Behind every artist, writer, and dreamer lies a terrain of risks and discoveries that can’t be plotted in advance. To create is to wander into the unknown, guided less by certainty than by curiosity. Each guest is asked the same ten questions, but their answers reveal something far greater—an unfiltered glimpse into the raw and deeply personal terrain of a creative life.

Created by Connor Wolfe (they/them), founder of Wayfarer Books and Wayfarer Magazine, “Uncharted” is an invitation to step off the map and explore what it means to live and create beyond the expected.

Uncharted with James Crews

On Kindness, Creative Rebellion, and Saying Yes to What Matters

Issue 43. October 2025

James Crews (he/him) makes a compelling case for attention, gratitude, and everyday grace. The editor behind the bestselling anthologies The Path to Kindness: Poems of Connection and Joy and How to Love the World: Poems of Gratitude and Hope, he’s been featured in The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, The Christian Science Monitor, and on NPR’s Morning Edition. Crews is also the author of four prize-winning poetry collections The Book of What Stays, Telling My Father, Bluebird, and Every Waking Moment as well as the short-essay collection Kindness Will Save the World: Stories of Compassion and Connection. When he isn’t speaking or leading workshops on kindness, mindfulness, and writing for self-compassion, he’s at home with his husband on forty rocky acres in the woods of southern Vermont. In the conversation that follows, Crews reflects on how poems can reorient us toward wonder, connection, and the steadier parts of a difficult world.

1. What’s lighting you up creatively right now?

What’s bringing me alive lately is creative freedom. I always start my days with a large cup of coffee and free-writing in my notebook for a few pages, practicing radical acceptance of whatever wants to come (what Julia Cameron has called “Morning Pages” in The Artist’s Way). It’s easy to fall out of this habit, to forget how important it is to give my heart and mind this kind of free range to explore. Just this morning, I felt lit up again telling the truth about what I love and don’t love about my life. And the thing that arose over and over, which has helped me to stay in creative flow, was stability. It’s not a very exciting notion for most creatives, but I realize that my daily practice of sitting down at my desk first thing and opening the door to whatever arises has helped me create a strong foundation from which the rest of the day unfolds. I often think of the well-known Ralph Waldo Emerson quote: “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” I’ve often spurned stability and consistency as too boring and uninspiring. Yet in the last five years, the wise consistency of continually showing up every day to the page, and not seeking out the drama that once marked my life, has brought about more creative abundance than I ever could have hoped for.

2. What’s the last thing that truly captivated you—an idea, a place, a piece of art, a poem, a moment?

I have written elsewhere that “only moments matter,” and this is one of the mantras I try to live by. Both of my parents died quite young—my father at 43 years old, from complications of Hepatitis C, and my mother at 64 from sudden heart failure. Spending time with them in their final months and days showed me over and over that the so-called smallest moments are the ones that stay with us the most. The moment that sprang to mind when I first read this question may not seem all that earth-shattering or relevant, but I have carried it with me for weeks now. My husband Brad and I were walking a piece of land here in Vermont, where we’re trying to find a place to create a farm and retreat center. It was the perfect summer day, and we pulled over on a mostly deserted road to walk the unmown fields of the property. I’d been overly busy, and felt a little resentful that I’d taken time away from my packed schedule to drive the hour there and back. Yet as soon as we began to step through Queen Anne’s lace and goldenrod, a sudden sense of peace fell over me. I looked down to see a black swallowtail butterfly nectaring on a pink clover flower, and seemed to feel my soul at last rising to the surface again, just in this single moment of close attention. Ultimately, that piece of land didn’t end up being right for us, but that bit of what Anne Lamott has called “soul time” continues to stay with me, a reminder of what’s most essential, the space I need in my life through which to cultivate a sense of wonder. It’s as if watching that butterfly flex its wings and drink showed me again how I might nourish myself, spending time away from work, distraction, and news.

3. What’s a recent experience that made you feel deeply present?

I always feel most present when I am immersed in a poem or essay, or when I’m listening and responding to someone else’s work. I host a monthly writing community on Zoom called The Monthly Pause, and just a few days ago, I found all of my worries and fatigue falling away from me as I listened deeply and generously to what folks had written during our time together. I believe this practice of receiving, even living inside a piece that someone has created, makes me a better writer myself. I stay alert for phrases and lines that stand out to me, and reflect that back to the writer, focusing on what draws my attention. I do the same in my own work too, especially during the revision process. No doubt, this kind of generous listening seeps into daily life as well, making me more attentive, more alert to inspiration whenever and however it slips into me.

4. What’s a piece of art, a book, or a conversation that’s been living in your mind rent-free?

My best friend, whom I have known for 25 years now, recently visited me. As we walked through a local nature preserve, she confessed that she’s been struggling to stay present to where she lives, and to the work she’s doing right now. She foresees a move down the road eventually, but doesn’t want to just reject her daily experience, missing out on what’s actually there to appreciate. Lately, she said, she’s been seeing each new day as the perfect tangerine, round and fragrant and filled with its own particular sugars. It’s up to us whether or not we choose to feast on the tangerine of each given day, whether we even start to peel it, or decide to leave it untouched. Needless to say, this conversation has stayed with me, and has made me even more present to the gift of a new day, even when there are parts of my life I’d rather reject.

5. What’s the most rebellious thing you’ve ever done in your creative work?

One of the bravest things I ever did was publish my first anthology of poems focused on kindness, Healing the Divide. This was an act of rebellion for me not only because of the theme, but also because I gathered only accessible poems that spoke to a larger, more mainstream audience. I was teaching beginning creative writing at SUNY-Albany at the time, and the idea came to me following the 2016 election. The students in my classes came from diverse backgrounds, many of them from in and around New York City, and I could tell that, given the rhetoric and actions of our government, they were losing hope in humanity. Poetry has always been the lens through which I see and process the world, and so I thought it would be helpful to put together a book that might give them more faith in the future. The book I eventually published would go on to reach far more people than I ever could have dreamed, but I’ll never forget returning to Lincoln, Nebraska, where I had done my PhD, for a reading. One of my former classmates was commenting on the collection, and I told him how surprised I was by its success. “Well,” he said with a discernible sneer. “It’s not all that surprising. Target sells T-shirts with the word ‘kindness’ printed on them.” I could feel the sting of those words, meant to belittle the book and its accomplishments. But having been on a reading tour for the anthology, and seen how my own students and many other readers connected with these poems, I knew that, no matter what anyone else thought, this book would touch many lives, and give poetry a wider audience. I remain proud to this day that I said a difficult “yes” to this departure from the more “literary” projects I was trained by academia to pursue.

6. If your younger self could see you now, what would surprise them the most? What would disappoint them?

If my younger self could see me now, he would be shocked that I make my living speaking to large groups, leading workshops and retreats, publishing books. I first came to poetry in the third grade when my teacher Mrs. Brown required us to memorize and recite a poem to the whole class each week for a unit in our English class. I don’t even know where the thought first came from, but one week I found myself standing at her desk, turning five different shades of red as I asked her if I could write, memorize and recite one of my own poems. She clapped her hands, excited by the idea, and I became a writer in that instant. After I shared my poem, people came up to me—the quietest kid in class—and complimented what I had written, saying they couldn’t believe that came from me. It felt like a miracle, that something I had created out of nothing, sparked a reaction like this in people who had never even spoken to me. Since then, I knew I wanted to write, wanted to share my work, but I never thought I would be fortunate enough to do it as part of my job. I also never thought one could be both introverted and still comfortable enough speaking to large audiences. In spite of all this, I think my younger self would be disappointed that I sometimes lose myself too much in the business of “adulting,” and often stray from the wonder and awe that brought me to writing in the first place. This is something I’m working on right now, allowing myself what feels like an indulgent amount of time some days to “do nothing,” just walking or sitting in the garden, exploring a town I’ve never been to, sitting at a cafe for hours without the armor of my laptop and a task to do. This type of spaciousness feels necessary to my creativity. Yet the older I get, the more rare it seems, the easier it becomes to make excuses to avoid it.

7. What is a truth you’ve had to unlearn in order to grow?

One so-called “truth” I’ve had to unlearn is that an artist has to suffer in order to create their work. Because of our grind culture, and the myths surrounding creativity, I believed that if it felt too easy, it wasn’t worth doing. I’ve always worked hard, but I thought that writing should feel difficult, that I wasn’t living up to my potential somehow if I wasn’t struggling. I grew up in a very chaotic home where my father was often switching jobs, and we moved every few years, often falling behind in the rent. My mother also lived with agoraphobia and other mental illnesses, so stability was hard to come by. We never knew when she might have another panic attack, or when we’d have to move suddenly from a beloved house. I think I got addicted to constant movement and drama, and carried that over into my adult life and writing practice. In therapy over the years, and in my marriage with my husband, I’ve worked to unravel this addiction, and to embrace the fact that one can be a happy and productive artist—without all the drama. I’ve learned to follow what feels good, what flows more easily through my writing.

8. What question are you currently trying to answer through your work?

I lost my mother a few years ago. She had been ill for many years with multiple sclerosis and COPD, and I’d acted as her caregiver for most of my life. But her death came as a shock to my system, leaving me without a sense of equilibrium or purpose. I realize, looking back, that I took her for granted, even with the awareness that she was not well, and even given the fact that I had lost my father 20 years before. The recent death of Andrea Gibson, a poet who influenced my own work profoundly over the past few years, reopened this wound, and has me asking this question in my poetry and essays: How can I live close to death, and welcome the braided nature of sorrow and joy into my daily life, without also dwelling in anxiety and fear? In other words: How can I live without taking anyone or anything for granted? One thing that’s been helping in this quest is a quote from Andrea: “Remind me/all my prayers were answered/the moment I started praying/for what I already have.” To me, this speaks to our constant human dilemma, of how to radically appreciate what is right here in front of us, even in the midst of sorrow, even with life’s inherent imperfections and failures. Their quote also speaks to the realization that, when and if circumstances shift, we might ask for this very imperfect and beautiful life we spend so much time trying to escape. Most likely, someday, we will want it back.

9. What is pulling you forward right now?

Honestly, some days not much pulls me forward. My heart breaks constantly for the ways in which our country has been overtaken by casual cruelty, the ways our government is ignoring the genocide in Gaza, the attacks on LGBTQ+ people, people of color, and vulnerable groups everywhere. It is very easy to lose hope in the face of such violent rhetoric and outright lies. One thing that buoys me is finding a sense of purpose, both in writing every day and sharing my work with others. My husband and I recently edited a book of love poems by LGBTQ+ authors and allies called Love Is for All of Us, and being out on tour for that anthology, traveling all over the country and visiting bookstores in many different communities, renewed our spirits. Gathering in the name of something larger than us as individuals—love, tenderness, and belonging—helped us and everyone who came to our readings tap into a deeper well of energy. I try to be very intentional with the work I create and put into the world. I want the poems, essays, and anthologies I share to help make our planet a kinder, more beautiful place. I also recently interviewed the singer/songwriter and poet Carrie Newcomer for my writing community, asking a similar question: What’s keeping you going at this fraught time? She replied simply, “Leaning into beauty.” When I heard her words, I felt an opening up of permission in my body and in myself to do the same. Right now, I’m watching endangered monarch butterflies, bumblebees, and hummingbird moths feed on the purple blossoms of butterfly bushes we have allowed to grow wild in our backyard. Small moments of beauty, and small kindnesses I offer and receive—what the awe researcher Dacher Keltner calls “moral beauty”—all help pull me forward on the best days. And remembering that they are possible on my worst days helps me look ahead to better times.

10. If your creative work is a map, where does it lead?

If my creative work is a map, I think it leads to more mystery. The more I practice writing and other forms of creativity, the less I feel I know. For a long time, I think I thought the map would lead to success, fame, or a teaching position as a professor—but it has only led me more deeply into myself and my own experience, more deeply into the mysteries that govern our existence. I was once lucky enough to take a weeklong workshop with the poet Li-Young Lee, and I’ll never forget what he said: “Writing is a self-clarifying act.” As we move through the layers of self, however, we keep finding more layers. More and more lately, I seem to have left behind all maps, and now feel guided by Something I don’t quite understand, but which feels both present and real. I retrieve and receive more than I believe I actually create. I don’t mean to say that I don’t still strive, but it feels more like an act of service to what the poem, essay, or book wants to be, rather than what I want it to be. More often, I am trying softer instead of harder. If my creative work is a map at all, I suppose it’s one of those complex, nearly indecipherable subway maps with countless stops on the journey—but with no discernible destination. At one point, this might have felt frightening to me, but what a joy it still is to ride this train, getting on and getting off where it feels right, not needing to know where I’m headed anymore.

Behind every artist, writer, and dreamer lies a terrain of risks and discoveries that can’t be plotted in advance. To create is to wander into the unknown, guided less by certainty than by curiosity. Each guest is asked the same ten questions, but their answers reveal something far greater—an unfiltered glimpse into the raw and deeply personal terrain of a creative life.

Created by Connor Wolfe (they/them), founder of Wayfarer Books and Wayfarer Magazine, “Uncharted” is an invitation to step off the map and explore what it means to live and create beyond the expected.

Uncharted with Pádraig Ó Tuama

On Presence, Rebellion, and the Maps of Creativity

Issue 43. October 2025

Today we’re joined by poet and theologian Pádraig Ó Tuama (he/him), whose work explores the intersections of language, power, conflict, and religion. He’s not only a gifted writer on the page, but also a compelling speaker, teacher, and facilitator of groups. Many will know him as the host of Poetry Unbound from On Being Studios.

From 2014 to 2019, Pádraig led the Corrymeela Community—Ireland’s oldest peace and reconciliation organization. His academic background is equally rich: he holds undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in theology, professional qualifications in conflict mediation, and a PhD in Poetry and Theology from the University of Glasgow. Looking ahead, he’ll be serving as a visiting scholar at Columbia University’s Centre for Cooperation and Conflict Resolution through the autumn terms of 2024 to 2028.

To give you a sense of his impact, BBC journalist William Crawley once introduced him at a TEDx talk by saying, “He’s probably the best public speaker I know.” And as The New Yorker’s Eliza Griswold observed, for Pádraig, “Poetry is the language the heart speaks not when it reaches for some externalized divinity but when it seeks to understand itself.”

1. What’s lighting you up creatively right now?

At this very moment, I am looking out at a tree, and in the tree is a bird. I’m traveling, so I’m around birdlife I don’t recognize. The bird has a yellow beak, and is sitting on a cluster of berries protruding from a tall slender palm tree. The berries are red and the bird’s plucking them off one by one, eating some, spitting others out, shitting merrily as it goes. Now it’s hopped to a twig so light, I can barely believe it can sustain the weight of even a light bird. And now—just seconds later—its flown to a large horizontal palm frond extending perpendicularly from a more sturdy tree. Somewhere else another bird is singing. In fact, I can hear three: something dove-like, something like a song, and something throaty and husky. Interestingly, I can’t hear the jungle fowl who—at any point of the day—can release their explosions of noise without warning. I’ve just counted, and in the space of five seconds, I could count ten different shapes of leaves and foliage on the immediate plants and trees and palms near me. And now, as if I’ve summoned them by writing about them, one of those damned fowl has crowed. I was awake early this morning, 4.15am or so, and the crowing started then, and it’s now six hours later, and it’s still pandemoniuming its way through the waking hours. The male jungle fowl has a slightly shorter crow than that of the domestic rooster—rising with objection, but without the elongated end. Right now, another bird—hidden too, and utterly new to me—is squeaking near me. It goes from a whistle to a nasal squeak, then back again. Fresh as the morning.

