My Year in Writing: 2022
November 28, 2022
Now is the time, between my birthday and the end of the year, when I take stock of my year in writing. It’s been a pretty productive year, considering it also included a move from Brooklyn to the Berkshires:
Published Wine-Dark Sea: New & Selected Poems & Translations (Shanti Arts)
Book launch for Wine-Dark Sea online with Kathryn Miles (Feb)
Appearance on Portuguese American Radio Hour with Diniz Borges (March)
World Poetry Day/Cagarro Colloquium reading (March)
Book launch with Portuguese Beyond Borders Institute (March)
Book signing at Terrain.org booth at #AWP22 in Philadelphia (March)
Wine-Dark Sea gets “Taylored” by @taylorswift_as_books on Instagram! (March)
Lecture at University of the Azores: Mesa-redonda Poesia, Tradução e Memória (April)
Azores launch for Wine-dark Sea and Azorean Suite/Suite Açoriana at Letras Levadas in Ponta Delgada, São Miguel, Azores, with Leonor Sampaio Silva (April)
Açores Hoje television interview with Juliana Lopes on RTP Açores (April)
Terrain.org Reading Series with Joe Wilkins and Betsy Aoki (April)
“Phase Change” and “Under the Linden’s Spell” reprinted in TS Poetry’s Every Day Poems (online/email)
“Midnight Sun” and “Shapeshifting” reprinted in Earth Song: a nature poems experience (anthology), edited by Sara Barkat and published by TS Poetry Press
Named Ryan Observatory’s first Poet Laureate
Mentored 2 students in Creative Nonfiction for Adroit Journal Summer Mentorship Program (June/July) [UPDATE: one of the students I mentored got accepted into the University of Pennsylvania, early decision! So proud of her!]
Translated Pedro da Silveira’s A ilha e o mundo, his first book of poems (1952)
Excerpts from Corsair of the Islands, my translation of Vitorino Nemésio’s Corsário das Ilhas, published in Barzakh Magazine (online) (August)
Panelist/presenter at Colóquio: Pedro da Silveira – faces de um poliedo cultural, University of the Açores: On Translating Pedro da Silveira’s A Ilha (September)
Lançamento da obra Habitar: um ecopoema, Margarida Vale de Gato’s translation of Dwelling: an ecopoem, published by Poética Edições, with Nuno Júdice, Luís Filipe Sarmento, and Margarida Vale de Gato, at FLAD in Lisbon (September)
Guest lecturer in Creative Writing at University of the Azores (Leonor Sampaio Silva, professora)
Panelist/presenter at 36th Colóquio da Lusofonia, Centro Natália Correia, Fajã de Biaxo, São Miguel, Azores: reading from Azorean Suite/Suite Açoriana with Eduardo Bettencourt Pinto (October)
#YeahYouWrite Catskill Reading at Fahrenheit 451 House, Catskill, NY w/Stephanie Barber, Laurie Stone, and Sara Lippmann (October)
Guest Writer at UConn Stamford creative writing class (Mary Newell, professor) (October)
Poet & Astronomer in Conversation (with Derrick Pitts, Chief Astronomer of the Franklin Institute) at Ryan Observatory at Muddy Run, PA (November)
“Wine-Dark Sea” (poem) published in American Studies Over_Seas (November)
20th Anniversary of residency at Millay Arts and writing of Dwelling: an ecopoem (November) [UPDATE: Got asked to join the Board of Millay Arts in December.]
Selections from Habitar: um ecopoema published in Gávea-Brown (US) and Grotta (Azores)
Book reviews in Gávea-Brown and Pessoa Plural [Postponed until 2023.](December)
My essay, “Açorianidade and the Radiance of Sensibility,” accepted by Barzakh Magazine for publication in Winter 2023 issue. (December)
What a year! I am exceedingly grateful to everyone who has supported my writing over the past year. As Walter Lowenfels wrote, “One reader is a miracle; two, a mass movement.”
Like I said last year, I feel like I’ve been blessed by a mass miracle this year!
