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Radical Communion: An Interview with Camille T. Dungy

By Kathryn Miles

The more I’ve learned to live in radical communion with the greater than human world, the more I’ve learned to accept that simultaneity of existence and experience.
 

Introduction

Camille T. Dungy
Camille T. Dungy.
Photo courtesy Colorado State University.
Camille T. Dungy is the most enviable kind of writer. Her poetry is simultaneously lyrical and precise: a place where the awful is made beautiful, as in “Requiem,” a poem in which she imagines a street cleaner washing away the stain of a tragic accident, and where the common becomes intimate and even sensual, as in “Naming What Has Risen.” A Guggenheim recipient, Dungy is the author of four works of poetry, including Suck on the Marrow, winner of an American Book Award. It was through those publications, as well as her work as a collaborating editor on From the Fishouse: An Anthology of Poems that Sing, Rhyme, Resound, Syncopate, Alliterate, and Just Plain Sound Great, that I came first came to know her as an artist and environmental thinker.

One of our first actual meetings was at a weekend retreat dedicated to the future of nature writing hosted by Orion magazine, where Camille currently serves as poetry editor. On the second day of the workshop, a group of us went hiking up Castle Rock, a small mountain located deep in the Adirondacks. On our descent, Camille (who was several months pregnant at the time), slipped and broke her ankle. We were well out of cell phone range, and she insisted with her usual quiet assertiveness that she was going to crawl down the mountain on all fours. The incident became the basis for her poignant and multi-layered essay, “A Good Hike,” which explores issues of race, body image, wilderness access, and more. That essay was also eventually included in her award-winning essay collection, Guidebook to Relative Strangers. As for our friendship, the event at Castle Rock was a galvanizing one in myriad ways: not only has it been the source for endless storytelling riffs, especially over meals or cocktails, but it also raised powerful questions for both of us about who we are in the wilderness and what it means to feel safe there. I think I can speak for Camille when I say that those questions continue to define much of our writerly lives.

When we spoke for this interview, both Camille and I had just learned about the death of our mutual friend and former colleague, Nina Roberts. A veritable legend in the world of social and environmental justice work, Roberts dedicated her long and storied career to issues of diversity and equal access in the wilderness. She was very much on our minds as we talked about race, gender, and ethnicity, and how all three coalesce in both the built and natural landscapes. These are many of the same issues that underlie so much of Camille Dungy’s work, especially her landmark anthology Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry (2009), which was nominated for an NAACP Image Award. We talked at length about the legacy of this very important anthology, about the kinds of stories different landscapes have to tell, and why allowing oversized dogs to run roughshod through your garden is actually a very good idea.

If a small percentage of people are telling the stories and making the decisions, then that only provides a small percentage of possible viable solutions to some catastrophic problems.

Interview

Kathryn Miles: This is terrible journalistic form, but I want to start this interview with more of an observation than a question. The first time I ever heard you give a formal lecture was at the Chatham University Summer Community of Writers, where we were both teaching. You gave the plenary for that workshop, and it was this gorgeous talk that used the regenerative properties of coral as a metaphor for writing and how to live a meaningful life. Do you remember that?

Camille Dungy: I do. I do. That lecture began by questioning how much we can believe in facts. But also I was thinking about the ways that facts change, or at least about how our idea of facts—and maybe also our idea of truth—shifts over time. I used coral as a vehicle to explore that idea because marine biologists have learned that little coral polyps go in and out of their corallites every day, 365 days a year. And so coral can literally be a mark of a calendar. But there’s this scientist guy who studies ancient coral, and he discovered that really, really old polyps went in and out of their corallites more often than they do now. And what this scientist concluded was that this change occurred because we have fewer days now than we did 400 million years ago. In other words, the coral was still going in and out once a day, but the number of days available to them was greater. I just found that completely fascinating: the coral’s behavior hasn’t changed; instead, it’s the time that the coral measures that has changed.

Camille Dungy with daughter
Camille T. Dungy and her daughter.
Photo by Rachel Eliza Griffith.

Kathryn Miles: Right. And so here’s what continues to blow my mind about that lecture. I first came to know you through your poetry, which is so beautiful and artful. That alone is a kind of right-brain talent very few people have. But then I sat there and watched you give this academically rigorous talk on coral polyps and geologic time, and all I could think was, How can one person have this amazing artistic brain and also possess the scientific precision to not only talk about marine biology, but also to use it as an extended metaphor? I mean, who actually knows how to marry these two brains? So again, it’s not so much a question as it is an observation. I feel like the ability to unite those two ways of perceiving the world is what most distinguishes you as a writer and an environmental thinker.

Camille Dungy: Thank you. But also, it’s just my brain. It’s just the way that I have always thought and that I’ve always seen the world. And so I don’t have an answer for how or why.

