This year’s theme is Writing about Health: Activism, Advocacy, and Storytelling, and will include workshops, craft sessions, and readings with a focus on health and healthcare. The featured Keynote Speaker will be acclaimed Korean-American writer Marie Myung-Ok Lee, author of Somebody’s Daughter, who has written on a variety of health topics, including advocacy for her son and others on the autism spectrum. Her new novel on the future of medicine is forthcoming from Simon & Schuster.

The conference will also include additional workshops and craft presentations by writers Nina Angela McKissock, Gillian Pidcock, Fran Quigley, Vince Mondillo, and myself. I will be leading a workshop titled, “Cellular Composition: Writing Water, Environment, and Self” — My workshop description follows:

Cellular Composition: Writing Water, Environment, and Self

 

Water is the most abundant molecule in our cells, accounting for roughly 70% of total cell mass. And given the permeability of our cell membranes, what’s in our water often ends up in our cells — making water pollution issues a matter of personal and public health. But while writing about the science behind these fluid boundaries is essential, it isn’t always effective in exerting positive change in environmental health policy. As Rachel Carson revealed with the public response to Silent Spring, people are more often moved by stories that engage their memories and emotions.

 

In the literary world, we often talk about “writing from the bones,” or “writing what we know on a cellular level.” This personal narrative —stories grounded in memory and emotion— will be the focus of our time together. In this workshop, we will examine the work of writers and scholars such as Sandra Steingraber, Rebecca Altman, Kristen Iversen, and others to learn how they have woven both science AND the self into their environmental health literature. We will study their methods and then embark on our own cellular compositions, using targeted writing exercises to generate strands of personal history to weave into our own environmental health stories.

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This was some kind of dream-come-true moment, the kind of synchronicity that you hear about at writer’s conferences, a cue, if you will. McKibben’s book, Oil and Honey, sits squarely on my writing desk, and there I was, an emerging environmental writer still acclimating to my recent move to Vermont, now standing next to him in line at the Hannaford’s, with the chewing gum and Tic Tacs, staring opportunity in the face.

What I should have said was, “Excuse me, Mr. McKibben, but I am a huge supporter and fan of your work. I am also an environmental writer, and just recently moved here to Middlebury, so I just want to introduce myself.” I should’ve told him that in fact, I was also a contributor to Fracture: Essays, Poems, and Stories on Fracking in America, and that I thought his essay, “Why Not Frack,” was brilliant. I should have told him that I’m so honored to have my work published between the same book covers as his. We would’ve exchanged pleasantries and shaken hands, and I would have felt like a real writer, on cloud nine for the rest of the month.

But instead, I took notice of the little earpiece he was wearing —the kind you wear when you are a very busy, very important author and environmental activist who must talk on the phone all the time to senators and congressional leaders, to publishers and agents, to attorneys who help release you from jail for your civil disobedience— and I told myself: Who do you think you are? This poor man is probably never home because he’s so busy saving the world, and he just wants to buy his Cabot butter and cheese in peace, without being interrupted by some frizzy-haired mother with perspiration rings under her arms.

So I said nothing. Did nothing. And watched one of my heroes walk away.

I try to tell myself that it’s probably for the best. That, given the kind of harassment to which McKibben will be subjected by the Republican opposition research group, American Rising —harassment which will entail following the man around with video cameras and employing trolls to comb through his body of work, digging for hypocrisies and inconsistencies to fuel their political attacks— given the anticipated harassment, I tell myself, it’s better to leave Mr. McKibben alone.

But then, if I’m honest, I will admit that my paralysis had nothing to do with America Rising, except perhaps that it is grounded in exactly the same thing that motivates the donors behind their work, which is to say fear.

My pathology of literary ambition and social anxiety is a distinct hell, a condition from which I was certain I suffered alone, until I read Rick Bass’s “Shy” several years ago. Bass perfectly characterizes this unfortunate state of being, and while I can find camaraderie in his admissions and excuse myself for being a shy writer, the thing that fills me with self-loathing is calling myself an activist when my introversion and anxiety prevent me from being very active at all. Rick Bass may be a shy writer, but he is a badass environmental activist, with the arrest record to prove it. How can I expect to exert any change, I scold myself, if I cannot even find the courage to speak to my own tribe?