My Year in Writing: 2020
November 18, 2020
2020 has been a difficult year in many respects: a global pandemic, over 1.3 million deaths worldwide and climbing, and, here in the U.S., a destabilizing and despicable government response to the pandemic and to escalating racial tensions, as well as a contentious presidential election that threatened the country’s 244-year experiment in democracy.
In short, it’s been tough to find moments to celebrate and, when we do celebrate, it is too often alone, distanced from others, or “together” on Zoom. One response to this “unprecedented” year (may we strike that word from future dictionaries) was to feel paralyzed. And, truth be told, I felt exactly that–paralyzed–for the first few weeks of the pandemic’s surfacing in the U.S.
Shortly, however, I felt that response was not worthy to the challenges–and it didn’t make things better or even make me feel better, as the sirens blared and the death toll rose. Another response was to turn to work, which in my case meant writing. It felt like a choice between surviving and going mad.
Now is generally the time of year—between my birthday and year’s end—when I take stock of my writing life over the past twelve months. This year, I was curious to see how I did. So, here goes:
- Received an award for FALLING UP from Letras Lavadas, in conjunction with PEN Açores, and a Nautilus Award for DWELLING. FALLING UP also received notices from Book Authority for Best New Memoir and Best New Family Books.
- Finished a complete draft of my Work-in-Progress, a research-driven memoir I’m calling THE OTHERS IN ME: A Journey to Discover Ancestry, Identity, and Lost Heritage, and submitted proposal to Tagus Press.
- A chapter from THE OTHERS IN ME, “Steerage,” about my great-grandparents’s journeys from the Azores to America, appeared in VIAGENS, a volume of literary journeys by some of the best Azorean writers writing today (and then there’s my piece), published by Letras Lavadas.
- Finished a long poem, “Azorean Suite,” a section of which appeared in Gávea-Brown: A Bilingual Journal last year, in my original English and in a Portuguese translation by Azorean poet, José Francisco Costa; then I translated the entire poem into Portuguese with Eduardo Bettencourt Pinto, for bilingual book publication as AZOREAN SUITE/SUITE AÇORIANA by Letras Lavadas in Fall 2020.
- Facebook Live with Vamberto Freitas, Katherine Vaz, Eduardo Bettencourt Pinto, and Onésimo Almeida held on 6 Nov and interview in Portuguese-American Journal with Carolina Matos published on the 5th marked the official launch of AZOREAN SUITE/SUITE AÇORIANA. (Watch it here: Launch event)
- Essay, “My Pessoa,” along with translations of two Pessoa poems (including the complete “Tabaccaria,” which I completed this Spring), and three of my own poems with Portuguese themes, will appear in Pessoa Plural in December.
- My foreword to David Swartz’s English translation of Nuno Júdice’s novella, THE RELIGIOUS MANTLE, published in August by New Meridian Arts.
- My essay, “John Fante, Francesco Durante, and Literary Islands,” appeared in Schuykill Valley Journal.
- Poem from my “Providence” sequence, “My Portuguese Grandfather,” published in The Portuguese Tribune. (Thanks Diniz!)
- Contracted to translate Vitorino Nemésio’s CORSÁRIO DAS ILHAS into English for first time, which Tagus Press will publish as part of their Bellis Azorica Series. Started translation and got through and initial draft of the first 10 chapters.
- Translated four poems from DWELLING into Portuguese for a special edition of Colóquio/Letras journal, which Nuno Júdice edits for the Gulbenkian Foundation, on Literratura e ecologia, and to which he asked me to submit.
- Translated five poems of Vitorino Nemésio, submitted to Gavéa-Brown Journal.
- Interviews in Pine Hills Review, with the Portuguese American Radio Hour (look for 07/14/20 episode), and in the Portuguese-American Journal, the last of which was also published in Portuguese on Agenda Açores. I also did a mini-interview for the Letras Lavadas free magazine. And Good Poetry podcast with host Adam Coons! Reviews in Açoriano Oriental for both FALLING UP and SUITE AÇORIANA, and in New Pages blog for DWELLING.