2. What’s the last thing that truly captivated you—an idea, a place, a piece of art, a poem, a moment?

The last thing? That bird. And the garden. And the light on the mountain last night when the sun was going down. I’m on Maui, staying in the house that Paula and W.S. Merwin built and lived in for many years. It’s run now by the Merwin Conservancy, a living land modeled after poetry, place, preservation. They— fools!— invite writers to stay for a few weeks while working on a project. (I’ve threatened to never leave). Merwin had purchased two acres about fifty years ago, with plans to build a house and plant on what was deemed wasteland. It’s now a rainforest of palm trees—some of them endangered—and birdlife and insect life (the little bastards love my milky blood, it seems).

3. What’s a recent experience that made you feel deeply present?

It started to rain last evening and continued all night. When I got up this morning, I made tea (Assam, with milk, in a flask to keep it warm) and sat on the lanai nearest to what was Paula Merwin’s office. I closed my eyes, listened to the rain, tried to recall what I’d read of the Stoics yesterday, and thought about the cardinal virtues (justice, wisdom, courage and moderation), but alongside that, I thought of the etymology of cardinal (it does not, as I’d wondered, share etymology with cardiac) and then—how could I not?—I thought of the cardinals I’ve seen flying around the trees during the week since I’ve arrived. The sound of the rain was like a permanent rhyme, a percussion, without metrical beat, but with a pulse as indigenous as that of the heart. And then I thought of how the Stoics were mostly interested in ways of being present, without allowing flights of uncontrollable things to take control. They didn’t think they were the first to state their wisdom: their wisdom has found voice in all human cultures, I imagine. My grandmother—in the midst of a long life with sorrow—loved the occasion for a song, or a cigarette, or a baby’s smile. And there were plenty. Babies that is. I’ve just counted: I was one of eighteen cousins born in eighteen years. She was present this morning too, although she’s never been to Hawai’i, and is dead many years. She was wearing the patterned housecoat she always wore, pottering about, uninterested in me, setting the butter out to soften in the warm.

4. What’s a piece of art, a book, or a conversation that’s been living in your mind rent-free?

I’ve been captivated by “Water” — Haleh Liza Gafori’s most recent translation of Rumi’s work (NYRB, 2025). I don’t believe in God (believe isn’t a strong enough verb for me), but I like reading some of the writing of some people who do. Linguist, musician, performer, communicator, seeker, Haleh is like conduit for the energies that also enlivened Rumi and, through her translations, I can see him: dancing, looking, calling out, whispering, shouting, spinning spinning spinning, praising his friend Shams, honoring Allah with his shouts of joy and lamentations, attending to life and the body and law and struggle with his full attention. A mynah bird has just landed on a branch nearby me. Mimics, they translate too: finding the part of their throats where the sounds they’ve heard can live through them. This one has gone from ticks to roars to purrs to song in the space of a minute.

5. What’s the most rebellious thing you’ve ever done in your creative work?

Rebellious according to whom? I have dared many things: to speak about religion and sex and the body as a gay man who has been through reparative therapies and exorcisms. But my guess is that anyone who’d find such writing rebellious isn’t interested in hearing what I have to say (if they’re even thinking of me; and I suspect they are not). So any rebellions in my creativity were mostly about my own relationship to my own relationship to my self… which, when you put it like that, appears just for what it is: centered on my self. The relationship to self is always going to be a serious relationship, but I hope, like the relationship to whatever God might be, I can look more through that connection, than at. I imagine any audience to my work is also looking at their lives, even anybody who reads my work and doesn’t agree with what I do with religion. But their lives are far more interesting than their opinions about me, and I want my imagination of their lives to be one of curiosity, not certitude. I suppose all of this is a way to say that art is more interesting than rebellion. I wrote a sequence of poems where Jesus, Son of God, fresh out of Hell, has a deep dialogue—erotic, frenetic, enraged, centering—with Persephone, queen of destruction, the Daughter of Gods. Someone suggested to me and said I had missed an opportunity for queering Jesus and giving him a male lover (Hermes? Hades? Apollo?).

I could vaguely see what they meant, but art rarely follows a line of a plot: for me, writing an encounter between these two devastated gods was imagination enough. Rebellion for rebellion’s sake doesn’t interest me any more. I’m interested in imagination and seeing where it takes me.

6. If your younger self could see you now, what would surprise them the most? What would disappoint them?

I think about my younger self a lot, but less in terms of surprise or disappointment. Mostly the energy goes back the other way: I have respect for the child and young man who felt like he had no map. He didn’t know the way, and to tell anyone about his secrets would have been to make life more difficult. He made it, anyway, or in some kind of way. Bruised, battered, slow. Self confident, strange, self destructive. Making art that knew more than he knew. Filled with self-consciousness, but also with an ambition. The cardinal is back. Maybe it’s not a cardinal—its coloring is more varied: butter yellow beak; black around its eyes; red feathers on its underbelly; purple wings. Lively. Sprite. Is it some kind of parrot? Is it a god? Oh the glory of this bird. I have no internet or mobile signal here, and my phone isn’t by me anyway, so I am without the ability to record or snap or look for information. The longer I look at it, the less interested I am in its definition anyway: what would information give me other than information? What I have is now, and I cannot stop looking at this bird, who has no interest in me. Perhaps that’s what would surprise the younger me: that I’d learn to be unafraid. What would disappoint the younger me? That it would take so much time. What would intrigue the younger me? That it took so much time. There was a green gecko here just five seconds ago. Gone now. I love those little lizards.

7. What is a truth you’ve had to unlearn in order to grow?

Fear. God.

8. What question are you currently trying to answer through your work?

Last night, I was invited by a new friend on Maui, Li, to go to an event in the home of Mary Anna and Steve Grimes, a night of music. I got the impression that many of the musicians there were friends or acquaintances; many of them had clearly known and loved each other for decades. They had stories of adversities overcome, wounds worn and borne, griefs marked. Moana and Keola Beamer played and sang, Keola on the guitar, and Moana singing and summoning up the ancestors by usage of the poi ball, as well as dancing hula while the singing was ongoing. What I am thinking of is not just the richness of their offering, it is also the way both of them could bear the beauty of their offering. It isn’t easy to share something so exquisite and not interrupt it with yourself, but they made a communion between listener and singer; singer and listener. Something happened in the space between. Not just between me and them, but between me and me: between me and my past and changing present; between joy and lament; between the dead and the living. I am not seeking any answers in the phenomenon of art; I am trying to be in the event.

9. What is pulling you forward right now?

I am interested in being drawn inward rather than forward. Time works in many ways, and one of the ways to thrive is to find a way to accept that time is going forward as well as make the time for some kind of travel inward; even if the idea of making time is a fiction, it can—like all fiction—do interesting work in us. My friend Jayne is here for some of the time at the Merwin Conservancy. She’s an artist and art therapist, and has spent the mornings collecting leaves and flowers from the pathways of the palm forest. She’s pressed them into paper and has made a small book of the shapes. I have another old friend with me too, Meister Eckhart. He died about 700 years ago, and wrote around 100 sermons. One of my favorite lines is where he notices fresh flowers on a grave at a convent. He mentions it in his sermon, praising the sister who made the arrangement of flowers, and commemorated the dead in the days of the living. He thought the human person lived on the hinge point between time and eternity: our days bring us through time, our prayers link us to eternity. Friendships—of all kinds—link me to time.

10. If your creative work is a map, where does it lead?

Maps interest me. They are a way to locate oneself today with the experiences—and point of view—of someone who either went that way before, or proposed some vantage point to make plot lines. I love the Czech poet Miroslav Holub’s gorgeous poem “A Brief Reflection on Maps” where a battalion of soldiers, lost in a blizzard in the Alps, found a map and made their treacherous way home. However, the map was not of the Alps, it was of the Pyrenees. If my creative work were a map, it would always lead off it. But it’s not a map. It’s a strange kind of mine; where to go downward is a way of attending to being present and being lost. The poet David Wagoner said in his magnificent poem “Lost”

“The trees ahead and bushes beside you

are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here

and you must treat it as a powerful stranger.”

Among the many pieces of wisdom present in this gorgeous poem that strike today are David’s choice of the words “ahead” and “beside” in the first line. One is looking forward, one is just adjacent. His poem is interested in neither of these orientations, but—as far as is possible—in the strange event of the here and now.

The cardinal is back again. On a sturdy twig of a small shrub-like tree. It’s peering down, chirping, perhaps looking for something to eat: a worm? a berry?

It’s raining lightly, I only see it when I look at the spaces between the trunks closely. And there’s a wind through the palm forest that reminds me why in many languages a name for breath is a name for God which is also the sound of what we cannot see. There’s sunshine also, glinting on the cartilage of the cardinal’s beak. The bird is hungry—or, at least, is seeking something that will sustain it on the edge of living. Me too.

Behind every artist, writer, and dreamer lies a terrain of risks and discoveries that can’t be plotted in advance. To create is to wander into the unknown, guided less by certainty than by curiosity. Each guest is asked the same ten questions, but their answers reveal something far greater—an unfiltered glimpse into the raw and deeply personal terrain of a creative life.

Created by Connor Wolfe (they/them), founder of Wayfarer Books and Wayfarer Magazine, “Uncharted” is an invitation to step off the map and explore what it means to live and create beyond the expected.

Today we are sitting down with Rebecca Brenner, an accomplished author, mindfulness meditation teacher, and journalist whose work spans a wide range of topics, from mental health and community care to equality and resilience. Her writing has been featured in publications including TIME, LA Times, Tin House, and Mutha Magazine. She also contributes as a journalist and features writer for TownLift, focusing on stories that reflect the vibrant Park City community.

As the president and co-founder of Mindful. Summit County, Rebecca works to advance mindfulness from an individual practice of self-care into a broader framework of community care. Under her leadership, the nonprofit aims to make mindfulness accessible and impactful, fostering a more connected and compassionate community. Her passion for advocacy also extends to her role as an elected member of the Leadership Team at Summit Pride, where she collaborates with city, county, and state leaders to promote equality and safety for queer communities in Summit County.

Rebecca’s creative work reflects her deep understanding of the complexities of human experience. Her debut memoir-in-verse, Paper House, explores themes of grief, addiction, and the intergenerational effects of loss, offering a poignant reflection on resilience and healing. The memoir, a deeply personal project over a decade in the making, is being released June 25, 2025.

1: What's lighting you up creatively right now?

Right now, the pull to focus outward—on the news, on social media, on the constant flood of information—is strong. It’s hard to look away when so many of the people I love are having their rights stripped away, when injustice feels relentless, when the world demands urgency. There’s a part of me that wants to stay tethered to the noise, to stay in a state of constant reaction, as if my vigilance alone could shift the tide.

But I have learned that I am most nourished—creatively, emotionally, and spiritually—when I turn inward, when I settle into my body and the present moment. Rest is not complacency. Meditation, mindfulness, time in nature with my dog, Fred, and meaningful moments with family, friends, and my community don’t pull me away from what matters—they deepen my capacity to engage with it. These practices don’t silence my anger or grief; they give me the steadiness to hold them without drowning.

This connection to what is alive right here, right now, doesn’t just ground me—it sharpens me. It reminds me that presence is an act of resistance, that clarity is power. In a world that wants us exhausted, reactive, and overwhelmed, the ability to remain clear-headed, deeply rooted, and creatively engaged is radical. It allows me to move forward—not from a place of fear, but from a place of unwavering intention.

2: What's the last thing that truly captivated you—an idea, a place, a piece of art, a poem, a moment?

For the past fifteen years, I’ve studied with a Lama from a Vajrayana Tantric lineage of Tibetan Buddhism. His teachings illuminated the fundamental life force energy—something vast and intelligent, alive yet groundless, endlessly creative. He often reminded me that life itself is inherently wise, that I could trust my own aliveness. At first, I struggled to grasp what that meant.

As someone who grew up in a home shaped by addiction and generational trauma, trust—especially in something unseen, something intangible—didn’t come easily. I had learned early on to be hyper-vigilant, to scan for signs of instability, to prepare for things to fall apart. Control felt like survival. The idea that I could relax into my own existence, that I could let go and still be held by something greater, felt almost impossible. It took years of practice, of unlearning, of testing the edges of surrender before I could even begin to trust what the Lama was pointing toward: that beneath all the chaos, beneath all the grasping, there is a current of life moving through everything—including me.

Recently, I’ve been slowly making my way through The Great Cosmic Mother: Rediscovering the Religion of the Earth by Monica Sjöö and Barbara Mor. When I read the words “Mother of God” and “Mother of Creation,” something deep within me shifted. I’m still searching for the right words to describe it, but it felt like an echo of something I already knew but had never fully allowed myself to believe.

It reminded me that aliveness is not just energy—it is loving, interconnected, and deeply creative. That it is central to who we all are, to who I am. That I can trust it. That my own aliveness is not something to control or contain but a source of interconnection, of power. And that perhaps, in all the ways I’ve been searching for solid ground, what I’ve really been searching for is this—the ability to rest in what is already moving through me.

3: What's a recent experience that made you feel deeply present?

I'm so grateful for my fifteen-year practice because I can feel its momentum unfolding in my daily life, not just in meditation or intentional stillness, but in the most ordinary moments—where presence reveals itself as something vast and steady.

Take my morning walks with my dog, Fred. He moves through the world with such ease, with no agenda other than experiencing what is right in front of him—the scent on the wind, the crunch of snow beneath his paws, the rhythm of his breath. There is no rush, no worry, no analyzing what comes next. Just presence.

As I walk alongside him, the snow-covered trees, the mountains, and the way the morning light moves through the branches remind me that I, too, belong to this unfolding moment. They invite me out of the noise of my reactive, constantly chattering mind—the to-do lists, the anxieties, the endless internal dialogue pulling me elsewhere—and call me back into the simple, undeniable aliveness that is always here, always waiting.

These walks have become more than just routine; they are small rituals of returning—to myself, to the world as it is, to the steady rhythm beneath all the movement. In those moments, I remember that presence isn’t something I have to chase or force—it’s already here. I just have to notice.

4: What's a piece of art, a book, or a conversation that's been living in your mind rent-free?

My poet friend, Nan Seymour, recently shared a poem by Nazim Hikmet, translated from the Turkish by Steve Kronen:

MY FUNERAL

Will my funeral start out from our courtyard?

How will you get me down from the third floor?

The coffin won't fit in the elevator,

and the stairs are awfully narrow.

Maybe there'll be sun knee-deep in the yard, and pigeons,

maybe snow filled with the cries of children,

maybe rain with its wet asphalt.

And the trash cans will stand in the courtyard as always.

If, as is the custom here, I'm put in the truck face open,

a pigeon might drop something on my forehead: it's good luck.

Band or no band, the children will come up to me—

they're curious about the dead.

Our kitchen window will watch me leave.

Our balcony will see me off with the wash on the line.

In this yard I was happier than you'll ever know.

Neighbors, I wish you all long lives.

It is a poem about death, yes, but somehow it feels more like a poem about life—about the simple, everyday details that shape a person’s existence. The narrow stairwell, the wash on the line, the trash cans standing as they always do. There is no grand farewell, no dramatic lament. Just a gentle acceptance, a quiet observation of the ordinary continuing on, even in death.

There is something deeply generous in this poem—its humor, its light touch, its absence of self-pity. Even in the face of finality, there is room for pigeons and children, for luck, for well wishes to those left behind. It does not ask for mourning, only recognition. In this yard I was happier than you’ll ever know. It is a line that settles into me like warmth.

The generosity and kindness in these words feel like a balm—an offering of perspective, a reminder that even in endings, there is a way to meet the world with grace, with humor, with love.