At home, I confess to my husband, who reassures me by admitting to his own star-struck awkwardness. “I saw Bill McKibben skiing up at Rikert,” he offers. “I couldn’t bring myself to say hello.”

Fine. But this is what I do, I say. Or at least am trying to do — but honestly, how much doing am I really doing when the thought of Twitter and self-promotion and direct-confrontational activism makes me nauseous, heart racing like I’m stuck on the high-dive, writhing like a worm?

Stop, my husband says. Breathe.

It’s finally springtime in Vermont, mud season, and the local Agway is setting out flowering trees and hearty perennials, the mulch and materials for maintaining your compost bin. I remember teaching my girls about compost back in Oregon, how they would deposit found earthworms from the yard into our bin, after letting the creatures blindly explore their outstretched, open hands.

It’s an ecosystem, I told them. The worms are doing the decomposition work to make the soil healthy for the plants — and it’s just now that I’m finally seeing where I might fit into this larger world. There is much quiet, underground work in sustaining the plants that bloom and inspire us with their tenacity, with their never-ending hope.

Bill McKibben says, “The real task for activists is to change the zeitgeist.”

Zeitgeist. Spirit of the age. Spirit of the time. Our culture, in other words: how we see the world, what we value, how we might defend the things we love. You find it in the art that we make, the stories we tell, in the lessons we teach our kids.

So maybe, for now, it’s okay to be a shy environmental writer, to express my activism through my art. Maybe today it’s enough to be the mother who still volunteers in her daughter’s classroom, who nurtures her classmates’ knowledge about, and wonder of the world. Maybe I can forgive myself for being so reserved around the big players, the ones with environmental arrest records. They have their roles in this activist ecosystem, and I am still figuring out my own.

Excuse me, Mr. McKibben. My name is Mary Heather. I am an environmental scientist, writer, and mother. I am a fellow Vermonter now, and a huge fan of your work. Thanks for everything you’re doing. And, hey, if you need me, I’ll be down here for now, making change from the forest floor.

Photo credit: Chesapeake Climate Action Network, from Wikimedia Commons

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Watching updates of Sandra’s arrest, along with all the other protests on social media and TV reminds me of how demanding this work can be.  Reminds me of the challenge of trudging uphill, of the stamina required to proceed forward despite the forces working against.  Rick Bass wrote a beautiful essay about activism fatigue several years ago: “Activism’s Paradox Mountain“ — a piece to which I find myself returning every now and then.  But there’s a reason they continue to climb, almost always a story behind the sacrifice.

A few weeks ago, I completed an application for a writing retreat, in which I was asked to provide a personal response to the following Virginia Woolf quote:

“I’m fundamentally, I think, an outsider.  I do my best work and feel most braced with my back to the wall. It’s an odd feeling, though, writing against the current: difficult entirely to disregard the current.  Yet of course I shall.”

As a writer whose work is often motivated by environmental issues, this quote speaks to me directly in terms of the margins from which I write — and from which others write, as well.  I know that my ideas and those of my literary heroes aren’t always popular, because they push back against traditionally held American ideals.  Things like capitalism and exceptionalism, the rights and responsibilities of individuals verses corporations, guns and “scientific proof.”  It’s hard to question our traditions — because these ideals have taken many of us far, have rewarded some of us well… well, except for those people and places whose needs are at odds with our traditional American beliefs.

But it seems to me that our greatest truths don’t begin as commonly held beliefs.  Rather, they come from stories — stories of pain, of injustice that we labor to deliver so that the truth may be revealed. That we are all created equal, for instance.  There is still much work to be done on that.

The work is difficult, unsupported.  It would be easier to fold into one’s self and float, bobbing and weaving through the rushing water, propelled by conformity and the sound of its applause, along the path of least resistance.  Easier still to allow your direction and destination to be determined by the urgency and velocity of someone else’s values, of other people’s rules.

And yet.  A salmon will leave the ocean and return to its natal stream, whose salt-free waters will assault its cells and strip the skin right from its flesh.  And fourth generation monarchs will ignore the impulse to mature and mate, saving their energy instead for the long flight from as far north as Canada to Mexico’s southern tail — a journey whose distance and hardship defies all logic, but without which would define the end of its kind.