- Participated in Dani Shapiro’s writing retreat at Kripalu (in person, just before the pandemic hit!), participated in “Lusodaisporac” Writing Workshop in June organized by Christopher Larkosh at UMass Dartmouth, took Diniz Borges’s Azorean History and Culture course from Fresno State University (distance), continued my Portuguese language studies, and will participate in Suzanne Roberts’s Travel Writing seminar at end of November. [UPDATE: Participated in Arquipélago de Escritores event in December.]
- Recorded video readings for Tina Cane’s Poetry is Bread, Homebound Publications, and Portuguese Beyond Borders Institute.
And finally updated my website, scottedwardanderson.com, which was long overdue…
…despite everything, not a bad writing year!
[UPDATE: Signed a contract with Shanti Arts for a new collection, WINE-DARK SEA: NEW & SELECTED POEMS & TRANSLATIONS]
Poet Serena Fox has been an attending physician in the Intensive Care Units of the Mount Sinai Beth Israel Hospital in NYC for the past 10 years. She works night shifts exclusively.
Since the increase in volume and acuity of respiratory failure related to COVID 19 this past month, the ICU beds have been increased 4-5 times usual, and she reports, they we are usually running full.
Fox worked in a major trauma unit in Washington, DC, until 2007, and launched her career in medicine in the emergency room of New York City’s Bellevue Hospital during the height of the HIV AIDS epidemic. Fox’s experiences there formed the background of poems in her book, Night Shift (Turning Point Books, 2009).
Her poems seem relevant to our historical moment and, with a lot of conversation about the need for ventilators, one poem from her book seems to strike a chord. “All That Separates” is a phrase that is usually associated with the Bible, as in “your iniquities have made a separation between you and your God (Isaiah 59:1-2). In some cases, a ventilator is all that separates a patient from their god.
However, the initial reliance on ventilators to treat patients with Covid-19 has been challenged or at least reconsidered, as moving quickly to ventilation may complicate already existing conditions, further compromising a patient’s health.
And, apparently, intubation and mechanical ventilation may lead to pneumonia because of the invasive nature of their application. A recent study at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago found a promising alternative whereby patients are placed face down on their beds and treated with heated, humidified oxygen for up to sixteen hours.
Here is Serena Fox’s poem, “All That Separates”:
What about respirators?
I can paralyze you with
an index finger, as effortlessly
as I brush your eyelashes,
making sure you’re down.
I set breaths per minute,
by pressing digits in a square.
Another plunge of my finger
slides you beyond consciousness
and memory. I hope sedation
lets you dream, gloriously
and elusively, beyond pain,
so we can turn you, change
the dressings, where your sternum
is no longer intact. A few
millimeters, all that separates
us, phalanx from pectoral flap,
you from me. A thickness worth
pause. More so, if a finger can
change outcome with the number of
your breath.
—Serena Fox from Night Shift (Turning Point Books, 2009) Used by permission of the author.
My Interview on Good Poetry Podcast
January 18, 2020
I recently chatted with Andrew Coons of the Good Poetry podcast. I read from my books, Dwelling: an ecopoem and Falling Up: A Memoir of Second Chances, and talk about poetic mentors and influences, conservation, and a range of interrelated topics.
Give a listen:
My Year in Writing: 2019
December 9, 2019
Now is the time of year when I take stock of my writing over the past twelve months.
