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.

Image credit: Marketingland.com

The post The Heart of My Work appeared first on Mary Heather Noble.

And suppose you went to AWP, that big conference for writers, which you’ve attended before, except this time you actually felt like a writer —not someone who wants to be a writer or is thinking about becoming a writer— but someone who is, someone who’s done the work, the ditch-digging, pipe-laying, solo barn-raising work of writing stories and sending them off like wishes or prayers or feathered seeds blown from a dandelion stem, hoping to God that some will take.  Now suppose you return home, elated and exhausted from the work of knitting yourself into this community, hoping your newly-woven confidence doesn’t unravel from the act of fledging, from the act of flying home.

Suppose when you got home, you found a package from someone important to you, who has decided to rid him or herself of your existence because of something you have written.

It’s your Mark Doty moment, and if you’re wondering what the hell I’m talking about, you must stop and read (or at least Google) Doty’s “Return to Sender” now.  If you’re not wondering, then you know what I mean and you are groaning with sympathy, or empathy, depending on where you are at with your own work.

Such moments in a writer’s life are not to be taken lightly, but in truth it feels as tragic and cliché as a scene from a movie.  Like that scene from Top Gun, where the dueling egos of Maverick and Ice Man during a training flight cause Maverick to fly through Ice Man’s jet wash — the turbulence sending his plane into a tail spin, whirling Tom Cruise’s cocky character into a desperate plea: “Eject! Eject! Eject!”

Blue ocean, sad music.  Something has been lost.

I want to crawl into my bed, bury myself under the blankets, keep the shades drawn tight.  Sometimes I wish I’d never followed this stupid dream of becoming a nonfiction writer.  Should have stayed with geology.  Should have kept myself occupied with unearthing our layered history, of investigating contamination, of remediating our mistakes.

Except — isn’t that exactly what I’m doing?  Examining the road cut of an experience or a life and trying to understand?  The difference here is that I’ve decided to share my notes.  I’ve forgotten the sharpness of my tools.  Forgive me.  I haven’t made anything up.

A few years ago, I went to a nonfiction writing workshop with Alaskan author Seth Kantner, whose work is acclaimed for its honest portrayal of the native culture, the tension between wilderness and modern society, between the members of his family.  He’d taken a risk and told his story, even though native Alaskan culture regarded such acts as hubris, indulgent.  I had asked him: “How did you get past that anxiety? How did you find the courage to tell your story?  Weren’t you worried about what they’d think?”

He said, “Do you want to be a writer or not?”

Here is what I want:  I want to reconcile this impulse to share my story with the sense of betrayal if I do.  I want to tell the truth without feeling like I’m doing something wrong.  I want to acknowledge joy and searing pain and everything in between.  I want to understand.

I want my confidence back.  I feel stuck in this cliché — at the edge of the ship, contemplating the deep and endless blue.  I’m leaning into my motorcycle at dusk, watching from a distance the other planes taking off.  I’m fingering the silver dog-tags of this person I might have lost.

Do I want to be a writer or not?

Forgive me.  I haven’t made anything up.

Image credit: Andrew Holt/Photographer’s Choice/Getty Images

From http://science.howstuffworks.com/transport/flight/modern/airplanes6.htm

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