Chattermarks

In 2010, I completed a year-long bicycle tour through many countries famous for their exotic creepy crawlies and, while reading Craig Childs’ book The Animal Dialogues, I couldn’t help reflecting on the experiences I had with some of those creatures throughout that tour. The Animal Dialogues presents an exploration of the author’s uncommon encounters with animals, reptiles, and insects. Childs’ writing style is a blend of naturalist observations and beautifully depicted narratives indicative of a well-seasoned nature writer. He is able to find pause in that moment between life and death and break down the human-animal barrier, capturing in writing the infinite space between one moment and the next.

One such moment was depicted in a chapter on mountain lions where Childs recalls many nearly unbelievable stories. After a recent cougar encounter in Diablo, followed by numerous cougar sightings around the Environmental Learning Center, I found myself paying close attention to how Childs describes his encounters with cougars in the wild. One particular story that Childs writes about centers around a run-in with a cougar near a water source in the Arizona desert. After the mountain lion backs down from the stand-off with Childs, he writes, “I stand there for a few minutes, staring at the forest. […] I have reached the hard, palpable seed of life. The image is now permanently formed in my mind. I can see how the mountain lion will be posed, suddenly in view anywhere around me, its tail weaving an intricate pattern, spelling secret words in the air (66).” We all have moments in life where time seems to stand still and we are truly living moment by moment. Although for most of us this stand still will never occur between man and cougar, what Childs conjures in this chapter and throughout his book is the way in which our primal connection with the earth is realized when we interact with deep wilderness. Whether it’s a cougar in my own neighborhood, a mountain goat on Cascade Pass, or some other surprising encounter, these experiences come in a myriad of forms.

» Continue reading The Animal Dialogues: A Natural History Book Reflection

As members of the current M.Ed. graduate cohort, we often have opportunities to assist with North Cascades Institute programs and courses outside our regular teaching schedules. Last month I had the awesome opportunity to assist and participate in the 12th Annual Thunder Arm Writing Retreat offered at the Environmental Learning Center. Poet Tim McNulty and essayist Ana Maria Spagna led three dynamic days that dug deep into self-exploration through prose. Below I’d like to highlight my experience and reflections of the retreat and showcase a poem I wrote over those inspiring days.

I’m an Environmental Educator with an English degree. Simply put, I love reading. Reading has the ability to transport the reader and as a result has enchanted me my entire life. When I volunteered for the retreat it had been some years since I last wrote creatively but only a few weeks since I’d delved into a book. In school I was trained to dissect another’s writing through close reading and critical analysis, not to freely capture my own thoughts through creative writing. The essay for me historically evokes a sense of drudgery, as words like “term paper” and “final exam” flood into my mind. At the beginning of the second day of the retreat, Ana Maria gave a craft talk titled “Peeling Back: The Movement toward Honesty in the Personal Essay.” Through group free-writing exercises she demonstrated how the essay can be viewed as a door to get at the truth of the moment. For the first time my academic experience of an essay transformed into an organic process of self-reflection and natural development of ideas. Both Ana Maria and later Tim McNulty demanded that as writers we trust our voice.

» Continue reading Reflections on the 12th Annual Thunder Arm Writing Retreat