Here is “My Year in Writing: 2019”:
–FALLING UP: A Memoir of Second Chances published by Homebound Publications in September 2019; book launch party on 10 November in Brooklyn; included on Book Authority’s Best New Family Books list
–DWELLING: an ecotour, including readings in Berkeley, Diamond Springs, and Sacramento, CA, Philadelphia and New Hope, PA, NYC, and at the ASLE Biennial Conference at UC Davis, where I also moderated a panel called “Poetry Can Save the Earth”
-Essay, “Whitman & the Sea,” published in Schuylkill Valley Journal in print and online
-Poem, “Cândido Rondon Remembering Teddy Roosevelt,” published in The Esthetic Apostle
-Revisions to and progress on my #WIP, a research-driven memoir I’m calling THE OTHERS IN ME: A Journey to Discover Ancestry, Identity, and Lost Heritage
-Started a long poem, “Azorean Suite,” a section of which will appear in the upcoming edition of Gávea-Brown: A Bilingual Journal, in my original English and in a Portuguese translation by Azorean poet, José Francisco Costa
-Essay, “My Pessoa,” to appear in Pessoa Plural next June
-Wrote introduction to David Swartz’s English translation of Nuno Júdice’s novella, THE RELIGIOUS MANTLE, which will be published in 2020 by New Meridian Arts
…all in all, not a bad writing year!
I first learned about the work of Camonghne Felix through Brooklyn Poets, where she was “Poet of the Week” in July 2015, and in Poetry Magazine around the same time. I was struck by her ability to weave together pop culture with the political in an illuminating and entertaining way.
Perhaps her most well-known poem, “Tonya Harding’s Fur Coats”—which I wanted to share, but its unusual formatting would be butchered by Gmail and WordPress—is a perfect example of this element of her work: social commentary that reaches beyond its pop-culture references to speak truth to the universal. (“The thing about being poor is that you spend your days pointing,” is how the poem opens. You can read it here.)
In an interview on the website Empire Coven, Felix explains that for her, “what makes poetry and poets so special is that we create a world with imagination where we introduce new content, new ways of thinking, and new frameworks of thought. I am so curious to know what this world would like if there were a bunch of poets running it.”
Felix works as political strategist—she was most recently communications director for Amara Enyia’s Chicago mayoral campaign—and has an MA in Arts Politics from NYU and an MFA from Bard College. Her first book, Build Yourself a Boat, comes out later this month from Haymarket Books. You can order it here.
She has a favorite quote that stays with her—literally, as she told the interviewer from Empire Coven, as it is tattooed on her thigh—from a poem by the great Gwendolyn Brooks: “Say that the river turns and turn the river.”
As Felix explains, “Brooks spoke a lot about the intrinsic power of black womanhood and black femininity. When she wrote, ‘say that the river turns and turn the river,’ she really wrote it as a love letter to women and girls of color. It was a reminder that the world is not a great place, but we have a natural power and ability to transcend those bad things and make the world a better place.”
For Felix, it’s a reminder “that when I’m frustrated or something seems like its not working out, all I have to do is change something about the way I’m thinking or going through the world. That will change the way that I’m experiencing the world.”
In the poem I want to share today, the speaker of the poem seems to be addressing a lover who has been caught fooling around with another woman and the other woman, who has reached out to her through social media to try to explain herself, as if that would provide some comfort. Or perhaps, she meant to make the speaker uncomfortable.
Anyone who has known betrayal can relate, yet as Felix told me, part of what she’s trying to do “is working through the unique ways that black women experience heartbreak and trying to give black femme heartbreak space to live outside of the overall tragedy of race and gender.”
Here is Camonghne Felix’s poem,
“Aziza Gifts Me a New Pair of Pants and Saves Me from a Kind of Dysmorphia”
you turned me into the enigma of
your sleep and I could no longer
get to you, your dream girl novaed
into soluble wins, a Mustang expensive
and out of reach. I want nothing from
her, no information, no explanation,
yet, in my Facebook inbox, she talks
of chemistry, a perceived lack thereof
how she peppers you with the music
of your fantasies, lets you into
the strobe light, her body a
body of swan songs. I can’t help but
do the comparative math work, really
analyze the friction —
on a scale of one to fuck you I am
obviously prettier, more compelling
better dressed, better situated for
the fixed follicle of long term care. She
knows
the coke life, the nightlife, the way to shake
a man down to his flimsy desires
his petty pull to the things that will
kill him slow, his tongue a rat, a
hangnail at the edge of his mouth.
still, I know that perfection
is a matter of impulse and still
there is no one too perfect to feel
worthless. I cannot be bothered with
the multiple failures of my skin. Aziza says,
but, you are so beautiful
and yet, nothing fits. I am hungry
to return to the monster I know.