Kathryn Miles: Well, then, let me try to play armchair psychologist for a minute. I know that your dad was a physician and that your mother worked as an assistant dean at the University of Iowa Medical School. I’ve heard you joke before that you’re the only not-doctor in your family (your sister is a Ph.D.-bearing historian and your husband has a Ph.D. in American literature). So I guess I wonder: Was there always a really strong aura of medicine and science in your house growing up?

Guidebook to Relative Strangers, by Camille T. DungyCamille Dungy: I was definitely raised thinking about science and thinking about the specific vocabulary for describing and defining our experiences in the world. In our house, you used the proper names for anatomical parts of your body, for instance. My father studied botany and zoology as well, and so the Latin names for plants and animals were also how we talked about things. But that was only part of the conversation. My parents are also great lovers of art. They collect visual art. There was always classical and jazz music playing in the house. They’re voracious readers. That kind of appreciation for the arts was there as well. And so the combining of those parts, it’s not that it just showed up. It’s a lifetime of attention and care and work.

Kathryn Miles: I was reading some reviews of your work, and you are repeatedly praised for your skill with metaphor. Whenever I hear anyone discuss literary device, I immediately think about poet Wallace Stevens. He describes metaphor as a “shrinking from / The weight of primary noon, / The A B C of being.” What’s the motive behind the metaphor in your work?

Camille Dungy: It’s actually the opposite of shrinking away for me. I make sense of the world through analogy. You can see how this works with how we name so many things. Take a word like seahorse, for instance: you’re holding these two things together that don’t normally seem to fit, and you’re saying, this is a horse of the sea. Metaphor creates that proximity between one thing and another. In that regard, I think all language is ultimately metaphor: it’s an approximation of the thing that’s being described, or something that sits in proximity to the thing that’s being described. When I’m writing, I’m trying to figure out as closely as I can how to describe a feeling or an entity. Metaphor helps me see something more clearly.

Kathryn Miles: One of the things you and I share is that we both moved around a lot when we were growing up. We both spent some of our formative years in Iowa, and you of course lived in Southern California as well. Both places have been completely remade by human development. For me, I think that as a child I at least intuited that artificiality and the sense of dislocation it can create, and that maybe that intuition was part of why I had such a hard time really engaging with the landscape there. Talk about how you developed your own sense of place in these challenging terrains. Did poetic language help there?

If you’re looking at a place that has been radically changed for the last 120 years, you have to be able to appreciate it for what it has become.

Camille Dungy: I think that the travel and the moving to different regions heightened my attention, because it made me uncomfortable enough to pay attention to what I was missing or what I was seeing or why the air felt different in one place than another on my skin. I had to learn how to describe my experience of a place. And then I also had to learn how to describe what I desired and what I missed. In Guidebook to Relative Strangers, I talk about how I moved to Iowa during a phase of adolescent neurodevelopment where my neuroplasticity and language acquisition was in one of its most robust growth periods since babyhood. I was also in this entirely new landscape that felt totally foreign. And so as I was figuring out who I was and where I was, I also had to learn how to have language for both of those as well. Maybe that made it the perfect time to move as a writer. Back to this idea of metaphor, in hindsight I see that I did a lot of comparing the Iowa landscape to the parts of California that it wasn’t: I’d describe “waves of corn” or “a vast ocean of soybeans.” I’ve sometimes found myself doing the same thing since moving to Colorado, which clearly has its own beauty, but also doesn’t have an ocean. Well, I mean, it used to have one a very, very long time ago…

Kathryn Miles: See, there’s the scientific mind again…

Camille Dungy: Right. So Colorado does not currently have an ocean. But we do have this reservoir where I began paddleboarding last summer. It was my first time on the lake doing an activity I had never done before, which meant that I saw this reservoir in an entirely different way. And it was really beautiful. If I had shown up wanting the Pacific Ocean, I would have been disappointed. But if I wanted the opportunity to walk on water, which is essentially what I was doing, it was perfect. If you’re looking at a place that has been radically changed for the last 120 years, you have to be able to appreciate it for what it has become.

Kathryn Miles: And we also have a responsibility to acknowledge who or what did the changing, right? In your essay “From Dirt,” you write powerfully about the often overlooked (or ignored) cultural inheritance of landscape. Unbeknownst to a lot of gardeners, common crops like watermelon, sesame, and rice were carried to North America by enslaved Africans. So-called “founding fathers” used access to seeds and gardens as a way of oppressing enslaved people. “Don’t think I don’t have histories like that in mind when I insist on growing what I please in the soil that surrounds me,” you write. You also say, “Living in the body I live in, I can’t help but see the direct implications, the devastating implications, of the erasure of certain histories. When you dismiss lives from the record, you put those lives in jeopardy.” Reclaiming those lives—and their profound connection to the natural world—was very much at the heart of Black Nature as well. Talk about the importance of making space for these histories and stories, especially where environmental thought is concerned.

