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The Heart of My Work
It’s been a long stretch between posts, I know. But I’m settled in Vermont now, (most of) the boxes have been unpacked, and the children are almost back to school. Time to re-engage with my work. But the time off now forces me to re-examine the motivation behind my words. What is it that I’m trying to say, exactly? What is the issue that keeps bringing me back to my desk?
About a month ago, right before my cross-country move, I participated in a themed residency at PLAYA in Summer Lake, Oregon. The residency included several artists, writers, and scientists of varying genres —botanists, essayists, environmental scientists, poets, photographers, and other visual artists— whose work addresses, in some manner, important environmental issues. I spent a glorious two weeks on the beautiful grounds of PLAYA among other creative minds, other environmentally focused creative minds, which felt a little like meeting a wonderful family that you didn’t know you had (read about the other fabulous PLAYA residents here).
PLAYA’s art + ecology series is specifically designed to nurture the collaboration between science and the arts, in an effort to both inform artistic work with current scientific information, and to increase the accessibility of scientific discourse by using humanities to engage the senses and emotions. At the end of the residency, we residents were asked to share excerpts of our work at PLAYA’s “Beyond Creating: A Climate of Change” event, the second in their series of conversations “between artists, writers, and scientists about environmental issues affecting mankind and other species.”
When Deborah Ford, Executive Director of PLAYA, first invited PLAYA residents to participating in this discussion, the question we were asked to consider was: What is at the heart of my work? —Which is exactly what I am re-examining today.
I was first trained as a scientist. I have degrees in geology and environmental science, and spent many years working as a regulator in the technical environmental sector: permitting of industrial and municipal wastewater discharges to be protective of ground water resources, and overseeing the investigation and remediation of contaminated sites. So I bring this knowledge and experience to my work — the science. But as a writer, I not only want to translate the science of my subject matter and make the technical information accessible, I want to MOVE people. I want to engage my readers on an emotional level, so they might be motivated to change.
So I often write stories and essays about my former industrial sites, and feature people —including myself— who may have been impacted by what’s there.
What this means is that not only am I going to tell you, the reader, all the technical details about what happened at the site and what is present in soil and water, I’m going to take you with me when I sample a neighboring well. I’m going to bring you through someone’s living room and into their kitchen so I can collect a sample of what they drink. You will see the to-do lists by the phone, the children’s artwork on the fridge, the prescription bottles by the sink. You also hear the little boy splashing in the bath while I’m talking to his mother. You, too, will hear his bath-time singsong the entire time we’re there.
Writer Julia Cameron says, “The act of making art exposes a society to itself. Art brings things to light. It illuminates us. It sheds light on our lingering darkness. It casts a beam into the heart of our own darkness and says, ‘See?’”
In science circles, you hear a lot about acceptable risk, whether something is clean enough, and “no evidence of harm.” But we often forget to ask the ethical question of whether it’s right or wrong to conduct nonconsensual experiments on current and future generations in the first place.
THIS is at the heart of my work: shining a light on the things we confine to the corner while we are arguing about the science. I want my work to show you how our society handles matters of science, and ask you to question whether we’re really, truly upholding the values we say that we hold dear.
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