In my new room, there are no mirrors —
I am confounded with how ugly I feel
how thirsty I am to be something
ductile and pliable, calling out to the
back hand of the lover I know. We are
a bus ride apart and in the olive glow
of a high midnight, he texts me with
strangled, desperate remorse:
I want off this carousel
I need my girl, my life back
You are my only caboose
The only north star I know
My one way trip to something
Larger than my obnoxious instincts
Something larger than my
complicated, calculated need to be
Bigger than you.
—Camonghne Felix. This poem originally appeared in PEN Poetry Series from PEN America. Used by permission of the author.
18 March 2019. Photo by SEA
Last month, I read with Alice Pettway at the Sacramento Poetry Center. Alice came all the way from Shanghai, where she lives with her husband, and read from her new book, Moth, which has just been published by the fabulous Salmon Poetry of County Clare, Ireland, and from her first book, The Time of Hunger / O Tempo de Chuva.
Pettway and her husband have been on quite a journey, first with the Peace Corps and now with various work situations, that has taken them from Mozambique to Bogotá and now to China.
Perhaps because of this itinerant existence in countries far-flung from her native Texas, Pettway seems to be perpetually longing for home in one way or another. In her work, she seems to be always returning as much as she is leaving, while the “tug of the familiar” and the familial is always calling her.
As she wrote in a 2010 “Letter” from her Peace Corps post in Mozambique, “We are falling in love with our new home, but missing our old one.” (My latest, Dwelling, is also about the longing for home and about how we need to protect this Earth, our island home, so we were a good pairing.)
“When we think of home, we might think of a place, a smell, a tradition,” Pettway wrote to me in an email about her poem, “Burial,” which I share below. “Those memories pull us constantly back toward our past, but they also sometimes force us out into the world to discover different ways of being. When our new and old selves eventually find themselves squeezed into the same space again, an emotional reckoning is unavoidable.”
Her eye for detail and resonant images, along with a deceptively simple, direct language characterizes Pettway’s work. I am delighted to share her work with you here.
Here is “Burial” by Alice Pettway:
Burial
I changed shoes for the burial.
The earth, soft from rain,
was hungry for the black stems
of my funeral heels.
It was hungry for you too,
waiting only for lurid turf
to give way to reality,
a hole gouged in a field.
The funeral director looked
away; your brothers
pulled black plastic ground,
took up shovels.
I grasped a handle too—bent
my woman’s body into pivot
of muscle and dirt until the throb
of earth on wood faded, until soil
landed on soil as softly as snow
on snow, until there was no hole.
The men stood silent. Burial
is no more a man’s task
than birth is.
—Alice Pettway, from Moth (Salmon Press, 2019). Used by permission of the author and publisher. You can read more about Alice Pettway here.
The iconic 18th Century Portas da Cidade (City Gates) in Ponta Delgada, São Miguel. (Photo by Scott Edward Anderson)
Some of you know that I’ve been on a journey the past few years to uncover and explore my familial roots on the island of São Miguel in the Azores, the nine-island archipelago in the Atlantic Ocean between Portugal and the United States.
Last summer, I had a residency on the island with Disquiet International, named for the enigmatic book of prose written by the great Portuguese poet, Fernando Pessoa. The residency in Ponta Delgada took place only 3.7 km from the freguesia (municipal parish) where two of my maternal great-grandparents emigrated in 1906.
Through Disquiet, I was also introduced to poet Lara Gularte, herself of Azorean American ancestry. Her relatives were from Faial, Pico, and Flores, three more of the nine islands in the Azores. Gularte was born in California and grew up in what was then an area of fruit farms known as the Santa Clara Valley (now more famously known as Silicon Valley).
Last month, Lara graciously invited me to read in the series she runs in the Sierra Foothills east of Sacramento, near where she now lives. Along with her husband, Brian—and some good local wine—we spent a wonderful evening discussing our Azorean heritage, poetry, and the dilemma of being generations removed from the places of our origins.
