, and what it squelches and stamps out.

The speaker of the poem "Somewhere in New England" is lost—figuratively and literally, jarred by a recent uprooting and looking to at least create roots in the form of a garden. The two people in the poem struggle to share a common language because their baseline vocabulary, that is, the physical landscape they value, is different.

I enjoy many geographies. When a space is no longer somewhere you are just visiting or looking at with curiosity and distant admiration, however, but becomes where you live, a place you are asked to claim, the stakes change. Can I relinquish the vistas I fell in love with and that, in the end, are the ones with which I identify? I firmly believe place and self are inextricable, one from the other.

Place, consequently, means a great deal. As well, the absence of place plays at least as big a role in who we are. (Just ask any child of immigrants who has heard all their life of a "home" they've never visited.) But where we belong isn't simply a matter of how the newbie manages to fit in. It also has to do with how the new place attempts to meet or accept them. The questions around this topic expand in complexity rather quickly, from the personal to the political. Can I embrace new people entering the place I call home, even if that means it will change because of their presence? Can I allow someone to claim a space as theirs if they are not native to it but have chosen it? 

Whether the seed grows isn't only about how strong or adaptable the seed is, but also whether the environment it's placed in is welcoming to its needs. It's a transaction. I know people who've overwintered fig trees in Boston and people who grow lilac bushes in Santa Cruz but believing the exception proves the rule only punishes those who fail. 

I'm a pretty pathetic version of a New Englander. I don't rake leaves, I like to speak in impulsive, effusive gusts, and seeing snow fall brings me close to hyperventilating. I'm also lucky. I didn't move because of war, drought, threats to my life, or economic devastation. And my displacement has brought me many poems.

While not solely about a sense of displacement, "Coastal Redwood" is also born in part from just that. It comes from a series of mine, a dozen poems strong and counting—love letters to west coast flora that I miss. 

When considering the redwood, it's hard not to think about all the trees have lived through. This poem moves closer to prayer. I am using writing to find or ask for how to continue to see hope in a world that is so weighed down in despair. 

The poem (and the series) owes a debt to three poets I greatly admire. The first is Louise Glück, whose book Wild Iris is a work of sheer brilliance. While my poems don't speak in the voice of the plants, the speaker in them is still talking to the plants in anticipation or acknowledgement of some kind of wisdom or message arriving in response. I didn't start writing with Wild Iris consciously in mind, but I had absorbed it, my permission slip. The second poet my series draws inspiration from is Ada Limón. She tends to have a lot to say about trees in general, but in relationship to "Coastal Redwood," I think of Ada's poem "Ancestors" where she writes, "I've come here from the trees—" and "imagine you must survive / without running." 

Finally, the plant series wouldn't exist if I didn't happen to have shown up for a workshop at a poetry festival in Amherst, Massachusetts given by Aimee Nezhukumatathil. It focused on epistolary writing and at some point, she suggested writing to something non-human. Maybe it was sitting there in an audience of people dressed in black and brown, turtlenecks and jeans, and watching Aimee in her yellow dress and pink sweater looking like something blooming herself that released the idea.

When I visit California now and walk among the array of succulents, rosemary draping its periwinkle flowers from window boxes, Mexican sage with its soft, purple flowers reaching, I feel the same rush as I do sitting down with old friends there. Short of Mexican sage and old friends, when I'm in need of beauty and companionship, I turn to poetry.

DEVON MARSH

DEVON MARSH ON “IN THE REDWOODS”

When our children were growing up, my wife and I made it a point to take our family to places of remarkable natural beauty. We wanted to instill in the kids a sense of wonder. Starting when they were small, we visited sites close to home in the Appalachian Mountains and on the North Carolina coast. As they grew, we ventured farther afield: desert trails in Redrock Canyon; tidal pools at Point Lobos; complex surface geology in Acadia; an immense deposit of driftwood on a stretch of beach in the Olympic Peninsula. Our family has been fortunate to see some beautiful places. In each one, we tried to slow down and take in the unique features it had to offer.

My poem, “In the Redwoods,” recounts a visit with my teenage children to California’s Big Basin State Park. The park burned in August, 2020. Although many of the largest trees survived the fire, reading the poem now inflicts a poignancy I couldn’t have anticipated when I wrote it. I wrote the poem because our walk along the trails in Big Basin felt different from other hikes. Surrounded by the ancient redwood trees, I found myself wondering how many tourists these patient giants had observed. Trees feel our presence, if not in a sentient way then at least through our effect on their surroundings. But it’s possible they register more than we think they do. Trees communicate through sophisticated chemical mechanisms, using both airborne and mycorrhizal connections. We might discover that their capacity for cognition approaches their ability at communication. What did the redwoods perceive about me and my family? What did they tell each other after we left?

In a poem published last summer, I wrote, “Through us, the universe reflects.” I believe humans are the universe’s attempt to reflect on itself. Similarly, human creations—works of art, legends, myths—are Homo sapiens’ attempt to reflect on ourselves. None of the mythical creatures in our imaginations lurk in shadows observing us, but our knowledge of them asserts their presence as a possibility. We’ve each felt hair stand up on the back of the neck. The sense that someone is watching us is hard to shake. It might arise from a primitive awareness that in fact someone is watching us. Or it might arise from the natural world itself regarding us with a critical eye; it has every justification to observe us with suspicion. Or it might arise from our own creations observing us from inside our minds and forming their own opinions.

As I suggest in “In the Redwoods,” a Sasquatch family watching us walk through the forest would wonder how humans have managed to achieve all we have. They would puzzle over how we as a species have exercised dominion to the point of ruin, putting them and ourselves in peril, when by all appearances we are ill-equipped for survival. The sense that I was watched in this way stayed with me in the redwoods. The perception felt like a gift, and our hike that day felt like a poem.