5: What's the most rebellious thing you've ever done in your creative work?

My memoir-in-verse, Paper House, which will be published with Wayfarer this summer, is the most rebellious thing I’ve ever done creatively—not because it is loud or overtly defiant, but because it required me to go against everything I thought I knew about how this story should be told.

For years, my rational mind insisted it should be a traditional memoir, with neatly structured chapters and a clear arc. That’s how stories like this are written, right? That’s what the industry expects, what readers are used to, what would make it easier to publish. And yet, every time I sat down to write, it kept coming through in verse—fragments, images, white space, the silences just as important as the words themselves.

At first, I fought it. I tried to reshape it, force it into prose, make it more linear. But it resisted me. It wasn’t a traditional memoir, no matter how much I willed it to be. It was something else entirely—something raw, lyrical, woven in the language of memory rather than chronology. Some editors and agents encouraged me to reshape it, to make it more accessible by conforming to traditional storytelling. But the work refused. And, eventually, I had to surrender to what it wanted to be.

Trusting this form—trusting that poetry was the only way this story could live honestly—was terrifying at first. But in doing so, I learned something profound about creativity: it has its own intelligence. It is not something to be controlled, but something to be in conversation with. When I finally let go of how I thought the book should be written and instead allowed it to arrive as it wanted to, I felt something shift in me.

Writing Paper House in verse became an act of trust—not just in the work itself, but in my own instincts, in the intuitive and nonlinear nature of memory, in the idea that form and content are inseparable. And in the end, this trust deepened my belief in creativity as something alive, something wiser than my rational mind.

6. If your younger self could see you now, what would surprise them the most? What would disappoint them?

My younger self would be shocked to learn that I am a parent and that parenting has been the most joyful, heart-breaking (in the best way), transformative, and healing experience of my life.

She would be disappointed that, despite always wanting a garden, I still can't grow one to save my life!

7. What is a truth you've had to unlearn in order to grow?

There are so many lessons I’ve had to unlearn—like realizing that I don’t need to hurry through life or that I haven’t done something wrong each time I speak my truth. But the biggest one is control.

The Lama often said that all the Buddhist teachings could be boiled down to: “Relax and open. Relax and open some more. Relax and open even more.” For a long time, I assumed this meant that if I could just relax enough—if I could soften into the moment fully—I would finally arrive at a place of peace, clarity, and stability. That one day, I’d exhale and land somewhere solid.

But what I’ve come to realize is that there is no solid ground to stand on. Everything is always changing—my relationships, my work, my understanding of myself. There is no finish line where I get to say, There, now I’ve arrived. Instead, life keeps shifting, pulling me deeper into uncertainty. The difference now is that I don’t see this as something to fear or fix. Instead of resisting the unknown, I’m learning to trust it.

I don’t have much control—over outcomes, over how others perceive me, over what tomorrow will bring. But I do have the ability to meet each moment as it is, to relax into what is unfolding rather than gripping onto what I think should be happening. And in that surrender, I find something more lasting than control: an abiding trust in aliveness itself.

8. What question are you currently trying to answer through your work?

What does it truly mean to live life in this way? This question lingers at the center of everything for me. It is not one that can be answered in a definitive way—there is no singular truth to land on, no endpoint where I can say, Ah, now I understand. Instead, it is a question that asks me to keep asking, to keep moving, to keep paying attention.

This question pulls me away from institutions and structures built on seeking certainty, order, and control—the things that promise stability but often come at the cost of fluidity and aliveness. I grew up believing that if I could just find the right system, the right framework, the right answers, I would finally feel safe. But what if the safety I’ve been searching for isn’t in certainty at all, but in the ability to stay present with the unknown?

So instead of asking how to make things solid, I ask: What does it mean for my work, my parenting, my relationships to remain in the unknown? To resist the pull toward rigid conclusions and instead stay in a space of curiosity, openness, and responsiveness? What does it mean to trust that I don’t have to have it all figured out in order to show up fully?

To live this way is to stay connected—to my body, to the breath, to the moment as it unfolds. It is to recognize that life is not something to grasp but something to be in relationship with. That aliveness is not a thing to be possessed or controlled, but a movement, an unfolding, a rhythm that I can choose to participate in.

It is both liberating and unsettling—to let go of the idea that I can shape things into certainty, to lean instead into what is emerging. But in doing so, I find something unexpected: a deeper sense of belonging, a deeper trust in the process itself.

9. What is pulling you forward right now?

My two kids.

Every decision I make, every way I choose to show up in the world, is influenced by the quiet but undeniable pull of wanting to be here for them—for as long as I can, as fully as I can.

My mother died when she was only fifty-two. Her absence carved out an emptiness in my life that I’ve spent years learning how to live with. Now, as I approach the end of my forties, I am navigating aging without a map, moving through a stage of life I never got to witness her go through. There is no inherited blueprint, no guidance passed down from her on how to grow older, how to parent through different seasons, how to prepare for what’s ahead.

So I am crafting my own map.

I don’t take time for granted—not my time with my children, not my time in my own body. I want to live a long, healthy life, but not just in the sense of longevity. I want to age with an open heart and mind, to remain present and engaged, to continue evolving alongside my kids rather than simply watching from the sidelines. I want to be here not just as a parent but as a person who is still growing, still learning, still fully alive.

And more than anything, I want to see as much of their lives as possible—their triumphs and heartbreaks, their discoveries, the people they become. To walk beside them for as long as I can.

10. If your creative work is a map, where does it lead?

Deeper and deeper into the here and now.

I hope my work guides me—and others—into each moment, fully awake and endlessly curious.

Behind every artist, writer, and dreamer lies a terrain of risks and discoveries that can’t be plotted in advance. To create is to wander into the unknown, guided less by certainty than by curiosity. Each guest is asked the same ten questions, but their answers reveal something far greater—an unfiltered glimpse into the raw and deeply personal terrain of a creative life.

Created by Connor Wolfe (they/them), founder of Wayfarer Books and Wayfarer Magazine, “Uncharted” is an invitation to step off the map and explore what it means to live and create beyond the expected.

Today, we sit down with author Thomas Lloyd Qualls—a writer by nature, and by all accounts, incurably so.

His debut novel, Waking Up at Rembrandt’s, earned national acclaim, with The Midwest Book Review hailing it as “an impressive debut novel showcasing an undeniably talented and imaginative author.”

His second novel, Painted Oxen, won seven literary awards, including the Landmark Prize for Fiction, a Silver Nautilus Award, and Best New Fiction at the American Fiction Awards.

His third book, Happiness Is an Imaginary Line in the Sand, blends spiritual reflection with poetic insight. Think of it as a portable daily oracle. It received both a Gold Nautilus Award and Best in Small Press.

Across his body of work, Thomas blurs the boundaries between the literary and the mystical, crafting spaces where labels lose their grip. He lives in the high desert of Northern Nevada and holds close Pablo Neruda’s poem Too Many Names.

1. What’s lighting you up creatively right now?

Circular writing. I am crafting a new novel. Which is the third novel in a series. But also the first. It is technically a prequel to the first two. But it is necessary, for purposes of structure and storytelling, that it come last in the series. Also, it is one part modern fiction, one part magical realism, and one part historical fiction. These three aspects create a circle within the novel itself. A novel which is part of a series that is also told in a circle.

2. What’s the last thing that truly captivated you—an idea, a place, a piece of art, a poem, a moment?

I wrote a piece that’s in Happiness Is an Imaginary Line in the Sand about how some of us came into this life with something different, We swallowed lightning in another life. We rode dragons. We parted waters. And we are not so easily contented in this one. I recently came across an Aldous Huxley quote: But I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin. How beautiful and perfect is that? I like it when writers tell the whole truth. He wants goodness and sin. That’s real. That’s the thing you’re not supposed to say. And it is so refreshing to read. Because it makes us feel, finally, like we’re not alone.

3. What’s a recent experience that made you feel deeply present?

My fifteen-year-old son recently told me that I was being emotionally cold. I was trying so hard to keep all the wheels on the wagon of our new lives. To make the doctor’s appointments, to pack the fridge and the cabinets with groceries, to pay the mortgage and the HOA and the insurance, and to clean up the leaves. And on and on. To provide the right mix of freedom and boundaries. But teenagers don’t really care about any of that. They look at you and say, in a manner of speaking, why aren’t you here? (Although it’ll probably sound more like Brah, chill.) It was a hard wake-up call to get, given the chaos of my last two years, and, objectively, the more than adequate job I think I have done keeping all the balls from hitting the ground. Nevertheless, it wasn’t something like an impulsive and untrue I hate you that is thrown out in the middle of a fight. I knew he was right. That brought me back to ground zero immediately. And I have been checking myself a lot more regularly to make sure I am showing up as a real human. Not just a robot who can check all the boxes.

4. What’s a piece of art, a book, or a conversation that’s been living in your mind rent-free?

Two things seem to live side-by-side in my psyche right now:

One is Mary Oliver’s Wild Geese. I’ve had a rough last two years or so. I split with my partner of 17 years. We had to sell our house. I had to buy a new and overpriced house close to my son’s school. I have had to learn how to parent my son on my own pretty much full-time. One of my best friends died. I had to move my parents – who live four states away – into assisted living, and then clean out and sell my childhood house. Then my mother died last November. There are other things I can’t talk about yet. Of course, I have not always navigated these challenges with the grace that would’ve been ideal. And so having Mary Oliver’s voice in my ear, as I walk along the river near my house, is comforting. Her telling me, You do not have to be good / You do not have to walk on your knees / for a hundred miles through the desert repenting helps to manage the imperfections of being human. And also, when the geese that dwell along the river call out, as they do often, it is a constant reminder that they are over and over announcing [my] place / in the family of things.

The second thing is the ancient poet Hafiz telling me, Stay close to anything that makes you glad you are alive. This guides so much of my actions and my decisions. It is why I return to the writing page over and over. It informs my decisions about who I spend time with. It makes me come back, again and again, to situations that are difficult, but without which, my life would feel pointless.

5. What’s the most rebellious thing you’ve ever done in your creative work?

It isn’t intentionally rebellious, I don’t think. But all of my novels are quite unconventional. With my first novel, Waking Up at Rembrandt’s, I chose to tell a good portion of the story from the second person. Or rather, that’s how it came out of me. I am not sure I had much of a choice. Also, I juxtaposed the story narratives with poems that inform the story, and fall into three main themes: love, words, and art. In my second novel, Painted Oxen (winner of Homebound/Wayfarer’s Landmark Prize for Fiction), the narratives of the two main characters are framed by dream sequences and tarot archetypes. And the two main storylines are potentially reincarnations or parallel existences. As I mentioned, the third novel also plays with time and space. Did I mention the moon is a character?

Again, I don’t intentionally try to be rebellious. These are the ideas that come to me and the way the stories want to be told. I am simply their willing and faithful servant. Of course, it doesn’t hurt that I have a strong anti-establishment streak. When I was pitching Waking Up at Rembrandt’s, I told an editor about the intercalary poems, she stated emphatically, Oh you can’t combine fiction with poetry. My response was something like, Well, I did. And so far the world hasn’t blown up. Needless to say, the novel did not find a home there.

6. If your younger self could see you now, what would surprise them the most? What would disappoint them?

I think my younger self would be surprised that I have a respectable job, that I have published three books, and that I am not incarcerated. That same self might also be disappointed by the first point.

7. What is a truth you’ve had to unlearn in order to grow?

The meaning of freedom. Most of us, especially us artists, have somewhat childish ideas of freedom. I recently was re-reading old journals from my twenties. I talked a lot about freedom in them. About not selling out. About living free. But I was also poor and had almost no life experience and did not know the first thing about how to navigate the world on my own. And saw modern society as an insurmountable hurdle to the life I thought I wanted to live. Real like is an ongoing balance of freedom and responsibility. From the view of the national stage right now, too many people have a childish view of freedom. Something like 77 million people, it seems. We have responsibilities to ourselves and to each other. Sometimes those responsibilities look like making art that makes other people feel alive or less alone. And there is also a wonderful freedom in doing that. And we still all have to chop wood and carry water, to make sure the electricity bill is paid, and to show up as a real human to your teenager or your aging parent.

8. What question are you currently trying to answer through your work?

How do we transcend ourselves? What if our ideas of what we think our lives should look like are too small? What if the Universe is far more intelligent than we can imagine? It is useful to throw away the maps and follow the road that unwinds before you. See where it goes. We get too fixed sometimes on what we think we should be doing, what we think we want. There is always another road. Step back and take another look around.

9. What is pulling you forward right now?

Hope, to a certain degree. But also, extreme presence. Like I said in response to question 8, sometimes it is worthwhile to throw away the map. Follow an inner compass. Be willing to make it up as you go. Trust that the stars will not lead you astray. Be a true wayfarer.

10. If your creative work is a map, where does it lead?

I never know where I am going. That’s part of the fun. But I am learning to trust the stars.

Behind every artist, writer, and dreamer lies a terrain of risks and discoveries that can’t be plotted in advance. To create is to wander into the unknown, guided less by certainty than by curiosity. Each guest is asked the same ten questions, but their answers reveal something far greater—an unfiltered glimpse into the raw and deeply personal terrain of a creative life.

Created by Connor Wolfe (they/them), founder of Wayfarer Books and Wayfarer Magazine, “Uncharted” is an invitation to step off the map and explore what it means to live and create beyond the expected.

Today we are with Theodore Richards (he/him). Theodore is an educator, poet, and philosopher, and the founder of The Chicago Wisdom Project. His work is dedicated to re-imagining education and creating new narratives about our place in the world. He has received degrees from various institutions, including the University of Chicago and The California Institute of Integral Studies, but has learned just as much studying the martial art of Bagua; teaching in various settings and students; and as a traveler from the Far East to the Middle East, from southern Africa to the South Pacific. He is the author of eight books and numerous literary awards, including two Nautilus Book Awards and three Independent Publisher Awards. He lives on the south side of Chicago with his wife and three daughters.

1: What's lighting you up creatively right now?

These are hard times. There is so much suffering and cause for despair. That said, part of what’s going on is an unraveling of old systems and ways of being. I see that as an opportunity: Something new is being unveiled. So, rather than think of clinging to the old systems as they are being dismantled, let’s think of what we can create that’s new and better. For example, let’s take a look at education, an area that I spend a lot of time in. You’ve got fascists trying to dismantle it or use it for a racist or an anti-queer agenda (among other things) and that’s terrible. But I am working at thinking of entirely new forms of education rather than trying to protect what’s being dismantled.

And this is woven into my creative work. When we choose to look at ourselves and the world authentically and courageously, something new emerges. For me, that emergence is what lights me up.

2. What's the last thing that truly captivated you—an idea, a place, a piece of art, a poem, a moment?

I will name three things from a recent trip I took to Italy with my family.

Seeing Caravaggio’s “The Conversion on the Way to Damascus” in a church in Rome. The painting was used as the cover to my novel, The Conversions. I love what Caravaggio does with light in his work. And I love how one can see art in Italy at churches as opposed to museums.

After Rome we were in Naples, a city that generally inspires me. One of the world’s most beautiful cities, and so rich culturally. Truly a Mediterranean culture more than a European one. We were in the labyrinthine streets of the Spanish Quarter, and I was really inspired by the intersection of history and peoples, drinking wine with people, eating and listening to music.

And lastly, the sunset over the Mediterranean from the island of Ischia in the Bay of Naples.

3. What's a recent experience that made you feel deeply present?

Swimming in caves as we rode a boat around Ischia with my youngest daughter, Vismaya. She loves the water, and just watching her and being with her reminds me of how to experience joy, and to be present and in my body.