Gularte, who worked for many years as a public servant, finally traveled back to the Azores in 2008—the first of her family to return in four generations. “Before I explored these islands, they were only an abstraction,” Lara told the Portuguese American Journal in June 2018. “I had seen photos and post cards, but nothing prepared me for the natural beauty and complexity of the landscape.”
Her first collection, Kissing the Bee, was published by The Bitter Oleander Press in 2018. Many of the poems in her book speak to what she found on the Azores and the deepening connection which that brought about with her family roots in California’s fertile central valley.
“I was a resident poet at Footpaths to Creativity Center and Artist/Writer Residency on Flores Island in the Azores where this poem was written,” Lara says. “Flores is the island from where my grandfather was born before he emigrated as a young boy to the U.S. He was a stowaway on a ship and disembarked in New Bedford, Mass. He then worked in the cranberry bogs for a few years before traveling to California where he met my grandmother.”
Here is Lara Gularte’s poem, “Flores Island”:
FLORES ISLAND
The place at the beginning
A whale rises up in her mind
turning her thoughts gray.
In port, the ferry of return.
She searches for her grandfather
to discover the shape of his emigration
and finds the plank’s gone, rotted.
At the mercy of rough water and high winds,
he rowed, sinews pulling his dory,
pulling his bones to breaking.
She scans the distance,
says his name out loud, Antonio Henriques,
waits to hear a voice, see a face.
She searches for all the prisoners
of thick mists, others who look like her,
whose foreign tongues speak music to her soul.
Beyond the wake of a rogue wave,
currents and tides ride
on the back of a gray whale.
She sees through the vapor
boats whose nets gather the sky and let go.
Fog falls,
bearing dazed souls back to their home place.
She falls with them.
—Lara Gularte, from Kissing the Bee (The Bitter Oleander Press, 2018). Used by permission of the author.
A Vision Realized: Still Dwelling After All These Years
October 2, 2018
Sometimes, perseverance pays off.
Back in the early 2000s, I began working on a few poems in response to Martin Heidegger’s essay, “Building Dwelling Thinking,” which I first read over a decade before while living in Germany.
In this essay, Heidegger argues that dwelling is our way of being on the Earth, but that modern society creates a rift between building and dwelling.
We can heal that rift by preserving the Earth, by not exploiting its resources and, Heidegger suggests, by thinking about building as dwelling and our relationship to community.
My reactions to the work were complicated by several factors, not the least of which was the philosopher’s complicity with the Nazis during WWII, but also that some of what Heidegger says about dwelling didn’t ring true with what I understood were the origins and meanings of the word “dwelling.”
For example, Heidegger believed dwelling is best accomplished solely by staying in place, when in fact the roots of the word imply abandonment, leave-taking, and, frankly, wandering.
Heidegger concludes his essay with an example of his own dwelling in southwest Germany’s Black Forest–also home to the Brothers Grimm. His Black Forest home, known as “die Hütte,” located in Todtnauberg, embodied his concept of being rooted in a place. Of that he was certain.
Yet, dwelling’s roots, if you will, speak to its origins in doubt, leading astray, and ultimately, to being in error. This was clearly rich territory, given Heidegger’s egregious affiliations–and Jewish poet Paul Celan’s visit with the philosopher in 1967.
Exploring a multilayered aspect of dwelling as a manifestation of our being on the Earth, I turned to the writing of philosophers Kate Soper and David Abrams, as well as that of the phenomenologist Gaston Bachelard, all of which contributed to my thinking on the subject.
In November 2002, I enjoyed a residency at the Millay Colony for the Arts in Austerlitz, New York, sponsored by the Concordia Foundation, and a sabbatical from my work with The Nature Conservancy, which afforded me concentrated time to engage with my project.
I’ll never forget driving up to the Colony–it was right around my birthday. I’d shared a few of the early poems of my project with my friend and poetry mentor, Alison Hawthorne Deming, who responded positively, calling my project “a phenomenology of how we live on the Earth.”