Black Nature, edited by Camille T. DungyCamille Dungy: The global majority has never been part of the idea-building or solution-building sector of the Euro-American environmental conversation. And that’s an issue if you’re talking about a global majority not being given the power of language to shape our ideas about what this planet is, whose planet this is, and how we steward this planet. Quite simply, if a small percentage of people are telling the stories and making the decisions, then that only provides a small percentage of possible viable solutions to some catastrophic problems. The more open the conversation about our relationship with this planet and our possible courses of action is, the more likely we will correct the course of action before it’s too late. You just can’t keep listening to the same people and hope for a different answer.

Kathryn Miles: It’s been 12 years since the publication of Black Nature, which has been described as “the first anthology to focus on nature writing by African American poets, a genre that until now has not commonly been counted as one in which African American poets have participated.” What, if anything, has changed since its release in 2009? What still really needs to change?

Camille Dungy: I think a lot of things have changed, which is exciting. When I published the book, I had to do all of the literature research, and there just weren’t any Black voices, really voices of color at all, in the major literary journals and anthologies. They just weren’t there. And then within a few years, the next two major anthologies of environmental poetry had a lot of people of color in them, partially because of direct conversations I had with those editors and partially because of people reading Black Nature and seeing spaces and platforms for themselves or vacuums that they needed to fill. Many doors are open now that weren’t open at the beginning of the 21st century. That’s super, super exciting. On the other hand, we had that story from a couple years ago at the Global Climate Summit where Ugandan climate activist Vanessa Nakate was cropped out of the AP photograph, so it was just Greta Thunberg and three other European and American White women in the photo. There were other women of color at the Climate Summit, too, and they were just not in the picture.

Kathryn Miles: Literally.

Camille Dungy: Yeah, exactly. The Associated Press tried to offer all of these explanations for it, but the fact remained that Nakate, who is doing really incredible work, just wasn’t there. You also had other news agencies like Reuters misidentifying Vanessa Nakate as Zambian activist Natasha Mwansa. And so for a long time, the conversation becomes “The AP cropped out Vanessa Nakate” or “Reuters misidentifies Vanessa Nakate,” instead of the conversation we should have been having, which is “This is Vanessa Nakate, who we know because she does incredible climate work.”

Longs Peak and the Colorado Front Range
Longs Peak and the Colorado Front Range.
Photo by Chuck Quigley, courtesy Pixabay.

Kathryn Miles: That kind of silencing seems to be all too common in the environmental movement, even now. The last time I interviewed you, it was for an article about segregation in our national parks. One of the things you and I talked about then is the real dichotomy inherent in so many of our wild places. For instance, the Blackfeet were forcibly removed from their tribal lands to create Glacier National Park. Untold Navajo, Paiute, and Hopi artifacts were flooded when Glen Canyon was dammed to create Lake Powell. And yet, places like Glacier and Lake Powell are also undeniably valuable resources for outdoor recreation. It’s so hard for people to hold both ideas—that these are degraded but also beautiful places—simultaneously.

Camille Dungy: Right. I couldn’t live in the American West if I couldn’t hold both of those things simultaneously. Or I certainly couldn’t conscientiously live in the American West if I couldn’t hold both of those things, because this is not my land. This land is my land because of truly brutal, calculated, and racist histories. And so I have to hold that and be aware of that. And yet I am here, and I love it. And to love it, I need to see its beauty and work to conserve and steward its beauty as it is.

Kathryn Miles: So how do we do that? How do we simultaneously honor and even lament what could be a landscape’s tragic history and then also hold and see its beauty?

Camille Dungy: For me, one of the keys to my work is just writing out those layers, just stating them, making them clear. Sometimes it can be a little humorous. Sometimes it’s super ponderous and difficult. And I guess for some people it’s guilt inducing. And all of those responses are valid. I’m going to tell you a funny story.

Kathryn Miles: Oh, good.

Camille Dungy: So I have this big sunflower patch in my front yard. For the last couple years I’ve let the stalks stay long enough for the birds to eat every last thing out of them. A bunch of beneficial insects also use the sunflower stalks for shelter in the winter. This February, the grove of sunflower stalks was still up. And one day I found a note in my mailbox from a neighbor who wrote, “I’m so sorry, but my Newfoundland insisted on running through your sunflowers today on the walk. And he knocked them down, and he also knocked over the bird feeder, but I got that back up. If there’s any irreparable damage, please let me know.” He left his email. So I wrote him back, and I was like, “In the olden days, there would’ve been bison. And the bison would’ve walked through this area and knocked down these sunflower stalks and somebody would’ve eaten them. But we live in suburban Colorado, and there are no bison. And honestly, your Newfoundland is the closest to a bison my garden will ever see. So thank you.”

Kathryn Miles: I love that.