4. What's a piece of art, a book, or a conversation that's been living in your mind rent-free?

A couple of books that I recently read are sticking with me. Marius Kociejowski’s A Serpent Coiled in Naples during our trip, and it really dives into the unique culture there. I write about it a bit in What Happened to Icarus, and it affirmed some of my feelings about the place. I talk a lot about the “flattening” of the world, how capitalism makes everywhere the same, sterile, two-dimensional. Naples is a place that really seems to be able to maintain its “texture”, its depth. And Daniel Mason’s North Woods is a beautiful novel. It really demonstrates the way fiction can center place and the natural world alongside the human psyche.

I also want to shout out two Children’s Books. Sylvester and the Magic Pebble was recently mentioned on the television show The Bear. It was my brother’s favorite book—he had memorized it as a very young child. My mom buried it with him when he died. It’s the story of a donkey who is magically, tragically turned into a rock and how he is turned back. And I just gifted Homemade Love by bell hooks to friends who are expecting their first child. My middle daughter, Calliope, memorized it when she was little. It’s about how things sometimes get broken and how we can try to be ok with that and focus on repair rather than perfection.

5. What's the most rebellious thing you've ever done in your creative work?

I think that a lot of my work has really challenged the dominant narratives and values of our civilization. That’s pretty rebellious. But maybe the most rebellious thing about my work is that it insists on loving the world and each other in spite of all the evidence to discourage that. In that way, What Happened to Icarus is probably the most rebellious book I’ve written.

6. If your younger self could see you now, what would surprise them the most? What would disappoint them?

I think what perhaps would be most surprising is how central family is for me. As a young person, I was extremely independent and solitary, a traveler. A lot of my next book is about that. I realized, with age, that those notions of independence were delusions, and that we are really here to be in relationship.

I hope nothing would be too disappointing… maybe my bank account!

7. What is a truth you've had to unlearn in order to grow?

Again, I think that I had to unlearn the value of independence. I grew up with a sense of shame around needing others. That’s so toxic to so many people, including me. Unlearning that has probably been more important than anything I’ve learned with all my degrees.

8. What question are you currently trying to answer through your work?

All of my work contains within it the question—in some cases implicit, others more explicit— of how we can fall in love with the world knowing how flawed and sorrowful it is.

9. What is pulling you forward right now?

My daughters. Always them.

10. If your creative work is a map, where does it lead?

Down. The Depths. It couldn’t be a two-dimensional map, because the destination is always in the interior. In my next book, I use the idea that the real story for Icarus begins after he falls into the depths of the sea. This is the real journey. It’s like Dante’s journey into the inferno, or the classic shamanic journey. I don’t think we can really get anywhere if we don’t go within, into the depths.

I’m Connor Wolfe, Founder of Wayfarer Books and Wayfarer Magazine, and I created this series around one simple question: What does it really mean to forge your own path? Each guest is asked the same ten questions, but the answers open a window into the raw, unpredictable, and deeply personal terrain of a creative life.

Today, we sit down with poet and educator Emilie Lygren, whose work is rooted in curiosity, reverence, and a deep engagement with the natural world.

Her poetry has appeared in over twenty literary journals, including Alaska Quarterly Review, Crab Creek Poetry Review, and Wildroof Journal, and her debut collection, What We Were Born For, won the Blue Light Book Award. The book was also selected by Young People’s Poet Laureate Naomi Shihab Nye as a Poetry Foundation monthly book pick in 2022.

Emilie has spent years bridging the literary and the scientific, developing outdoor science education, nature journaling guides, and social-emotional learning resources through her work at the Lawrence Hall of Science.

With a BA in Geology-Biology from Brown and an MFA from Maharishi International University, Emilie teaches creative writing in spaces as varied as classrooms, field stations, libraries, and parks. She currently lives on Coast Miwok land in San Rafael, California, where she’s at work on an anthology of poems on mental health for teens and youth.

Q. What’s lighting you up creatively right now?

I’m currently working on a poetry anthology for young adults focused on anxiety, depression, mental health, and healing. Reading poetry helped me immensely when I was a teen struggling with my mental health. It’s been really moving to curate poems in which adult authors write honestly about their own experiences and struggles. Working on the project has sparked some great conversations with fellow writers and with strangers in cafes and other spaces. Once I share the content of what I’m working on and share about my relationship with anxiety and depression, it opens a window for connection at a deeper level. I think one of poetry’s strengths is giving voice to what’s often kept just under the surface. Though there’s certainly more room to talk about struggles with mental health than there was when I was growing up, there’s still stigma around it. I hope this will be a book that young people can hold close during stressful times, and that the collection will help spark and normalize conversations about mental health.

Q. What’s the last thing that truly captivated you—an idea, a place, a piece of art, a poem, a moment?

I’m easily captivated. Right now I’m sitting on my patio, and in the last minute I’ve found myself captivated by a spider web woven across the surface of a large candle holder, by the shadow of a chair and the way it’s sharper in some places and more blurry in others, by the mint growing in the planter box next to my chair and the large galvanized metal tub it’s growing in, the sound of my partner practicing guitar just inside the house. Captivation is often where my writing begins, so it’s a mindset that I cultivate with intention.

Q. What’s a recent experience that made you feel deeply present?

It’s the rainy season in Northern California where I live. Since it doesn’t rain much (if at all) in summer and early fall, I love seeing the moss rehydrate. On a rainy and windy walk the other day, I lay my face on a particularly springy patch of moss and watched some ferns being gently nudged by the breeze and drops of water. Rain helps me remember to be present, helps me remember there are small moments of present available always right around me, if I take the time to pause.

Q. What’s a piece of art, a book, or a conversation that’s been living in your mind rent-free?

Recently I’ve been spending a lot of time with William Stafford’s poetry. He was such a poet of conscience, inquiring into what it means to live with integrity, and critiquing systems of power. I turn to his poems often as models for using writing to name injustice, and to attempt to close the gap between the world as it is and the world we hope to build.

Also, the Legendborn Cycle by Tracy Deonn. I’m a big YA literature fan, and this series is incredible–– so many layers of nuance, a compelling story, and vibrant, complex characters. I’ve had a hold on my calendar for the day the third book drops for months now. I get so consumed by reading fiction that my partner also has this date marked on his calendar, too–– because he’ll become what he calls a “YA Widow” until I finish the book and resurface into reality.

Q. What’s the most rebellious thing you’ve ever done in your creative work?

I don’t know that I feel too rebellious in my creative work. But I am often writing or teaching at the intersections of things, and find that the richest insights come when I’m dabbling at the edge of one field of study, while trying to bring in and integrate perspectives from another. Professionally, I’m an outdoor science educator and a poet, a combination that sometimes gets me confused looks. I’m always thinking about how to bring a scientific perspective into poetry, and I’m constantly bringing poems into the more scientific spaces I inhabit. This intentional shrinking of genre and discipline is a kind of rebellion.

Also, my next poetry collection focuses a lot on gender identity. These poems weren’t intended to be rebellious. I wrote them to understand myself better and to share about my experience. But the context of the world makes this book rebellious, especially during the current administration. I wish it didn’t feel rebellious. I wish it felt ordinary.

Q. If your younger self could see you now, what would surprise them the most? What would disappoint them?

I’ve done a lot of healing work over the last fifteen years. And while mental health is still a struggle for me at times, I’m no longer living in constant fear of people not liking me. My younger self might find that hard to believe.

I’ve always loved insects and spent many, many hours as a kid observing them. I think my younger self would be a little disappointed that I never became a field entomologist.

Q. What is a truth you’ve had to unlearn in order to grow?

As a kid I was often told that I was smart. In elementary school classes learning was often framed as memorizing and regurgitating facts. I was good at that. And while that felt like a good thing at the time, it also left me with a rigid sense of identity, one that relied on continuing to know things to be “smart” to get attention or to feel self-worth. I’ve done a lot of work on myself to unhitch my sense of self-worth from being “good” or “smart” (more on that journey in this blog post). This has involved unlearning what I thought learning was entirely and learning to value uncertainty and curiosity over a need to be right or to know the answer right away.

Q. What question are you currently trying to answer through your work?

Two questions that I’m constantly in relationship with are who am I and where am I. The answers to both questions are always changing. They’re also interrelated. “Who am I” is about staying tuned into myself, and trying to understand my conditioning, ancestry, lineage, and positionality. It also involves a lot of unlearning and striving to move with integrity, asking myself how to show up in a given moment or season of life. This leads me to “Where am I,” which is about noticing and being deeply present with my direct surroundings, particularly within nature, and also paying close attention to the communities, conditions, and time I’m inhabiting.

Q. What is pulling you forward right now?

Spring is a magnet. It’s my favorite season. I can feel the number of daylight hours starting to spill over. The first shooting star flowers are opening. I can almost hear the rest of the wildflowers drumming at their roots. I’m pulled forward in time by the anticipation of spring, my attention and gratitude on all that’s starting to grow.

Q. If your creative work is a map, where does it lead?

I don’t know where the map leads. That’s the fun part, I think. The pen is a companion for navigating uncertainty. To write is to reveal the map to myself, one inch at a time.

Connor Wolfe (they/them) is a writer, publisher, and advocate whose work spans over two decades and fourteen titles. Publishing from the margins of literary culture, Wolfe’s work has earned six Pushcart Prize nominations, the Gold Nautilus Medal for Poetry (2015), multiple Foreword Review Book Awards, and the Nautilus Silver Medal for Poetry (2022).

Wolfe is the founder of Wayfarer Books, an independent, trans-owned press committed to amplifying voices historically silenced by the mainstream. Their vision for literature as an act of resistance has shaped the press since its beginnings in 2011. Wolfe has served two terms on the Board of Directors for the Independent Book Publishers Association, delivered a TEDx Talk at Yale University, and completed a degree at Harvard University through grant programs.

After coming out as nonbinary and trans, Wolfe stepped further into national conversations around mental illness, erasure, and creative survival. Holding a degree in Psychology, they also studied Photojournalism under Samantha Appleton, former White House photographer for the Obama administration, sharpening their practice of bearing witness and telling the stories that often go unseen.

In 2024, Wolfe volunteered in the Collections Department of the Museum of Anthropology at Ghost Ranch, assisting in the preparation of sacred objects for repatriation under the revised Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. After wintering off-grid in the high desert in the foothills of Pedernal, they are once again in motion, traveling with their three-legged black cat, momo, writing, documenting, and continuing the long walk home.

I’m Connor Wolfe, Founder of Wayfarer Books and Wayfarer Magazine, and I created this series around one simple question: What does it really mean to forge your own path? Each guest is asked the same ten questions, but the answers open a window into the raw, unpredictable, and deeply personal terrain of a creative life.

In this interview we catch up with author/poet Heidi Barr. Heidi is a writer and wellness coach whose work is founded on a commitment to cultivating ways of being that are life-giving and sustainable for people, communities, and the planet. She lives with her family on Dakota land in rural Minnesota.

Q. What’s lighting you up creatively right now?

Interestingly, I’m writing less than I have in many years right now–after nine books in nine years, I’ve reached a point where I need to ‘fill the well’ – an essential phase of any creative practice. The phrase “You can’t pour from an empty cup” comes to mind. So what’s lighting me up is showing up fully to my work in wellness, which is currently taking place in the field of addiction recovery, without pressuring myself to start right in on the next big project. We need time to just live amidst the mundane details–to exist and interact with the day to day. Doing the work of living is enough for now, and doing so will ensure I’ve got some stuff to pour into my next creative project when it comes time to begin. I’ve been taking time to read fiction, sketch, and experiment with watercolor painting. I’ve drawn a lot of flowers and trees in my journal, and that’s enough for now.

Q. What’s the last thing that truly captivated you—an idea, a place, a piece of art, a poem, a moment?

I’ve been spending a lot of time each week sitting with groups of people who are moving through a period of active recovery from substance addiction–which is a tough road, but one that’s worth the effort it takes to travel. The idea that it’s possible to heal from something that’s held you captive for a long time is one that brings me a great deal of hope. I see brave people face their demons every day as they take small steps toward embodying the life they truly want to live. The grace I see offered through non judgmental community support reinforces my faith in humanity.

Q. What’s a recent experience that made you feel deeply present?

I’ve taken to walking a half mile path either before starting my day, or at lunch time–it meanders through a pine forest, and on clear days when the sun’s out, it’s a little like walking through a fairytale land of dappled sunlight. Spending time with these trees reminds me to be present and show up for myself by paying attention to the moments.

Q. What’s a piece of art, a book, or a conversation that’s been living in your mind rent-free?

The other day someone said to me, after a therapeutic session about living in alignment with what you truly want for yourself, “You know, I didn’t even think about looking at my phone in the past hour.” In an age where so many folks spend most of their day looking at a phone, or thinking about looking at a phone, this was high praise. But more importantly, it’s an indication that if we put our attention on what truly matters to us with the intention to align with it, we have the capacity to stay focused and take small steps toward embodying what we truly want.

Q. What’s the most rebellious thing you’ve ever done in your creative work?

Writing about ordinary things and trusting that other people will want to read it. Or maybe we could say just allowing myself to be my authentic, quiet self in a world that tries really really hard to get a performance.

Q. If your younger self could see you now, what would surprise them the most? What would disappoint them?

They would be astonished to learn they eventually publish multiple books. They would also be astonished to learn they regularly give presentations to groups of 20+ and teach yoga classes. They may be disappointed to learn they haven’t yet acquired a horse.

Q. What is a truth you’ve had to unlearn in order to grow?

Too many to list, but one that comes to mind is that you have to be loud to get your voice heard. You don’t have to be loud, you just have to figure out how your voice wants to emerge in the most authentic way.

Q. What question are you currently trying to answer through your work?

What would it be like to live in a world where a prayer for peace is answered?

Q. What is pulling you forward right now?

Building a life that feels right and good and adds to the healing of the world.

Q. If your creative work is a map, where does it lead?

I’m going to answer this with the last line of my forthcoming collection, Church of Shadow and Light (which is due out in April from Wayfarer Books): Every moment is the end of something and the beginning of something else. What ends now? And what begins?

I don’t know where my creative work leads, only because that place doesn’t yet exist. I hope it’s a place of peace and wholeness for all beings, and my creative practice is an effort to keep building the road that leads there.

Connor Wolfe (they/them) is a writer, publisher, and advocate whose work spans over two decades and fourteen titles. Publishing from the margins of literary culture, Wolfe’s work has earned six Pushcart Prize nominations, the Gold Nautilus Medal for Poetry (2015), multiple Foreword Review Book Awards, and the Nautilus Silver Medal for Poetry (2022).

Wolfe is the founder of Wayfarer Books, an independent, trans-owned press committed to amplifying voices historically silenced by the mainstream. Their vision for literature as an act of resistance has shaped the press since its beginnings in 2011. Wolfe has served two terms on the Board of Directors for the Independent Book Publishers Association, delivered a TEDx Talk at Yale University, and completed a degree at Harvard University through grant programs.

After coming out as nonbinary and trans, Wolfe stepped further into national conversations around mental illness, erasure, and creative survival. Holding a degree in Psychology, they also studied Photojournalism under Samantha Appleton, former White House photographer for the Obama administration, sharpening their practice of bearing witness and telling the stories that often go unseen.

In 2024, Wolfe volunteered in the Collections Department of the Museum of Anthropology at Ghost Ranch, assisting in the preparation of sacred objects for repatriation under the revised Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. After wintering off-grid in the high desert in the foothills of Pedernal, they are once again in motion, traveling with their three-legged black cat, momo, writing, documenting, and continuing the long walk home.

