A river of words: exploring the ways Washington’s lands and people together celebrate their resilience through poetry.
Claudia Castro Luna’s One River, A Thousand Voices invites poems into the shape of the Columbia River’s length, and imagines a way of writing water instantiated in the natural world and on the page. The evolution of an anthology, too, is riverine: a source, eddies and currents, tributaries, barriers, reaches, and an outlet.
On Resilience: Stories of Climate Adaptation Across Washington’s Landscapes, by Harriet Morgan and Lindsay Senechal, is a Writing the Land® poetry anthology inspired by the public lands managed by the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife. Morgan, a WDFW climate change coordinator, commissioned this collection of hope that celebrates the resilience of Washington’s public lands. As expressed by Thor Hanson in the book’s introduction, “There is a lot to learn from wild things in wild places. When the climate changes, they respond in every way they can. So must we all.” I find hope too in the words of CMarie Fuhrman, who writes in the preface, “The Earth is so glad you are here.”
I am grateful to the dedicated and agile Writing the Land poets, some of whom came on board specifically for this project, and who were all too happy to respond to the challenge and explore and write one of the 16 bioregions of Washington. Working across the arts and sciences, the practical and esoteric, poets and land managers formed reciprocal relationships and even friendships, to which the many poetic epigraphs attributed to these dedicated land managers attest. I am confident poetry lovers and nature lovers alike will enjoy the 51 poems and 46 black-and-white images with copious descriptions of the land’s inhabitants and management practices. Following this guest editorial—over the next four days of this week—you may read (and in some cases, listen to) four of the included poems.
In 2020, NatureCulture® launched with the Writing the Land project, pairing poets with conserved lands and creating anthologies sold by the land trusts and other conservation organizations featured in the books to forward their mission via both outreach and fundraising. The mission of NatureCulture includes the core belief that humans are part of nature, and this book emphasizes that maybe as we learn to act more like kin to rest of the natural web, we can help heal some of the damage we’ve done when acting outside this role.
On Resilience: Stories of Climate Adaptation Across Washington’s Landscapes, with all its adaptations, is a small step in exploring the ways Washington’s lands and people together celebrate their resilience, and one example of how we can help people connect through poetry with the lands they love.
Lis McLoughlin, PhD is the founder and director of NatureCulture®, a publishing and events company through which she directs Writing the Land®, which pairs poets with conserved lands and creates anthologies sold for land conservation. Lis has degrees in civil engineering, education, and science and technology studies. She lives off-grid in Northfield, Massachusetts and part-time in Montréal, Québec.
Header photo by Always Wanderlust, courtesy Shutterstock. Photo of Lis McLoughlin by Andreas Riemenschneider.