Man, was that both encouraging and daunting! I had to stop the car more than once with a bit of a panic attack fearing I was not up to the task.
Yet, I persevered, and the work expanded from a sequence of poems to a companion series of essay “questions”–in the tradition of the Egyptian-French poet Edmond Jabès–on themes within the poems, and finally to some short “definition” poems, exploring the various meaning of the word dwelling.
At the 2011 American Society for Literature and the Environment (ASLE) conference in Bloomington, Indiana, I shared several of the poems on a panel organized by poet and anthologist Laura-Gray Street.
Over the years, a number of the poems made it into print or on-line publications, including Terrain, CrossConnect, Many Mountains Moving, and The Wayfarer. The late John Ashbery selected one of the poems, “Becoming,” to represent work produced by the Millay Colony for its 30th Anniversary exhibit at the Albany (New York) International Airport in 2004.
But I couldn’t find a home for the book as I conceived it–poetry and essays combined. When my collection of poems, Fallow Field, came out in 2013, I included several of the “Dwelling” poems as a section in the book, not sure I would ever publish the entire work.
Then, in 2017, I submitted the manuscript to a contest for The Hopper Poetry Prize, a prize devoted to environmentally focused collections. To my surprise, I received an honorable mention, which encouraged me to seek out other publishers towards the end of that year.
I wrote to half a dozen publishers I thought would have an interest and Christine Cote of Shanti Arts in Brunswick, Maine, was one of the first to respond. I sent her the manuscript.
A few weeks later, Christine wrote with such enthusiasm and a clear sense of the vision I had for the book. And the press, which was founded in 2011 “to celebrate and promote connections between art, nature, and spirit,” seemed like a gift to the book.
Christine’s design sense, too, was a gift and, when I suggested using some of my friend the artist Hans Van Meeuwen‘s drawings in the book, she loved the idea. Hans was an artist in residence at Millay when I was there in 2002; in fact, it’s where we met.
And when I told Christine I wanted to run the “definition poems” as a footer across the bottom of the page throughout the book, she was willing to try it–as skeptical as she may have been at first. I also ran the idea by my poetry friend Erin Belieu, showing her a sample. She said it “felt like a whisper across the bottom of the page.” It worked!
Sixteen years after that drive up to the Millay Colony, I’m holding a copy of this book in my hand. It seems like a minor miracle. Although, the real miracle will be you, dear readers, and your reaction to my little book of dwelling on the Earth.
Let me know what you think.
You can order copies directly from the publisher: Shanti Arts
Or on Amazon in paperback or Kindle versions: Amazon
National Poetry Month 2018, Bonus Week: My poem, “Surfacing,” from Dwelling: an ecopoem
April 30, 2018
Me and Harry. Photo by Lyn Groome.
Harry Groome is a writer and conservationist. When I first met him 20 years ago, Harry was also a board member of The Nature Conservancy.
I came to Philadelphia from Alaska, where I lived and worked with the Conservancy, to interview for a role with the organization’s Pennsylvania chapter.
Harry had recently retired as chairman of a large health care-pharmaceutical-consumer products company. In that meeting, I learned we shared three passions in addition to conservation: fly-fishing, ice hockey, and writing.
Harry told me he’d always wanted to be a writer, but he put writing aside when he took a job with the company where he spent his entire career. Upon retirement, he took it up again, writing short stories, getting an MFA from Vermont College, and eventually writing four novels.
But Harry’s most famous piece of writing—for which I once informed him he had more readers than Stephen King—was his “Letter to Hal.” Hal is his first grandson and the letter explained why Harry was giving Hal’s inheritance away to The Nature Conservancy. You can see a short film the Conservancy made of the letter here. (But get your tissues out—you’ll need ‘em!)
A few years later, when I was offered a month-long residency at the Millay Colony and took a sabbatical from the Conservancy to pursue it, Harry said to me, “Someday you’re going to have to choose. You can’t do both—you can’t be both a successful writer and a successful executive.”