I’m Connor Wolfe, Founder of Wayfarer Books and Wayfarer Magazine, and I created this series around one simple question: What does it really mean to forge your own path? Each guest is asked the same ten questions, but the answers open a window into the raw, unpredictable, and deeply personal terrain of a creative life.

To kick things off, we’re honored to sit down with award-winning author Emily Grandy, an award-winning author whose debut novel, Michikusa House, has captivated readers and critics alike. With numerous accolades to her name—including the Landmark Prize and a Silver Nautilus Book Award—Emily is making waves in the literary world. Her upcoming novel, Cupido Cupido, is already earning recognition as a finalist for the Sowell Emerging Writer's Prize. Beyond her fiction, she has an impressive background in biomedical research and editing. We’re excited to dive into her journey, her inspirations, and what’s next for her.

Q. What’s lighting you up creatively right now?

Emily: I’m always thinking about how to draw people’s attention to the natural world all around us, but especially in urban settings, like where I live. I’ve had so many people say to me they have no idea that wildlife lives alongside us in cities. They just don’t see it. So, I’m constantly trying to find ways to get people to recognize the presence of our non-human neighbors in a positive way (because sometimes that interaction can be very negative or even harmful). Sometimes that means starting a food garden, considering where our food comes from and how what we eat is connected to the land, its history, its climate. Other times it’s through recognizing what plants in our gardens and landscapes are or are not regionally native. Birding is another great option that gets people outdoors and forces them to use their senses, their memory, their intellect to recognize or ID these fleeting, musical beings. All of these ways of making connection, and more, take up space in my books and other writings.

Q. What’s the last thing that truly captivated you—an idea, a place, a piece of art, a poem, a moment?

Emily: I was at a special exhibit at the Milwaukee Art Museum recently featuring these enormous photorealistic charcoal drawings by Robert Longo. Most of the images are standalone, but there was this one set of 5 all lined up in a row: a close up of a Native American headdress; a field of fluffy white cotton; a shredded American flag hanging limply; a pile of white pills; the wing of a dead bird. Together, these images represented the greatest wars America has fought against itself: against the Natives of this land, against Black people, North against South, the war on drugs, and finally the war against our own environment. These 5 images together were so striking, and a deeply upsetting reminder of the internal conflict this country continues to suffer. Art has often uplifted me, brought my joy and immense wonder, but rarely has it made me feel so forlorn.

Q. What’s a recent experience that made you feel deeply present?

Emily: I was out birding with a friend at dusk, and in the near distance through a thicket of trees we heard three coyotes howling and whooping to one another. We both just stopped and listened until they quieted. Then we saw them, just over a small ridge ahead of us, and they saw us. Two squatted and marked their territory. We just stood there, looking at one another without fear, only curiosity, until they trotted along on their way.

Q. What’s a piece of art, a book, or a conversation that’s been living in your mind rent-free?

Emily: The Comfort of Crows, by Margret Renkl. Few authors speak so accurately, yet with such compassion, to what I’m feeling and constantly thinking about.

Q. What’s the most rebellious thing you’ve ever done in your creative work?

Emily: Professionally, I’ve always been involved in medical research. Creatively, I challenge the binary ways some scientific disciplines, like medicine, view and interpret the world. I also aim to decentralize the human-focused narratives we tell ourselves, giving voice to other beings who are rarely offered a seat at the table.

Q. If your younger self could see you now, what would surprise them the most? What would disappoint them?

Emily: I used to be a long-distance runner, but I gave that up during the pandemic after I got a femoral stress fracture—over-exercising as a way to de-stress. I needed a better coping mechanism. Gardening, yoga, long walks, birding, these are my mainstays.

Q. What is a truth you’ve had to unlearn in order to grow?

Emily: Human exceptionalism. I firmly believe this false idea of our superiority is the foundation of many of the biggest problems we face as a species.

Q. What question are you currently trying to answer through your work?

Emily: What does reconnecting with nature look like for everyday people?

Q. What is pulling you forward right now?

Emily: A determination to speak up for those without a voice in an increasingly noisy, complicated world.

Q. If your creative work is a map, where does it lead?

Emily: On all my profiles, I describe myself as a wanderer. I take the same approach with my creative writing. I don’t plan, I barely outline, allowing spontaneity guide where the story goes. Because all my writing involves a lot of research, I tend to make surprising discoveries as I go, and I like weaving unexpected findings into my work. So I never know where it leads, but for me that’s half the fun.

AUTHOR BIO

Emily Grandy’s debut novel, Michikusa House (Wayfarer Books, 2023), was awarded the Landmark Prize, the Silver Nautilus Book Award, and was longlisted for the Edna Ferber Book Award. Her second novel, Cupido Cupido (forthcoming), was a PEN/Bellwether Prize finalist, and is currently a finalist for the Sowell Emerging Writer's Prize. Her writing has appeared in both academic and literary journals and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Before she became a biomedical editor for GDIT, she did orthopedic research at the Cleveland Clinic. She lives in Milwaukee, WI.

Poet David Whyte grew up with a strong, imaginative influence from his Irish mother and found his true self while walking among the hills and valleys of his homeland. The author of eight books of poetry and four books of prose, David Whyte holds a degree in Marine Zoology, honorary degrees from Neumann College and Royal Roads University, and has traveled extensively, including living and working as a naturalist guide in the Galapagos Islands and leading anthropological and natural history expeditions in the Andes, Amazon and Himalaya. He brings this wealth of experience to his poetry, lectures and workshops. His life as a poet has created a readership and listenership in three normally mutually exclusive areas: the literate world of readings that most poets inhabit, the psychological and theological worlds of philosophical enquiry and the world of vocation, work and organizational leadership. An Associate Fellow at Said Business School at the University of Oxford, he is one of the few poets to take his perspectives on creativity into the field of organizational development, where he works with many European, American and international companies.

Connor: What was your first encounter with poetry?

David: The first image I have in my mind and memory is of the silhouette of my mother, reciting to me in the Irish language, while sitting, at the foot of my bed against the light of a door always left ajar because there was no working light in my room. I felt in the gravitational pull of her voice, both completely present and in the presence of, while being introduced to a vast inherited world of which I knew I was a part.

Connor:  When did you first know it was your path to be a poet?

David: There were the first bodily intuitions, which had nothing to do with vocation, but with natural attraction, followed by a more serious confrontation of the inheritance of poetry. I happened to come across a large format copy of the Ancient Mariner by Coleridge, (One with the famous Dorée engravings) when I was nine years old. I remember having the book open on the kitchen floor while my mother worked around me and having an experience of both sheer terror and absolute fascination at one and the same time. Then at twelve, in the local library, I pulled down by my stretched fingertips, a collaboration of Thom Gunn and Ted Hughes, the reading of which felt literarily like being plucked up from the ground by a passing Hawk. That was the moment poetry really got its claws into me, an abduction, a kind of kidnapping of a growing identity that changed me forever. Though I stayed very serious through my years as a naturalist and world traveler, Poetry as a vocational path opened up to my imagination as a possibility only in my late twenties and then more seriously in my early thirties, when I first began to work with memorized poetry, my own and others, before live audiences.

Connor: You have said that, throughout your youth, you grew up with an imaginative influence from your Irish mother. In images and ideas what did she pass on to you at such a young age?

David: The sense of a greater inheritance, another always present but unspoken context, a sense also of deep compassion for others and the struggle involved, of living even the most quotidien life. A lively, untrammeled sense of language, with laughter never very far away at the absurdity of it all.  

Connor Would you say she was your strongest influence?

David: In one sense. In another I have had so many good influences in my life, from Latin Teachers to sea Captains! And then all those in the long lineage of poetry who have spoken to me and taught me, most especially William Wordsworth.  

Connor: You’ve traveled extensively . . . the Galapagos Islands, the Andes, Amazon, and Himalaya to name a few. What places have imprinted themselves the deepest and how has that connection revealed itself in your work?

David: Though I have been many, many places. The places most deeply imprinted are the places involved in my direct inheritance: the Yorkshire Moors and Dales and the Cumbrian Mountains of the North of England and in Ireland, the Atlantic shores of that land.  

Connor: In addition to your poetic work, you lecture extensively on the philosophy of “Conversational Leadership.” Could you tell us a little more about the idea of “Conversational Leadership?”

David: Not fully in the space and time we have here! But essentially, in Conversational Leadership I am working with the timeless thresholds human beings have had to cross, whether they see themselves as leaders or no, in deepening any conversation. My next prose book looks at seven of these ancient and necessary ways of making the invitation that is necessary to any Leadership conversation.  

Connor: In the work at present, we see upheaval and more and more we see leadership being replaced by self-interest. Could you see the philosophies of “Conversational Leadership” addressing these escalating challenges? In our last issue, we spoke with your fellow poet and colleague Krista Tippett regarding poet’s place in the husbandry of the soul throughout heavy times, such as those we currently face as a global village. Would you agree that poetry speaks to and nourishes some part of us that isn’t otherwise reached by religion and spirituality?

David: The larger context, the perspective beyond what you have come to only think is a self, is what I address every day, through poetry, whether I am in Paris, France, or Paris, Texas, working with leaders and managers, literary hipsters, academics,  or the dedicated religious, of all linguistic backgrounds, religious philosophies and cultures. Poetry has the great ability to address the deeper paths of the human psyche without setting off any inherited religious allergies… As I often say, poetry is language against which we have no defenses.

Connor: Indeed. Especially your work. Your poetry is layered with revelation as well as description. This is part of your signature as a poet. While there are numerous selections and offerings that come to mind when I think of your work, I will end with a selection of yours, in the poem, “Sweet Darkness” you write: When your eyes are tired the world is tired also. When your vision has gone, no part of the world can find you. Time to go into the dark where the night has eyes to recognize its own.   Can you tell us from where in your psyche this revelation sprung and what it speaks to?  

David: “Sweet Darkness” was written out of that very physical and almost breathless giving away, most human beings feel when they must let go of what seems most precious to them, not knowing how or when it will return, in what form or in what voice—that taking away of the light we experience walking through divorce or separation, through bereavement or through simply not recognizing the person looking back at us in the mirror. “Sweet Darkness” was begun in the early and darkest hours of the morning, in a kind of defiant praise of this difficult time of not knowing, a letter of invitation to embrace the beauty of the night and of the foundational human experience of not being able to see, as actually another horizon, and perhaps the only horizon out of which a truly new revelation can emerge. The last line cuts both ways of course, we ourselves have often helped to make everything and everyone around us, far too small, by our lack of faith in not knowing, by all the ways we are not holding the conversation with what as yet cannot be fully articulated. The essential work of poetry I might add!

Connor: In closing, can you tell us what you’re working on now?

David: In the world of works, am just finishing up a book of poetry ‘The Bell and Blackbird” that I am very intrigued to recite from and work with for the next few years of my existence. When that is done and out in the world in mid-April I will return to my prose book on “The Conversational Nature of Reality.” Titled A Timeless Way: Seven Steps for Deepening any Conversation. On the interior edge, walking around in that body addressed only from the outside as David Whyte, I am practicing the ancient and difficult art of living more at the frontier between what I think is me and what I think is the world. It’s the frontier that the writer writes at to write, the painter paints at to paint, and in the ultimate act of courage and bravery, the place from which to live, from the outside, what only looks like a most average life….

Michael Longley is a contemporary poet from Belfast, Northern Ireland. Educated in the Classics at Trinity College Dublin, where he published his first poems in the journal Icarus, Longley returned to Belfast in the sixties to continue writing and publishing poetry, even as sectarian violence drove poets like Seamus Heaney and Derek Mahon out of Northern Ireland. Longley’s later collections return to Homer in lyrical, freestanding versions that comment obliquely on personal grief and political violence in the poet’s community.  Most famous among these is the sonnet ‘Ceasefire,’ which reflects upon the provisional IRA ceasefire of 1994 through the reconciliation scene between Priam and Achilles in Book XXIV of the Iliad.

When I first saw Michael Longley, I knew immediately it was him.  The bright white beard was telltale, but it was his manner that revealed the character of the man. I watched him from the other side of the street, slowly making his way toward me, with a green reusable shopping bag and a tall red umbrella under his arm.  He seemed to be lost in a reverie, yet keenly attentive to the particularities of the world around him.  As he shuffled along in his high waisted trousers, off-balanced by the awkwardness of the umbrella, he would look up, notice some flower or object in a shop window, and then, with a funny little bob of his head, pay his respects and trundle along.

He saw me as he reached the curb, and his face crinkled up in a curious combination of a smile and a squint. “Are you Emm-mett?” he asked, enunciating the syllables of my name carefully.  His eyes were beady, birdlike. He winked often and seemingly unconsciously, giving the impression of a keen but friendly intelligence behind his gentle demeanor.  I told him I was, and shook his extended hand, noticing how small, scabby, and somewhat tired it was.  He stooped over his umbrella like a cane, back hunched, somewhat smaller than I’d imagined him. Longley’s physical was a palpable reminder to me that the poet had aged even as his poetry remains young.  He is 72 now, and in a month he will be 73.  He said he is “perhaps too much in love with his granddaughter,” but he indignantly protested one critic’s suggestion that his recent poems dedicated to his grandsons are “sentimental.” 

Longley hadn’t come empty-handed (even after setting down his umbrella and reusable bag).  “If you have one of these already, give this to a friend,” he said.  It was a limited print copy of his early translations, entitled Wavelengths. “It’s more Latin than Greek,” he apologized. The thin volume was beautifully bound and stenciled with wood engravings done by one of Longley’s friends.  I was speechless.  What inspired such generosity towards me in this gentle, marvelous man?  I asked him how he could be so kind to me when there were tons of students who’d love to sit down to chat with him.  “Oh, really?” he said quietly, “are there?....I guess I wouldn’t really have a sense for that kind of thing.  I thought I was rather anonymous.” His humility faded into a more personal note: “You know, the reason I decided to talk…to have lunch with you,” he said warmly, “is because I liked your letters. I liked the way you wrote to me.”

Longley was referring to the miniature letter campaign I’d launched to secure our meeting.  After a number of exchanges with his US publisher at Wake Forest, I’d succeeded in obtaining an e-mail address.  I knew this was my chance to convince Longley to meet me.  I told him of my interest in him, and my senior thesis, describing myself as “a fellow Homer-haunted soul, a student and a great admirer of yours.” I thought that would grab his attention, but I couldn’t resist adding one final hook: “In a different sense than you may have originally meant the words, I'll mention a quote of yours which has especially inspired me:  ‘If I knew where poems come from, I’d go there.’  For me, the imperative within that statement was clear, and so I've come to Ireland to find the poetry I love.”  A few hours later, Longley responded with a brief e-mail inviting me to “have lunch or something like that” in Belfast.  “It pleases me a great deal that you enjoy my versions,” he wrote at the bottom.

He was lonely, in a way, I realized as we talked over lunch.  Not that he didn’t have friends- his correspondences with Mahon and Heaney are legendary, and he struck up conversation easily with the other diners. But someone to talk Homer with—I think he was almost as excited as I was for that.

 “So you love Homer, do you?” Longley asked me.  “Yes,” I said, smiling. “I do, too” he said, and that seemed to seal our initial liking for one another into a more concrete alliance. The first thing Longley wanted to know was whether I wrote poetry.  I laughed and told him I only write the occasional romantic poem.  He grinned knowingly.  “Work, don’t they?” he applauded.  “Why do you think the girls believe all that?”  I laughed.  “Because it’s beautiful,” I said.  “Oh,” he said. “Yes, it can be.”