Camille Dungy: Right? I could have been angry because this dog was messing up my whole system, but my system is messy because nature is messy. And that’s fine. So let that dog enjoy whatever he wants.

There’s a kind of time travel that occurs when in the garden, because you’re in touch with these cycles that repeat themselves: out of death is life and out of life is death.

Kathryn Miles: So much of your previous work has tackled issues of race and the environment on a national or even a global level. But lately, some of your most powerful writing has been bringing that same level of thoughtfulness and inquiry to your literal backyard.

Camille Dungy: Yeah. My little two-fifths of an acre. The book I’m finishing right now is called Soil: The History of a Black Mother’s Garden. I’m intentionally playing with that word “soil” and the idea that it’s this substrate out of which things grow, but it is also the idea that when things are soiled, they’re dirty and they’re degraded. Here in my garden, there’s all this incredible beauty and things that I care about. I’ve tended to this space and grown plants in this space, and I’m rooted here. At the same time, I’m seeing the world around me right now. And I’m seeing the world out of which this space has grown and the complicated history here all at the same time. There’s a kind of time travel that occurs when in the garden, because you’re in touch with these cycles that repeat themselves: out of death is life and out of life is death. And all of those things are happening all the time. When you were asking before about how people learn to hold all of that, I think the answer for me is that maybe the cyclical nature is part of it. The more I’ve learned to live in radical communion with the greater than human world, the more I’ve learned to accept that simultaneity of existence and experience.

Kathryn Miles: You once described environmental consciousness and the environmental consciousness movement as an act of practicing thoughtfulness and attention. Is that a form of radical communion as well?

Camille Dungy: I think so.

Kathryn Miles: Can you say why?

Camille Dungy: (laughing) I’m doing the thing that I often do where I get hung up thinking about the definition of a word. Radical is the word I’m thinking about right now. Often we think about the political or social activist definition of radical. But there’s another way of thinking about it, and that’s the idea of a free radical: the floating atom that doesn’t want to be alone. It wants to bind to something else. And not only does it want to bind to something else, but it wants to bind to something else to calm the something else down, to stabilize something else, and itself. And so to be radical or to be like a free radical is to kind of be alone for a while, but with the intention of connecting to something else to stabilize the self and the other. And so, yeah, that’s radical thought. You’re flying out there like a little bit wild and crazy by yourself or ahead of, or separately of, but with an intention towards community and connection.

Kathryn Miles: That’s awesome. And I think that it’s…

Camille Dungy: … more science again.

Kathryn Miles: (laughing) True. But what I was actually going to say was that it gets us perfectly to the last question I had for you. Your first four books of poetry are often referred to as “survival narratives.” I’m curious, where did that term come from and how does it resonate with you?

Camille T. Dungy
Photo by Beowulf Sheehan.

Camille Dungy: It came from me. In the first book, I was looking at the mid 20th century and how people made a space to survive and thrive out of that time. And then the next book was the mid 19th century with very similar questions. Then it was this question of how do we live and love in a time of environmental degradation? And then, finally, how do we do all of that, but now also with a baby? Each time it was a question of how can my poems provide a guide for figuring out how to make the best way possible in precarious landscapes.

Kathryn Miles: Yeah. You’ve said before that when you begin writing, you’re not necessarily thinking of readers. But as soon as you say “guide,” I think of an implicit conversation with a readership.

Camille Dungy: Well, sure, but I need a guide too, right? We all need to create our own maps and guidebooks as well whenever we look out. So in that sense, it’s like the self who is guiding the self. But then there is a moment where I do start thinking about an audience because if I’m just writing to myself, I could just journal. So now how do I make sure that your valuable time as a reader is not squandered, that I’m telling you something that you need to know? I don’t really know what you need to know. But what I can do is share something that feels necessary for me to share. And I can make sure I’m doing it in a way that honors your time, your intelligence, and your heart.

   
Read Camille T. Dungy’s Letter to America, “Diversity, a Garden Allegory with Suggestions for Direct Action,” appearing in Terrain.org. And learn more about Camille at camilledungy.com.

   

 

Kathryn MilesKathryn Miles is the author of five books including, most recently, Trailed: One Woman’s Quest to Solve the Shenandoah Murders, released in May 2022 by Algonquin Books. Her articles and essays have appeared in publications including Audubon, Best American Essays, Best American Sports Writing, Ecotone, The New York Times, Outside, Popular Mechanics, and Time. Miles serves as a faculty member for Eastern Oregon University’s MFA program and as a scholar-in-residence for the Maine Humanities Council.

Read Janine DeBaise’s interview with Kathryn Miles, “Telling Stories,” as well Kathryn Miles’s Letter to America and an excerpt from her book All Standing, “At Sea,” appearing in Terrain.org.

Header photo by Bich Nguyen Vo, courtesy Pixabay. Photograph of Kathryn Miles by Amy Wilton.