The work that we do is hard.  We shed our skins and bare our vulnerable selves, and for some of us, this pilgrimage can feel like death.  Or maybe it’s our birth.  Either way, we must continue to write our stories.  The survival of our kind depends on it.

Cover image courtesy of Ecowatch.org

The post Writing From the Outside In: On Activism appeared first on Mary Heather Noble.

Indeed, Earth Works presents itself almost like an academic text (especially opening with an essay about ‘the essay’), the writing within clearly demonstrating Sanders to be a master of the craft.  The cadence of his prose is smooth and soothing, the vocabulary intellectual and wise without being pretentious.  The transitions between his sections are fluid, with just the right pause, like a gulp of air before swimming another gentle lap.  And yet, despite the tenderness of the tone, Sanders is still able to evoke a sense of urgency and alarm in his message — particularly about the tendency of people to impose violence against the Earth and one another, the loss of wildness and nature, the erosion of our connection to our planet.   His essays convey a seriousness without hostility, a profound disappointment in, instead of anger at, our misguided animal selves.  Rather than the high-pitched, alarmist, melodramatic environmental writing that the general readership has learned to tune out, Sanders’ work patiently and consistently reminds us: we are a part of this Earth, and this Earth is part of us.  Do you see how we are failing it?  Do you see how we’re failing ourselves?

How does Sanders do this?  How does he convey the magnitude of what we face without raising his narrative voice?  And how does he demand accountability to our surroundings without invoking an accusing tone?  This literary craft blog post examines two particular craft elements that Sanders employs to heighten his environmental message: the use of unexpected contrast to shock the reader out of complacency, and the deliberate interchanging of natural images with human gestures and conditions to illustrate our parallel needs.

Use of Contrast in “At Play in the Paradise of Bombs”

In his essay, “At Play in the Paradise of Bombs,” Sanders awakens his readers to the harrowing losses of war and environmental decay by juxtaposing dissimilar words and images in his text.  The piece itself examines Sanders’ childhood move, in 1951, from Memphis, Tennessee to the Army Arsenal in Northeastern Ohio, where he and other children of Arsenal employees and military personnel grew up playing in the shadows of a munitions plant.  The very title of this piece jars us with an array of words that are not supposed to fit together: ‘play,’ ‘paradise,’ and ‘bombs’.   Sanders carries this ‘contrast’ theme throughout the essay, peppering the prose with opposing images and words to illuminate the irony of our society’s accepted norms: neighborhood and Arsenal, children playing near ammunition, boys mimicking war, wildlife sanctuary and poison.  Of military machinery, he writes:

…On the front porch of our Memphis home I had read GI Joe Comic books, and so I knew the names and shapes of these death-dealing engines.  In the gaudy cartoons the soldiers had seemed like two-legged chunks of pure glory, muttering speeches between bursts on their machine guns, clenching the pins of grenades between their dazzling teeth. (p. 13-14)

The coupling of ‘grenades’ with ‘dazzling teeth’ underscores the glorification of war evident in Sanders’ boyhood toys, and the contrast of his innocent proficiency with the terminology of “death-dealing engines” signals the reader to pause and think: Why is it okay for a child to know so much about killing machines?

The reality of war, of course, is bone-chilling, and Sanders writes about “a needle of dread” settling in upon seeing real tanks on the compound, and driving past “guard houses manned by actual soldiers.”  Rather than the cartoon images of men and glory, Sanders learned that the Arsenal was “a fenced wilderness devoted to the building and harboring of the instruments of death.” (p. 14)

— Which brings us to another contrast: ‘wilderness’ (abundant life) and ‘instruments of death.’  Here, Sanders juxtaposes his childhood exploration of the woods within the Arsenal’s fortress against the environmental consequences of weapons production.  He recalls:

Even where the army’s poisons had been dumped, nature did not give up.  In a remote corner of the Arsenal, on land that had been used as a Boy Scout camp before the war, the ground was so filthy with the discarded makings of bombs that not even the guards would do there.  But we children went, lured on by the scarlet warning signs: DANGER.  RESTRICTED AREA.  …In my bone marrow I carry traces of the poison from that graveyard of bombs, as we all carry a smidgen of radioactivity from every atomic blast.  Perhaps at this very moment one of those alien molecules, like a grain of sand in an oyster, is irritating some cell in my body, or in your body, to fashion a pearl of cancer. (p. 16)

The opposing forces of words like ‘poisons,’ ‘Boy Scout camp,’ and ‘discarded makings of bombs’ or ‘children’ and ‘DANGER’ instill immediate concern in the reader’s mind: This was a place where children were taught to appreciate and survive in nature, how could they have allowed it to become a toxic and dangerous dumping ground?  Sanders even uses contrasting images to dramatize the health risks of the Arsenal’s chemical releases: a pearl, a rare and cherished commodity, with cancer, an ever-increasing and dreaded fatal disease.