“So what have you been reading now,” he wanted to know.  “Most scholarship I find a little boring,” he whispered, leaning in conspiratorially.  “You say that like it’s a secret,” I said.  He leaned back his head and guffawed.  “Oh, that’s a good one,” he said. “That’s very good.” 

I asked Longley about his time as a classics student at Trinity. He spoke fondly of his old teacher, Stanford, who was a “beautiful man, within and without.” Greek class with Stanford, however, could be very “stiff” and “old school.”  As an undergraduate, Longley confessed to being rather lackadaisical about attending Stanford’s mandatory lectures.  Once, after he had missed several weeks in a row, Stanford confronted him rather sternly: “Where were you at the lecture yesterday, Longley?”  Longley chuckled as he recounted his response: “I overslept, Prof. Stanford, and couldn’t make it over in time.”  Stanford: “The lecture was at 11…Where do you live, Longley?”  Turns out Longley slept in a dorm hall on campus, five minutes from the lecture.  Stanford instructed Longley to see him at Stanford’s office early in the next week.  As Longley remembers, he spent the weekend dreading the meeting, expecting to be set back a year in his studies for failing to attend the lecture.  That weekend, however, one of his poems was published in Icarus, Trinity’s poetry journal. Next week he came in to Stanford’s office, expecting the worst.  Stanford’s demeanor was severe.  He dressed Longley down sternly, explaining that attendance was mandatory and that Longley’s truancy was grounds for failing him.  “And do you expect me to let you get away with that, just because you’re a poet?” he concluded.  “Certainly not, sir,” Longley returned.  “Well, I’m going to,” said the inveterate Stanford, “because I like your poems.”

Longley told another Stanford story, this one with a trace of pride.  The class had been reading Aristotle’s Poetics, and Longley had been (once again) lax in completing his reading.  Called upon in class to say something insightful about poetry and prose, he burst out, “Well sir, if prose is a river, poetry’s a fountain.”  Years later, Longley told me, he returned to Trinity for a class reunion and Stanford approached him from across the room, “If I could do it all over again,” said the now-elderly Stanford, “I’d be a poet rather than a scholar.”  Longley gave me a long look.  “I wish I’d attended more of his lectures,” he said.

I wanted to ask Longley about Homer more directly, so I took the next chance to ask him about his return to the classics after nearly three decades. From 1969 until 1991, Homer had almost completely disappeared from Longley’s work.  Then, in Gorse Fires, he launched a set of seven Homeric poems.  I asked Longley about the two explanations he has given in the past for this sudden emergence.  One was that events in his own life led him to seek resonance in Homer, who “let me write belated lamentation for my mother and father.” Another was that Homer empowered him to comment obliquely on political violence in Ireland.  So I asked him if he thought these two themes were only coincidentally related, or if there was a connection that brought both of them out in his Homeric versions.  “I hate those binaries,” he said. “Critics love them, but they’re always too simple.”

“Poetry is like a flick of the wrist,” Longley told me before lunch was over, making the motion with his hand.  “You have to be insouciant. It’s like anything else.  Have you ever made a group of people laugh?  Writing a good poem is like that.  It’s better than food, than  drink, than sex even.  And that’s saying something!”  Talking about the poets he’s read and studied over the course of his life, Longley said offhand, “People sort of blast your soul sometimes; they don’t know they’re doing it.”  Did he know what he was doing?

Suddenly tired, he stood to go, and gathered his things about him.  Outside, he opened his umbrella with the delight of a child.  “I got it in France,” he said.  “It’s a poppy, see?”  He was already drifting back into his dream world of flowers, birds, and snatches of ancient poetry.  “We will be in touch,” he said.  “It was a great pleasure to talk with you.” I watched him as he shuffled off, his sleepy movements like dance steps to music only the dancer could hear.

Emmett Gilles

June 29, 2012

Belfast, Northern Ireland

*From The Wayfarer Archive, Summer 2012 Issue

Learn More about Michael Longley at the Poetry Foundation »

Our first guest is April Tierney, author of the recently released poetry collection, Matter/Mother. April is a poet, activist, craftswoman, mother, and lover of stories. Her work follows threads of ecopoetics, myth, culture, and lineage. She has been nominated for The Pushcart Prize and featured in Orion Magazine, Deep Times: A Journal of the Work that Reconnects, Clarion Poetry Magazine, and Real Ground Journal, among others.

Learn more about April

HB: Tell us about how this particular poetry collection was created.  What was your writing process like? It’s a collection all about motherhood, so how was creating it similar to the gestation/birth/mothering process? 

AT: I wrote these poems during the first two and a half years of my daughter’s life. Most days while she napped, I labored to bring forth some of the stories and realities of mothering within an anthropocentric, capitalisic, nuclear family paradigm––stories that have often been repressed or dismissed. This is the book that I longed to read in that early postpartum time, but which I could not find. It is raw, dark, truthful and redemptive. 

I wasn’t sleeping for the vast majority of the time I was writing Matter/Mother, so the process itself felt quite mad. But in that feverish desperation to make sense of my reality, creating these poems also helped to anchor me into a foundation of sanity that I may not have otherwise been able to inhabit. So in that way, this book was very much like the gestation/birth/mothering journey––mysterious, raw, messy, harrowing, and ultimately, life-serving. 

HB: What was the root inspiration of this project? Why now? 

AT: For the first two years after my daughter’s birth, I experienced intense postpartum anxiety, while other mothers around me were facing debilitating panic attacks, depression, insomnia, physical pain, and autoimmune disorders. This inspired me to ask deeper questions about the conditions which lead to such high levels of dis-ease within this essential role. I knew it couldn’t all be blamed on hormonal shifts, as so many people proclaim, but rather the lack of wellness and cohesion of the times we are mothering within. 

In Earth-based cultures, mothers are held at the center. As life-bearers, they are treated with the same care and respect as Mother Earth. However, in industrialized societies where the Earth is both exploited and neglected, mothers are, too. As if this were not sorrowing enough, we mothers often internalize our struggles as personal inadequacies, rather than something that is culturally imposed. So, in writing this book, I felt it was important to draw a connection between our treatment of the Earth and of our life-bearers, in order to shed light on the circumstances we find ourselves in now. Because, as we know, the first step in effecting meaningful change is to be able to tell stories about our realities so that we can eventually reshape them. 

HB: Do you have a favorite poem from your latest work? (Or perhaps one that you wrestled with the most…..?) What makes it/them stand out to you? 

AT: I’m not sure if it’s my favorite, but the poem I wrestled with the most is called Rage/The River, which is a piece about maternal rage, the thing that so many of us experience but are not supposed to talk about. It took a few months to even begin formulating the concept in my mind, largely because I had not heard or seen it explored in much depth before. And when I did eventually show up to the page, I had to continually stretch myself beyond the language that I had access to, in order to arrive at something that felt honest and humanizing. 

I think part of the reason why mothers don’t talk about their rage is because they are afraid of being labeled as ungrateful or incapable of fulfilling this role. When in reality, it’s not our children we are angry with, but the impossibility of raising the next generation without adequate support. We were not designed to parent without a proper village, and the advent of the nuclear family has broken down this innate wisdom in every possible way. It has put an intense level of pressure on parents that our systems cannot withstand, which is why we see such high levels of illness, burnout, distraction, and addiction.

Writing about rage, along with many of the other taboo subjects in this book, felt like a necessary step in shifting the lens away from the individual to begin redirecting accountability toward a culture that takes advantage of both mothers and the Earth. It’s my sincere prayer that this shift in perspective can help to create waves of change.   

HB: Where is your creativity taking you now? 

I actually have not written anything since completing this collection almost a year ago, which has been the longest I have gone without writing in my adult life. Creating Matter/Mother while in the early stages of motherhood, took absolutely everything out of me. So I’m not sure when I’ll pick up the pen again, but I am thoroughly enjoying (and needing) the break. Thankfully, I am a very creative person, so when the words are not flowing, I find other ways of bringing beauty into the world. I enjoy weaving baskets and working on my table loom, as well as making jewelry, baking, and tending to our garden. 

HB: Thanks so much, April, for sharing about your work with us. May we all find the courage and space to rest and exercise our creativity in the ways that serve best in this season.

Order Matter/Mother

Krista Tippett graduated from Brown University in 1983. After earning her degree, she traveled on a Fulbright scholarship to study at the University of Bonn in West Germany, where she wrote for The New York Times in divided Berlin as a freelance foreign correspondent. Krista went on to earn a Masters of Divinity from Yale University in 1994. It is said that, while conducting a global oral-history project for the Collegeville Institute for Ecumenical and Cultural Research at St. John’s Abbey of Collegeville, Minnesota, she began laying out the idea of what would go on to become her radio show, On Being. Tippett would also go on to found “The Civil Conversations Project,” which she has described as “an emergent approach to healing our fractured civic spaces”. In 2008, her efforts in Speaking of Faith-The Ecstatic Faith of Rumi would win her a Peabody Award and then, in 2014, she would go on to win a National Humanities Medal at the White House for “thoughtfully delving into the mysteries of human existence.” Interwoven throughout each of these endeavors and indeed her faith itself has been poetry. I had the immense pleasure of sitting down with Krista this past summer to discuss the place poetry holds in her personal philosophy and where the roots of it run in her soul.

Connor: In many of your interviews, you like to start by giving the spiritual background of someone's life. And while the focus of our interview today is your use of poetry throughout the discourse of your work, I think we can both agree that spirituality and poetry are inherently alike. So, I'm going to start where you usually do, and ask you to just give a very brief spiritual background of your life.  

Krista: Well, one thing I like about that question is that the answer changes over one’s life. Over time, one thing that's happened is I've learned I have a very expansive understanding of the spiritual background in someone's life, which may be about religious formation or lack of religious formation. I think about spiritual life as interior life, and questions of meaning that live in us and that we follow. I was actually just back in town—in my very small town in Oklahoma. . . there was a lot of religion in my background, that was hugely formative. Also, in this context of poetry, I think I was spiritually starved growing up of ideas and beautiful language, and something like poetry and literature. So sometimes when people imagine that I have this great education, and this great grounding . . . I'm the opposite story. I'm the person who was never exposed to this stuff until I was really old, and then I kind of discovered it and couldn't believe how long it had taken.

Connor: What was your first experience with poetry?

Krista: Yeah, that's a good question. Again, I was not raised in a kind of literary atmosphere at all, or a home which had many books in it, or certainly not a home where people read poetry aloud. I kind of think, it was growing up in the 60s and the 70s . . . For some reason, I remember E. E. Cummings. So maybe I saw some poetry that was playful. But I honestly don't think I read much poetry until I got to college. And I suppose the first poet who I felt like was a soul friend was Rilke . . . I discovered Rilke when I was living in Germany.

Connor: It's funny, you should say that. Rilke was the first poet I bonded with. I read, like so many people, Letters to a Young Poet and that was it. I was hooked on poetry.

Krista: Yeah.

Connor: I mean, like so many other poets, that's kind of a very coming-of-age story for so many writers I think.

Krista: It really is.

Connor: You gravitate towards poetry, the work of Mary Oliver and Wendell Berry and Marie Howe and Rumi and as you said, Rilke to name only a few, are interwoven throughout all of your books, and On Being. Several figures you interview bring poetry into their responses, recognizing this, at one point you even assembled all such poems into episodes of On Being, the Poetry Project. What inner questions do you feel you're seeking the answers to when you sift through poetry?  

Krista: Well, one thing I would say just is that I have gravitated more and more towards poetry, and that the show has gravitated more and more towards poetry. So, I think you would find this in the early years, but it's a very defining, recurring place now in my work, and in what I'm looking for in the world, and in what I'm listening for. I think, I wouldn't say that it's so much about a particular set of questions as it's about poetry's capacity to raise questions, and make observations using words and using forms of language that give those questions and those observations a different kind of heft, and make them ponderable. I don't know if that's a word . . . [laughs]

Connor: Well we can make it a word. [Laughs]

Krista: Yeah. And I think that I've turned more towards poetry, as many people have, because the forms of speech that are more common are just so broken, and so bad for us. So, poetry, I wouldn't just say that poetry is an antidote to that, I would just say that we are rediscovering our need for language that gives us truth in a different way. Right now, we have this kind of crisis of truth. But I actually think that the crisis is out on the surface. I think we've been moving towards it for a long time. And one of the ways we've been moving towards it is through this over-reliance on facts. And way too much confidence in what facts alone could ever convey.

Connor: Certainly.

Krista: And now, again, that's just out on the surface. I think a lot about a few things. I think a lot about Elizabeth Alexander saying to me that, “every line of a poem is not true.” In terms of another question, like "Did this really happen," or “Is it about you?” That every word and line of poem is not true, but that poetry gets at undergirding truths. And that's a really good way to talk about what we actually don't know how to discuss or put words around in our public life right now. We have no vocabulary for undergirding truths, to break through the competing facts and the thing I thought a lot about that helps me understand why poetry has become just that much more valuable is something David Whyte said to me just last year that, “poetry is language against which we have no distance.” And right now, again, if I think about the different battles of our time, one of them is just this battle with defensive and offensive language. That's another way to understand how poetry cuts through that. And it still does, right? This is language also that makes you be silent, and just that is counter-cultural right now.

Connor: That couldn’t be more true. Speaking of the current world climate, I just wanted to touch on a few of your memorable interviews with poets. You had a very poignant discussion with John O'Donohue two months before his death. In that conversation, you discussed the importance of developing the inner landscape to keep us healthy in the midst of bleak surroundings and experiences. In the light of the current world climate, I can think of no more timely practice. What were some of the insights to tending to that inner landscape that you feel that you got from John, or have come to in your own time since? Where does poetry enter into the husbandry of the soul?

Krista: Well, in so many ways, right? There are the obvious ways, and then I think there are the less obvious ways. We were just talking about silence and stillness, and I think about years ago, I interviewed this individual whose mission it is to protect the last quiet places in the world, you know?

Connor: Wow.

Krista: Say things like, "Silence is a laboratory for the soul." Which is a lofty way to talk about the experience we've all had, and we know in the world around us. There's certain insights, and there's certain kinds of growth and learning that you just have to get quiet inside to make room for. And poetry does that. You know, poetry is not easy. It's not easy. It's not entertaining. It can be soothing, but even when it's soothing it's asking something of you. Asking to soften up and open up ... And that also is a hallmark of inner-life too, there's a little bit of work involved.

Connor: Certainly and that is what makes poetry great.

Krista: Right? I remember having this conversation with Marie Howe and saying to her, "I sometimes feel like I have to be either wrecked enough or strong enough to read poetry." And she said, "Well it hurts a little bit going in, and we're so trained, culturally, to turn to things that don't hurt going in," right?

Connor: Absolutely!

Krista: That makes us feel better, or distract us. So, really, it's in so many ways both direct and indirect, it opens us for growth. And I think also, beauty, beautiful language. By which I don't necessarily mean sweet or frilly, you know what I mean?

Connor: Yes. I do.

Krista: Beautiful language can also be angular, and heavy, and hard. I think beauty is an element. I don't think poetry is optional. It holds some kind of reverence for beauty for inner-life.  

Connor: I mean, right now, we're all starved for meaning, beauty, eloquence—those things that bring us to a moment of pause and awe, and awareness.

Krista: Yeah.

Connor: And I think poetry certainly aids in that. As we talked about earlier, when I was 26, I read two books that changed my life. And it was Rilke's Letter to a Young Poet, and his Book of Hours. After eight years of studying world religion longing to find a transcendent moment, I experienced it through poetry.

Krista: Yes.

