Officially a Woman Writing Nature

It’s here! The Sugar Mule “Women Writing Nature” issue containing my first published poems has been made public. Download the PDF here. (My poems are located on pages 323 and 324.)

I’m thrilled and honored to be included in the (long) list of truly wonderful writers and poets published in the issue and to have found a momentary niche in a community of sensitive, intelligent, perceptive women. Together, we observe and discuss the natural world and our places in it — the bonds we human animals make with other animals and the impact of not only ourselves on the land but also the land’s impact on us. It’s a symbiotic relationship we have with the earth, for all our sins against and struggles with it. The pieces included in this issue reflect the various, idiosyncratic experiences we have in a world that is both brazen and subtle, wild and tame, wonderful and bitter(sweet), strange and common — sometimes all at once.

Check it out. I’d love to know what you think.

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August 3, 2012 at 12:01 am

Rivertrance

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Hmmm… Shades of ‘Poem to a Friend’, and the orchid conveys such a sense of desolation under glass; the same sense of tragedy I feel as when people talk about their butterfly collections.

August 3, 2012 at 2:25 pm

Heidi Parton

You’re right about the bird poem having shades of “Poem to a Friend.” I’m still working through that old guilt, I suppose. I hope that “A Series of Poems on the Theme of a Blue Jay” is more nuanced and open-ended than the other. It started out as individual haiku written over a period of several months, and I decided later to string them together to create a kind of dialogue between the poems while still allowing them to stand on their own. I hope it works.

“Song of the Orchid Cultivar” is definitely melancholy. For me, the desolation is less about being encased under glass and more about rootlessness, being fixed in a place that is the only home one has ever known and yet still feeling foreign, unnatural to the place. That’s something with which I’ve battled for some time, and I’ve noticed that other descendants of immigrants feel the same way, even if they don’t verbalize it. But I’m glad that you’ve identified with a different aspect of the poem. 🙂

August 6, 2012 at 2:32 am

Yes, by traveling you find out where you came from; being here and now feels a little foreign. Aerial, mist-loving roots and glass are good metaphors.

Whimsically…are you sure your not related to The Little Prince…?

August 6, 2012 at 3:52 am

I might be! Haha I had my mother read a passage from The Little Prince at my wedding, where the fox speaks to LP about what it means to tame and to be tamed. Mom, the bridesmaids and I were all in tears by the end of it. Such a wonderful book.

August 6, 2012 at 9:27 am

Yes… Antoine is forever.

August 3, 2012 at 1:54 am

Sarah