Sanders’ successful manipulation of contrasting words and images throughout this piece allows him to maintain a consistent narrative tone while startling the reader to a new awareness.  Like the eerie coupling of childhood innocence with demonic possession in a horror movie, this technique of pairing opposing forces in an essay can foster frightening revelations.

Comparison of Human Condition to Natural Rhythms in “The Force of Spirit”

The other craft technique that Sanders uses to nurture an environmental consciousness in his reader is his subtle, yet deliberate insertion of simile and metaphor into the prose to infer connection between the human condition and the natural world.  For instance, in “The Force of Spirit,” Sanders examines the concept of spirituality, pondering the force that wills people to live, the energy that can ripple over a landscape.  He describes the way his wife’s parents have aged and approached death, drawing comparisons with natural environmental rhythms to suggest that the “spirit” which drives our love of life is also the same force that makes rivers flow and seedlings burst through soil:

Ruth’s father, still able to get around fairly well back then, had just been to see Dessa in the special care unit, where patients suffering from various forms of dementia drifted about like husks blown by an idle breeze. (p. 239)

To say that [Ruth’s father] is dying makes it sound as though he’s doing something active, like singing or dancing, but really something is being done to him.  Life is leaving him.  From one visit to the next we can see it withdrawing, inch my inch, the way the tide retreating down a beach leaves behind dry sand. (p. 240)

The way Sanders compares ailing patients to “husks blown by an idle breeze,” and his dying father-in-law to a withdrawing ocean tide, implies an inherent connection of this human condition to the natural rhythm of the Earth.  And in so doing, the reader is compelled by extension, to consider the suffering or dying of a landscape to that of a fellow human being.  This inference is subtle, but real, and Sanders confirms this intention in his analysis:

…I want a name for the force that binds me to Ruth, to her parents, to my parents, to our children, to neighbors and friends, to the land and all its creatures.

The power is larger than life, although it contains life.  It is tougher than love, although it contains love.  It is akin to the power I sense in the lambs nudging the teats of their dams to bring down milk, in the raucous tumult of crows high in trees, in the splendor of leaves gorging on sun.  I recognize this force at work in children puzzling over a new fact, in grown-ups welcoming strangers, in our capacity, young and old, for laughter and kindness, for mercy and imagination.

…Whether we call that magnificent energy Spirit or Tao, Creator or God, Allah or Atman or some other holy name, or no name at all, makes little difference, so long as we honor it.  Wherever it flows — in person or place, in animal or plant or the whole of nature — we feel the pressure of the sacred, and that alone deserves our devotion.  (p. 242-243)

This union of human and Earth is the DNA of Sanders’ essays, and his interchanging of natural images with human emotions, gestures, and conditions is one of the signature traits in his outstanding body of work.

The post Inspiring Activism with a Soft Touch: Scott Russell Sanders’ Earth Works appeared first on Mary Heather Noble.

Williams’ account is carefully braided, the rise of the Great Salt Lake and its threat to the bird refuge skillfully juxtaposed against the rise of a deadly cancerous tumor in her mother’s abdomen.  With each rising lake interval, Williams parallels her mother’s peril with that of every species threatened by the flood.  This metaphor is carried throughout the book, as she weaves fragmented strands of the two narratives together to contemplate natural cycles, the inevitability of death, and the unnatural systems our culture employs to prevent them both.  We experience first hand the anxiety and heartbreak of every threatened bird, every stage of her mother’s disease, and are left with the intimate knowledge of mourning the loss of wildlife and place intertwined with the loss of one’s mother.  Williams’ emotional journey illustrates both our reluctance to accept even the most natural of changes, and the lengths to which we go to resist them.