Connor: In your book Becoming Wise, you say that Rilke became your friend across time and space, and that you were drawn, among many things, to his idea of living the questions. Verse is interwoven into countless spiritual texts, the Bible, the Quran, the Bhagavad Gita . . .

Krista: Absolutely.

Connor: I believe that poetry shows its inherent sacredness when used to voice the ineffable. And, in Speaking of Faith, you say, "In many ways, religion becomes the same place in us that art comes from. The language of the human heart is poetry." Do you hold poetry collections alongside those sacred texts? Do you think that poetry has the capacity to guide the soul in the same way that spirituality and religion does?

Krista: I do. And I think that's such an important point that you're making. I mean, sure, we could have a really complex conversation about how poetry engenders, spiritualizes, and speaks to this part of us and comes out of this part of us ... But the truth is, as you also pointed out, all of the great spiritual traditions have poetry woven all the way through them. So, there you go. Another thought that I really hang onto, that I think about a lot, is . . . I once interviewed this great theologian of the prophetic tradition. This is somebody who's not a household name, but if anybody who has studied the prophets, the biblical prophets, who were social action figures and he said to me, "Prophets have always also been poets," that one of the ways prophets kind of broke through the cacophony of what was happening culturally is to speak in disarming language. That their language is powerful poetic language. And of course, if you read the speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr., right?

There's poetry in there, even while he's making these strong political points. So, yes, absolutely, somehow, poetry emerges from and speaks to the spiritual aspect of us in the most expansive sense of that language. But I also think it helps bring that into the light of day of our lives in the world. I think it's a source of nurture for continuing to live with the outer world and all of its complexity. And I think that's one reason that the election of 2016 turned out as it did. You've got this surge of people reading poetry and gathering to read poetry, and downloading poetry from the internet.

Connor: Certainly.

Krista:  So it's never merely interior.

Connor: Oh no. I just read an article asking, "Where are all the poets right now?" Because of all the protests and uprising since the election, and the call for that poetic voice that we had in former generations. And most people don't realize that it's there, that we’re here—we're screaming—but the media machine is louder.

Krista: Absolutely.

Connor: In closing, I reflect back to something you wrote in Becoming Wise. You say, "I've come to understand the cumulative dialogue of my work as a kind of cartography of wisdom about our emerging world." Taking the hundreds of intimate conversations you've had with contemporary poets of our day, and your gathered appreciation for poets of the past, have you distilled a set of mile-marker truths on your own personal map that poetry has taught you? I mean, looking back, is there something that stuck out, that poetry or a certain poet has taught you over your life? Like when you connected with Rilke, obviously that was a mile-marker truth on your inner-map. Can you speak to that particular one, or think of others that have come along?

Krista: Well, maybe kind of jumping off of what I just said, the conversation I had with Elizabeth Alexander, which was back in 2010, has just continued to be a real tethering point for me. One of the things we talked about is how poetry is a way to raise questions, which is important to me. I think of Elizabeth Alexander, a couple of questions that she's raised by way of poetry that are just very present to me now, and I'm really working with them. It is this aspect of our project that we call the “Civil Conversations Project.”

These questions kind of epitomize everything that we've been talking about—about what is it that poetry does that other forms of language don't do. So, there's a poem she wrote years ago, which ends with a question, "Are we not of interest to each other?" I quote that probably in every speech I give about Civil Conversations.

For the project, we've created a guide and it's in there, because it cuts through all of the very busy ways we have right now of talking past each other, and fighting with each other, and talking, but in fact not conversing, and not listening. And it's a question I wish I could just throw out into the halls of congress, and just throw at into gatherings as a new framing. We still do have really hard things to work on and talk about together. But, what if we let our coming together be framed by that kind of question, "Are we not of interest to each other?" What if we started there? Then another question that she raised, actually, in her poem Praise Song for the Day at the first inauguration of Barack Obama, “What if love were the mightiest word?" That's just, it's not . . . I thought it was an audacious question to ask in a political moment.

And I don't think it could be asked except in the form of poetry. And there it is. And to me, that's another question that if we let it roll around in our midst, if we let it affect the way we approach each other in the way we choose our words, the way we choose our fights, it would change us.

Connor Wolfe (they/them) spent 15 years helming Homebound Publications and Wayfarer Books (the publishing houses they founded in 2011). Wolfe’s visionary approach to indie publishing afforded them the opportunity to serve two terms on the Board of Directors for the Independent Book Publisher’s Association, speak on the TEDx stage at Yale University, and study at Harvard University via grant programs.

While at Harvard, Wolfe was fortunate enough to study Photojournalism under the mentorship of Samantha Appleton, the Official White House Photographer for President Obama and the First Family.

Wolfe presently resides at Ghost Ranch in Abiquiu, New Mexico (on the lands of the Ancestral Pueblo) where they work as a NAGPRA Researcher for the Collections Department of the Museum of Anthropology helping to ready sacred objects for repatriation under the newly-updated Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act.

They serve as Creative Director for Wayfarer Books and Editor-in-Chief at Wayfarer Magazine. When not in New Mexico, Wolfe is roaming the still-wild country in search of new landscapes.

I first became acquainted with Will Falk’s work when he joined the Homebound Publications author community with the publication of his book How Dams Fall—which is part of the Little Bound Books Essay Series.¹

I’ve enjoyed learning about how activism and his legal work join together and how all of it is underlaid by a deep love of the natural world. It’s clear that a commitment to ensuring wildness has a voice is central to his vocation.

So, folks, as the Ordinary Collisions interview series continues, it’s my pleasure to introduce you Will Falk.

Will is an activist, attorney, and author. The natural world speaks, and his work is how he listens. He is the author of How Dams Fall, a short work of creative nonfiction about his relationship with the Colorado River. His first collection of poetry When I Set the Sweetgrass Down is forthcoming from Homebound Publications’ Wayfarer Books. 

Heidi: Will, Thanks for being here with us today.  To start, I always ask the same question: What are two forces that are colliding in your life right now (or that have in the not too distant past)? 

Will: For the past two years, I’ve been fighting a campaign to stop a massive open pit lithium mine from destroying a beautiful mountain pass in northern Nevada named Thacker Pass in English and Peehee mu’huh in Paiute. This campaign is causing multiple forces in my life to collide right now. These forces include a so-called green energy movement’s misguided belief that we can save the planet by destroying more of it; an American legal system that is built to ensure nothing truly threatens corporate power to extract and exploit the land; the land’s fierce desire to live; Paiute peoples’ desire to honor their massacred ancestors in Peehee mu’huh; and the capitalists’ tendency to co-opt any social or environmental justice movement and turn those movements into more profit. 

However, the collision I’ll focus on here is the collision between my commitment to protecting Thacker Pass and my limitations as one person to ensure Thacker Pass is truly protected. The collision produces truth: I cannot protect Thacker Pass alone. But, I can do everything in my power to help more and more people fall in love with Thacker Pass in the hopes that they might join me in committing to protect Thacker Pass. 

Heidi: Wow. There is a lot there to unpack. I feels important to me to acknowledge how doing something like protecting a pass must be done in community, yet the only thing you can control is what you, yourself, put energy into. That takes a lot of love for the cause. How are you navigating the conditions this collision is creating? How does the dissonance created impact your choices? 

Will: I am not navigating this collision. Instead, I’m letting the collision be. It is simply true that I cannot protect Thacker Pass alone. But, it is also true that there are many things I can do to build opposition to the Thacker Pass lithium mine so that I am not fighting alone. 

If there is a dissonance created by this collision, it is overcome by recognizing that the dissonance is, in many ways, illusory. The illusion is revealed when I remember that I’m not fighting to protect Thacker Pass because I think I will win, I fight to protect Thacker Pass because I believe you must fight to protect your beloved whether or not you will actually succeed. I fight because I’m in love and not because I know I will win.  

Heidi: What you’ve said here reminds me of something poet Andrea Gibson says, when they write, “Even when the truth isn’t hopeful, the telling of it is.” As is focusing on what you CAN do, and putting that energy into building that community that’s so essential, as well as simply embodying the love that is at the foundation of the work.

What has this collision taught you about yourself? The world? 

Will: I think this lesson about fighting for your beloved whether or not there is hope that you will win can be applied to the whole world. Thacker Pass can serve as a microcosm for the whole planet. While we’ve been mostly successful in delaying construction in Thacker Pass so far, the destruction of life on Earth has only been intensifying for centuries. So many people either believe it’s not possible to destroy the planet or they believe it’s not possible to stop the destruction. But, in so many ways, neither of these possibilities is the point. The point is: The planet, the source of all life, our beloved is under constant and intensifying attack. We should fight back because we’re in love. We should not make our fight contingent on the possibility of success. 

Heidi: Now I’m reminded of the concept of active hope, as Joanna Macy describes it. Macy writes,  “Active hope doesn’t require our optimism, and we can apply it even in areas where we feel hopeless. The guiding impetus is intention; we choose what we aim to bring about, act for, or express.  Rather than weighing our chances and proceeding only when we feel hopeful, we focus on our intention and let it be our guide.”

Next I’d like to hear about a collision you explore in your forthcoming poetry collection. What’s going on in When I Set the Sweetgrass Down?

Preorder When I Set the Sweetgrass Down

Will: In When I Set the Sweetgrass Down, I explore the collision between what has been called “human supremacy” or “anthropocentricism” and “biophilia” or “biocentricism.” Simply put, anthropocentrists see the natural world as valuable only or primarily for what the natural world offers humans. Biophilia, on the other hand, recognizes that humans are only one part of the grand tapestry of life on Earth. Biophilics prioritize the needs of the natural world over the needs of some humans or even all of humanity. When I ask what the forest outside my window needs, the answer is rarely poetry or prayers. The answer is a healthy water cycle, clean air and soil, and a stable climate. These needs are not met by processes within human hearts and minds – they are met in the real, physical world. 

The title poem illustrates what I mean. In the poem, I begin burning some sweetgrass that some Paiute friends I’m working with on the Thacker Pass campaign gave me. I realized that praying with this sweetgrass is likely both culturally appropriative and also not part of my own European traditions. At the same time, it’s likely impossible to actually recover those European traditions thousands of miles from the land that birthed those traditions. So, I found myself asking a mother bear how I should pray. Her answer was that maybe prayer is not what’s actually needed, but action and work are. So, I decided instead of creating prayers in my mind, I’d let my labor be my prayer. And, in the end, I don’t believe spiritual fulfillment is actually possible or even desirable when the source of that spirituality – the natural world – is being destroyed. 

Heidi: I appreciate the commitment to “let my labor be my prayer.” May we all find the labor that is ours, and that which will add to the healing of the world. I’m looking forward to spending some time with this collection when it comes out very much. Thank you, Will, for sharing with us today.

Follow Will’s work on social media and through his website.

Follow the Thacker Pass Campaign

Have a collision you’d like to explore in this space? Send an email to heidi@heidibarr.com.

All Photos courtesy of Stephen Trimble. All Rights Reserved.

Stephen Trimble tells stories—in words and photographs—about the land and people of the West. Trimble has taught in the Honors College and Environmental Humanities program at the University of Utah and spent a year as a Wallace Stegner Centennial Fellow at the University of Utah’s Tanner Humanities Center. Steve was born in Denver, his family’s base for roaming the West with his geologist father. After a liberal arts education at Colorado College, he worked as a park ranger in Colorado and Utah, earned a master’s degree in ecology at the University of Arizona, served as director of the Museum of Northern Arizona Press, and for five years lived near San Ildefonso Pueblo in northern New Mexico. Steve often serves as a consultant and writer for the conservation community, including a year with The Nature Conservancy’s Colorado Plateau Conservation Initiative and a collaboration with the Southern Utah Wilderness Al…

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A writer’s home is a sacred place. Pilgrims travel through New England to worship at Mark Twain’s tower billiards room in Hartford, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s rocking chair parlor in Concord, or Emily Dickinson’s bedroom retreat in Amherst. To readers they are places of magic, consecrated by acts of literary creation. This is where stories come from, after all—the characters and events and ideas that spoke to us, inspired us, and transformed us. Walking up the Collinsville Green to David Leff’s beautiful 1847 Greek Revival house, I can feel that magic tingle on my scalp. Leff’s book The Last Undiscovered Place is one of my favorites, and he is without question one of the most interesting authors working in New England today, combining history, nature, and culture in a way few can. Behind the house at the base of a hill is his garden, which he enjoys pottering around every summer. Inside, the rooms are small but serviceable, filled with the sound of his daughter’s twittering birds and the receding light of the 19th century. The small drawing room to the right of the front door has been transformed into Leff’s office, with views of the Green, the sugar maple in the yard, and the white alp of the Collinsville Congregational Church. Centered by a three-board pine table, the room is wrapped in books, many annotated and underlined by Leff himself. On the shelves I spot William James, Herodotus, Gibbon, and several different editions of Thoreau’s complete works. I leaf through Kerouac’s letters, Robert Frost’s notebooks, and John Keats’ poems. Complementing these are artifacts: a snake skin, a hornet’s nest, a turtle shell, a caribou antler from Labrador. A hand axe, a machete, a birch bark trash can. On the wall by the front window is his wife Mary Fletcher’s beautiful self-portrait. In flannel shirt and jeans, glasses squared on his nose, hair and beard shot through with silver, Leff sits with a hot mug of coffee steaming by his hand, writing longhand. In the corner an old Victor Talking Machine record player waits for his collection of old 78s: Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, and Benny Goodman. But the machine stays mute when he writes. In that silence you can almost hear the creaking memories of the old house, or perhaps it’s only the hum of the large-screen computer in the corner. He works best with this luminous space around him, surrounded by his references and inspirations. He can edit manuscripts or perform ancillary work at a library or coffee shop, but the “bloodletting” of the first draft, as he describes it, takes place here on this pleasantly worn table. That is followed by eight or nine drafts, reading the manuscript out loud to catch repetitive words and awkward syntax, the “things you don’t catch with your eyes.” His process is regimented, precise, with time parceled out into the days and weeks. When Mary leaves the house for her job at the Avon Library, he writes, with his best work in the morning. Sometimes he spreads a dozen open books on the desk and synthesizes their contents. He uses note cards to plan and the computer to revise. He works until the chronic pain from his degenerative cervical disc disease becomes too much. There is magic happening here, but despite the shamanic artifacts and venerable tomes full of knowledge and craft, the room itself is not producing it. The magic comes from the modest, energetic man that inhabits it. The question becomes, then, where does such a man come from? What makes a writer?