Me being who I am, I said, “No, I can do both,” and proceeded to try to prove it for the next decade and a half. (I never liked being told what I could and couldn’t do.)
I made a pretty good run of it, too, but over the past nine months since I left my last “corporate” job with EY, I’ve been on a different journey. I started writing again, in earnest, and with a passion that I thought I’d lost. Poetry, as always, but also, increasingly prose—essays and memoir.
During this time, I’ve done some consulting, and even looked at some longer-term executive positions, but I haven’t found a role that gets me excited enough to go back into full-time work in such a capacity. I’ve lost interest in climbing a corporate ladder and playing in other people’s sandboxes.
Then something my wife Samantha said to me struck a nerve: “You’re happiest when you’re writing.” It’s true. And, while I did a fair amount of writing all during my working life over the past 30 years, including launching and writing my blog The Green Skeptic for a decade and publishing two books, over 100 poems, and a bunch of essays and reviews, I never fully committed myself to being a writer—not fully. There was always a part of me that wanted to be “successful” in work outside of writing—really, what I wanted was to be in charge, to run the show. (And I guess part of me still wanted to prove Harry wrong.)
But lately, and by this, I mean within the past couple of months, I’ve been thinking perhaps Harry and Samantha were right. And the universe seems to be sending me messages to this effect as well: First, in January a publisher wrote to me saying she wanted to bring out my book, Dwelling: an ecopoem, which I wrote on that long-ago residency at Millay. The book will be published this Fall. (Not a coincidence, I believe.)
Second, an idea I’d been working on—to trace the story of part of my family’s roots in Portugal’s Azores—started to take off. I landed a residency on São Miguel island for part of the upcoming summer, just a few miles down the road from the village where my great-grandparents came from and where that part of my family lived since at least the 1600s. I ran a book idea past my agent and now I’m working up a proposal and sample chapter, so she can try to sell the book later this Spring.
This is just to say that, now, some 16 years after Harry gave me that advice, I’m ready to make the leap and commit myself fully to being a writer. And, I’ve also started to think that perhaps it’s through my writing—and not by being an executive—that I can best contribute to the community now that I’m a “free agent.” Perhaps I don’t have to lead an organization to help them reach their goals.
With that in mind, I’m looking for ways to help organizations working on climate change, biodiversity conservation, and the sustainable use of our natural resources that allow me to keep up my focus on my writing. This could include working on major gift development, storytelling, or strategic projects for which organizations need expertise they don’t have in-house. I’m also looking to contribute to publications that have a need for my expertise in conservation, energy, and the environment. Reach out to me at greenskeptic[at]gmail[dot]com if you have any leads.
So, perhaps Harry was right, and it’s taken all this time for the writer in me to rise to the surface enough from the life-stream to get used to the air—to emerge and make the choice evident. Here is my poem, “Surfacing,” from Dwelling: an ecopoem:
“If this were the beginning of a poem, he would have called the thing he felt inside him the silence of snow.” Orhan Pamuk
The sound of the stream as it fills and flows
—under a full moon and stars—with melting snow.
The sound of your breathing as it fills and furls
in early winter air beneath the pines.
Say that the flow of a stream is surfacing a langscape,
surfacing the stream: shushing shushing susurrus
within you responding—
The way a crow responds to another,
as it dreams of road kill over the ridge.
The way deer browse for succulent shoots
or a dream of deer, hooving under surface.
Say that air flows around objects as a stream around rock,
surfacing the stream: leaves plastering color to surface
of a half-submerged stone—
—Scott Edward Anderson
(“Surfacing” first appeared The Wayfarer and is part of my sequence Dwelling: an ecopoem, which will be published in the Fall or 2018 by Shanti Arts.)
Postscript: Not long after I drafted this week’s mailing I got an email in response to my post of Ross Gay’s Philadelphia poem from Harry Groome himself—another sign—and we got together for coffee last week, where his lovely wife Lyn took the photo that accompanies this post on my blog.
Scott Edward Anderson
Scott Edward Anderson's Poetry Blog 