Refuge is a lyric work, a contemporary form published nearly a decade before the lyric essay’s widespread recognition.  And perhaps that’s what made it so successful — it was prose poetry before its time, structured in a way that enabled history, biology, and geography to enhance a personal narrative.  This literary craft blog post explores how Williams skillfully transitions from one story strand to another, using white space, common words, images, and ideas as points of contact for effectively weaving one section into another.

Williams introduces the metaphor between the flooding of the bird refuge and her mother’s death from cancer in the Prologue of the book:

Most of the women in my family are dead.  Cancer. At thirty-four, I became the matriarch of my family.  The losses I encountered at the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge as Great Salt Lake was rising helped me to face the losses within my family.  When most people had given up on the Refuge, saying the birds were gone, I was drawn further into its essence.  In the same way that when someone is dying many retreat, I chose to stay. (p. 4)

The early establishment of this metaphor provides the well from which Williams will draw to nourish the connective tissue binding her scientific and observation-based sections on the bird refuge and the Great Salt Lake with her more candid personal reflections on family, illness, and death.  For instance, in her second chapter, after having introduced the reader to the Great Salt Lake and the connection that she and the lake have to the refuge, Williams is able to seamlessly transition into the discovery of her mother’s illness:

… The long-legged birds with their eyes focused down transform a seemingly sterile world into a fecund one.  It is here in the marshes that I seal my relationship to Great Salt Lake.

I could never have anticipated its rise.

My mother was aware of a rise on the left side of her abdomen.  I was deep in dream.  This particular episode found me hiding beneath my grandmother’s bed as eight black helicopters flew toward the house.  I knew we were in danger. (p. 22)

Here, Williams employs white space and the word rise as the thread that connects these two fragments together — fragments that might otherwise seem disjointed, were it not for her prior establishment of the symbolic relationship between the two.

Williams uses the same technique later in the book to transition from her personal narrative to a section that discusses the history of Mormon religion and its connection to the land.  In this instance, Williams describes a scene in which her family learns that surgery and chemotherapy have failed to eliminate cancer from her mother’s body.  Her mother, originally opposed to undergoing treatment, unleashes anger at Williams and Williams’ father, saying, “I could have handled this, why couldn’t you?”  Williams is heartbroken, crippled with guilt:

… We had wanted a cure for Mother for ourselves, so we could get one with our lives.  What we had forgotten was that she was living hers.

I fled for Bear River, for the birds, wishing someone would rescue me.

The California gulls rescued the Mormons in 1848 from losing their crops to crickets.  The gull has become folklore.  It is a story we know well… (p. 68-9)

Again, the insertion of a little white space, coupled with the use of a common word between the sections (in this case, rescue), enables Williams to gently pivot from an emotionally charged family scene to a relevant historical anecdote about one of the refuge’s resident birds.  The effect is not only an effective transition from one narrative to another; it is a mechanism for the slowing of pace, and the relief of tension in the prose itself.

Williams utilizes white space well in Refuge, the vacancy of words allowing the reader to draw the connections between her fragments for him or herself.  We recognize it as a pattern, the more difficult the circumstances become, the more white space we see.  Toward the middle and end of the book, as the stakes for the refuge rise, along with the tension in her family, Williams’ prose become more fragmented.  The white space increases, and the connective tissue between sections is grounded in images and ideas:

Mother.  She is preoccupied.  Yesterday, on the telephone, she said she didn’t think she could make the family backpacking trip in the Tetons scheduled for summer.

“I think I may have pulled some muscles in my stomach,” she said.

I want to believe her.

It rains and rains.  Great Salt Lake continues to rise.

Eudora Welty, when asked what causes she would support, replied, “Peace, education, conservation, and quiet.”

Mother, Mimi and Jack, and I are seeking quiet in St. George, Utah. (p. 133-4)

As disjointed as these fragments seem, the reader easily follows the prose.  The white spaces, the symbolic rain and rising lake, the need for quiet all paint a larger picture: Williams’ mother is dying, and there is nothing that they can do.  The conclusion, though not spelled out, is easily understood.

In Refuge, Terry Tempest Williams has masterfully illustrated the potential of the fragmented approach, the importance of finessing transitions, and the beauty of lyric prose.  Her use of white space, common words between sections, and relevant images are an effective mechanism for manipulating pace, conveying emotion, relieving tension, and solidifying theme in the body of her prose.

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