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Leff began life in Albany, New York, but by second grade his parents had moved to the Madison Avenue neighborhood in Bridgeport, Connecticut, next to a grazing field of horses at Dewhurst Dairy. During these years his mother finished her degree and his father worked in retail, and they eventually moved across the town line in the Brooklawn section of Fairfield. As a child he was picked on by larger children, and his “mercurial” father left the family when David was fourteen. He remained a “mediocre” student until his junior year of high school, when he read Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Self Reliance,” “Nature,” and the “Divinity School Address.” Emerson hit him “in a powerful, deep way.” From that moment he can date his interest in nature, writing, and “the life of the mind.” He turned his studies around and at age sixteen took a few college courses at the University of Bridgeport, where his mother now worked in the English Department. He then convinced the school to take him full time before he even earned his high school diploma. He matriculated as a Biology major, but after memorizing the parts of a frog he became disillusioned with this study and switched to English Literature with a near double in History. After all, he says, the great science writers like Darwin and Heisenberg were being read by English majors, not science majors. Then, with only three semesters of work left, he decided that he wanted more independence and transferred to the University of Massachusetts, the cheapest school he could find at the time. He needed residency so he lived with his friend in Boston for a while and continued his work in English literature, “to be able to look through the eyes of geniuses.” But he remained “omnivorous” in his reading for the rest of his life. During these years he hitchhiked everywhere—to school, to Montreal, to Baltimore to visit a girlfriend, and across the entire country. In his small kitchen of the apartment he ate seasonal fresh vegetables, pasta, and crackers with peanut butter. He used food stamps and requisitioned food from government surplus packages. His English professor at the University of Bridgeport, Victor Swain, loaned him $3000 for school at UMass, which was a huge sum at that time. Swain only wanted to be repaid if he fell on hard times. Years later Leff did reimburse him, but could “never repay what he did for my life.” He always worked hard to pay for his school and living expenses. He labored as an assistant to a handyman in Bridgeport, as clean-up crew at a tool and die factory, and as pot washer and onion chopper at the UMASS commissary. His hands were alternatively black with grease and rubbed raw and red. Perhaps it was this toil that led him to make a practical choice in graduate school. He wanted to get a PhD in history, but at that time doctorates in history were driving taxi cabs, so he went to law school and passed the bar exam. But he didn’t enjoy it, and never forgot his interest in writing. In fact, he started keeping a journal on May 29, 1978, recording observations, metaphysics, and interesting dialogue. Since that day he has steadily kept a long series of journals, and they crowd two of the shelves in the magic office.

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During those years he also “found manhood in the outdoors.” Physically bullied throughout his childhood, he remained small and uncoordinated, always the last one to be picked for a team. But after an Appalachian Trail “Outward Bound” expedition at age sixteen, he realized that he could thrive there, and developed physical competency as an outdoorsman. Over the years he canoed Minnesota’s Boundary Waters and Maine’s Allagash Wilderness Waterway. He hunted, fly-fished, and climbed all sixty 4000-foot peaks in New England. On one adventure he took a smoky, buggy train from the north shore of the St. Lawrence Seaway to an old mining town, hired someone to take him to the embarkation point, and canoed down the George River toward Ungava Bay. His degree in law, interest in the outdoors, and ability to write landed him a job with Connecticut’s General Assembly, where he was correctly assigned to the Environment Committee. He worked there for sixteen years before becoming the Deputy Commissioner of the Connecticut Department of Environmental Protection, a job he served at for eleven years. Previously he was a terrible public speaker—and subsequently he could do live impressions of Walt Whitman in front of large crowds. His responsibility over hundreds of workers and huge projects taught him a multitude of skills, and brought him into contact with thousands of people across the state. When we go out to dinner we always encounter a former colleague or friend. His wife concurs: “He knows everyone.”

As Deputy Commissioner he focused on open space acquisition, protection of rare habitats and species, and was the primary writer of the state’s first green plan. His greatest accomplishment in that job was negotiating and facilitating the largest land conservation deal in the history of Connecticut. Due to these environmental efforts, the walls of his office are covered with awards from institutions as varied as United Bowhunters and the American Society of Landscape Architects. There are other honors, too, not on the walls, but perhaps more exciting. If you’ve seen the statue of the cannoneers at New London’s Fort Trumbull, you have seen Leff, since the bearded soldier was cast from his Vaseline-covered body. And recently Millwright’s 1680 Tavern in Simsbury has named two drinks for him, the Leff Maple Sour and the Leff Maple Old-Fashioned, honoring his work championing maple syrup culture, a pursuit he has synthesized in his book Maple Sugaring: Keeping it Real in New England. He was forced to retire after his degenerative cervical disc disease became too painful. But he found new ways to volunteer: serving as the historian for the town of Canton, acting as moderator for town meetings, and continuing to serve in an administrative capacity for his local fire department. “I think volunteerism is at the very axis of what it is to be an American from the Minutemen at Concord and Lexington to the guy who coaches Little League.” Writing, too, is a service, adding ideas and values to the culture, even though some might not see it that way. “You have to write for the love of it,” he says, because it is certainly not for the money.

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His projects saving open space were multi-factorial jobs involving dozens of pieces moving all at once, lining everything up in a four-dimensional puzzle. That was good preparation for writing, especially books full of complex structures and ideas, like his novel in verse Finding the Last Hungry Heart. His greatest challenge, he says, was the hard slog to bring to fruition his adolescent desire to be a writer, that gradual lifetime process to become focused and well-organized. He claims that he became a “synthesizer” rather than an “original” writer, though I would contend that effective synthesis is the very thing that creates originality. In 1984 he had moved to the old mill town of Collinsville at the bend of the Farmington River, and immediately knew he was home. Here he brought up his two children, Josh and Tiki, where they could play wiffle ball with the neighborhood kids. While he grappled with a difficult marriage he began his first book, and as a single father struggling after a divorce, worked on it at night, waking up at 2:30 a.m. to write the story of the town. Tiki remembers one scary incident when he lost the digital copy, and they had to buy a scanner and scan the entire three hundred pages back into the computer. But he persisted for six long years, trying to create something like Walden, “but inside out,” reflecting his passionate participation in community. Rather than move away from people to find the heart of being as Thoreau did, he found identity in the convergence of public life, nature, built environment, and more. The resulting book, The Last Undiscovered Place, is a multi-lensed panopticon, looking at Collinsville from every angle. It is an impossible book to classify, mixing reportage, memoir, history, and a dozen disciplines of writing and approach. It is also an instructional manual on how to live. He had never written a book and had no commitment from publishers—it was merely a labor of love. But after sending it out and weathering the usual rejections, it was finally picked up by the University of Virginia Press in 2004. Heartened by this small success, he began to process a life full of stories, scouring the voluminous journals for material. However, just as often the composition comes from daily experience or imagination. It almost always focuses on how people experience the past in the here and now, to “erase the barriers” of time. “My life’s work,” he says, “is to help people see in four dimensions.” But he doesn’t see his writing as “didactic or formal,” rather he wants to “stimulate a spirit of inquiry” as Emerson did for him. Along the way he has coined the term “deep travel,” the title of his book about canoeing the Concord and Merrimack rivers in Thoreau’s wake. It means cultivating what he calls “the willingness to wonder,” not just in some foreign country, but in the woodlot down the street. It is contemplative and spiritual, but is also anchored in the real, small details of everyday objects and places. “The more we know about where we live, the more interesting it becomes to us, and the more interesting it becomes, the more we want to know.” This investigation will eventually lead us to love these places, to care for them. “Make the most of where you are most of the time,” he says. “There’s so much joy in life.” When you meet Leff it is obvious he lives that maxim fully. Of course, writing books brings joy in the way that paddling long distances in a canoe or climbing mountains one after another brings joy. It’s exhausting and takes all your attention and most of the enjoyment comes at the end. You can’t read his books without thinking they are animated by some sort of spirit, perhaps the Earth Mother or the hooded figure of Father Time. He says that he is “highly spiritual” but also a skeptic. In fact, this skepticism has led him to be more open to possibility. “If we always look for rational explanations we limit ourselves,” he says. “I’m open to forms of spirituality that I myself cannot perceive.” He often walks with the pastor of the Collinsville Congregational Church, Jim Wheeler, and it is hard not to see in their friendship the echo of Hartford’s Mark Twain and Joseph Twichell, the agnostic and the believer, exchanging ideas on a walk under the elms. Brought up in a conservative Jewish family, at one time he could speak Hebrew and was bar mitzvahed. At one of his early jobs a coworker told him that he was being paid extra to watch him, because the owner thought that “Jews steal.” Drawing a distinction between religion and culture, he continues to celebrate the holidays, thinks they speak to the relationships to other people, to spiritual life, to the world. Although a holiday like Yom Kippur is bound up with specific religious rhetoric, it leads him to family, history, connections to the universe. He celebrates them in a way that’s meaningful to him and his son and daughter, and also celebrates Christmas with his wife Mary and her daughter. There are few who have had perfect family lives, and the next generation often suffers the failures of the first. His own father was certainly not the best role model. Leff writes in the poem “Night Walk,” “I’m forever cowering beneath blankets during Dad’s drunken rants, dropping a ball to schoolyard taunts, cutting my son’s umbilical, squeezed by the desperate gravity of divorce.” But now, after decades of poor romantic choices and strained relationships he finally seems to have found balance with this melded family, as he says, “in the nick of time.” According to his daughter Tiki they all share, “bad jokes, laughter, and genuine love,” along with passion for the creative life—Mary’s daughter Ariel and David’s son Josh are both artists, and Tiki is a photographer and designer. “We’re not only a family of artists,” she says. “But a family of cheerleaders who are always rooting for one another.” Tiki always loved the “smell of a darkroom” rather than a used book store, and has become an accomplished photographer. She has a master’s degree in Digital Media Management and her own clothing line, Anamorphic Apparel, crediting her father for much of her success. “I honestly don’t think I would have gotten to where I am if it weren’t for my dad,” she says. One of her passions is body art, and among her numerous tattoos are ones dedicated to the important people and events in her life. Her left wrist sports “I love you” in her father’s handwriting, which is “very specific” due to his nerve damage. “I’m one of the only people on earth who can decipher it,” she says proudly. “He’ll never admit it, but he likes it.” Meanwhile, as Leff gets older his cervical spine continues to degrade. While we talk he winces in agony, an aftereffect from the operation that was necessary to prevent paralysis, caused by the bone rubbing on the spinal cord. This operation, his third, was a success, but the chronic pain of the pinch will remain with him until he dies. He can’t chop wood or handle a forty-hour work week, and writing itself is often painful. Even physically simple duties for the local volunteer fire department became too much because of the late night calls. When I ask him to join me fly-fishing the Farmington River, he declines sadly, saying that the back-and-forth motion of flicking the line is impossible. Most people who meet Leff never even know he has a disability, since the condition is mostly invisible, and his active mind and good cheer are infectious. However, his right hand has slowly withered, increasing his writing challenges. “It would be easy to pop some narcotics and sit in front the TV,” he says, “but that’s not how I want to live.” Speaking lovingly about his wife’s struggles, he says that character is about triumphing over, despite, and because of your debilities. His own condition has taught him “empathy” and in his poetry collection Depth of Field he writes, “Who would I be without my hurt? It’s mine. Only mine.”

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Due to Leff’s spinal problems, his days of canoeing the Allagash and hiking the mountains of New Hampshire are over. But as his wife Mary says, “Life with David is an adventure.” When they met online, like so many these days, they hesitated, but after meeting in person experienced an immediate connection. After Leff’s previous romantic misadventures, it was a welcome relief to experience this so late in life. When Mary moved into his Collinsville home, he built her an art studio on the second floor to complement his office on the first. Together they explore the places “off the beaten path,” searching for the connections between art, history, and nature. On a recent trip they visited Trinity College to see one of the original folios of John James Audubon’s Birds of America. The Watkinson Library opened the case for them so Leff could photograph the pages. They share an intellectual curiosity and an appreciation of exquisite details. As with any voracious reader, Leff’s creative influences span the world, but a few stand out—fellow seekers Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau. He enjoys modern writers like Philip Levine, Donald Hall, Tony Hoagland, Robert Pinsky, John McPhee, and resident of nearby Cornwall Philip Roth. He also finds inspiration in the work of painters—American Impressionists like J. Alden Weir and Hudson River School painters like Frederick Church—artists who look for the authenticity of place. And he finds something else in the work of Jackson Pollock, Sol LeWitt, Georgia O’Keefe, and of course his wife Mary Fletcher. Life is too various and astonishing, we agree, not to search widely for ideas and happiness.

Though these days he has his own family of artists to give him help and inspiration, until recently the authors of the past were Leff’s only writing mentors. “I’ve always worked in isolation,” he says. He never took a creative writing course and only attended a handful of conferences. “I couldn’t tell you what a participle is,” he tells me. “Things just sound right.” That is something I recognize immediately—the song of a voracious reader who has absorbed language through thousands of books rather than a grammar class. That changed when his work began to be noticed and praised by other authors, like Harvard’s expert on landscape and the environment John Stilgoe, Connecticut state historian Walt Woodward, and former state poet laureate Dick Allen. Allen welcomed Leff’s forays into verse, talking of his commitment to the environment and calling his collection Tinker’s Damn “a series of revealing river bends.” Current Connecticut Poet Laureate and Antrim House publisher Rennie McQuilkin wrote that “Leff loves the hunks and colors of this world as few of us are able to, and he describes them—both the natural and the human—in such graphic detail that they leap to life on his pages.” McQuilkin encouraged Leff to work more seriously on his poetry, which he had only dabbled in previously, and published his first two collections.

With the addition of a few friends, he has opened up his exchange of “intellectual capital” even further. Around a roaring fire, Mary, David, and my wife and I joke about a name for our literary group, maybe “The Deep Localists,” “The Rhizome Initiative,” or just “Deep Travelers.” We discuss the need for cooperation amongst artists and writers, and how difficult that is in Connecticut. “It is so important to encourage and help emerging writers with their work,” Leff says. “It’s rewarding to feel part of a continuum and I’m always surprised at how much I learn.” These days he is working on a book about his youthful adventure canoeing the Allagash and getting back into his poetry, musing a long poem about “the qualities of light and dark.” He’s also collaborating on another manuscript with former state archaeologist Nick Bellantoni—adding yet another discipline to his box of tools that join a fragmented world together. He wants to keep moving forward, experimenting in method, form, and subject. After he finishes a project, “I want a new challenge,” he says.

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There must be hundreds of men and women like David Leff scattered around this country. Or perhaps I just want there to be. Our society has very little respect for masters of a craft; we always look to tear them down, to make fun of their accomplishment, to denigrate lived experience. And when that craft is literature, the problem is intensified, because there is a perception that writing is not actual work. How can what Leff does be difficult, as he sits in a rocking chair like Emerson himself, processing knowledge into words, reading a manuscript out loud to hear the rhythms? Even for those of us who love to read, writing often seems like magic, not work. But of course it is. Hard work. Even after you fight to master the art, you continue to fight, for every single page, every single reader. Nothing is given, everything is earned. Leff has learned that work over many years, learned how to take a life of struggle and joy, delve into its marrow, and crystallize it in words. “I’m a seeker,” he says. “I’m an explorer.” But deep travel is only the beginning. After that comes the act of creation, finding the words to express the inexpressible, to tell the stories that will change one human world.  

Eric D. Lehman is a travel and history writer, with reviews, essays, and stories in dozens of magazines and journals. He is also an award-winning author of many books, including Afoot in Connecticut,  The Foundation of Summer, A History of Connecticut Wine, Insiders’ Guide to Connecticut, A History of Connecticut Food, Becoming Tom Thumb, and Homegrown Terror. In his spare time, he pursues Henry Miller scholarship and teaches creative writing and literature at the University of Bridgeport, where he directs the school literary magazine, Groundswell, and the faculty essay series, The Commons. He lives in Hamden with his wife, poet Amy Nawrocki, and his two cats.

There are certain path crossings that stay with you as fated moments—certain strangers who seem familiar to you–as though while walking through a crowded market, you brush sleeves with someone who knows you but doesn’t know you. This was my experience meeting Frank LaRue Owen Jr. When last we sat together, it was in the dusty high-desert of God’s country. We sipped hot sake and ate sushi made with New Mexico Hatch green chile in a hidden away restaurant at the base of the Sandia Mountains in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and talked of the strange trails we poets find ourselves on in life. Sitting across from him, he is a man removed from the ordinary, insightful yet unpretentious, who is ever-shifting in dimension and depth. He is a poet, descendant of cowboys, and a fellow traveler.

Exploring the origins of his work, Frank LaRue Owen’s poetry is influenced by dreams, the energies of landscape and the seasons, archetypal psychology, the Ch’an/D…

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