Alaskan salmon
This is the most intense congregation of animals I’ve ever seen. I have a piece out about these salmon today in The Common Online: Alaskan Baselines.
Always turn in the direction of the skid
Poet Dean Young visited Smith yesterday and said many beautiful and interesting things about poetry during a question-and-answer session on his work. Here are some of his replies, to the best ability of my hurrying pen to capture them. * Writing isn’t separate from my life … There’s always room for writing. It’s automatic. It’s …
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Winter Notebook
There’s something special about seeking out nature in the unforgiving seasons. In memory of winter, now that spring has at last stolen over the landscape, I thought I’d share this nature notebook entry from the last days of December. The mosses were bright green in the brief melt, taking advantage of warming. Among them I …
Diving to the sea bottom
Latest article in the Boston Globe: Eric Schmidt, executive chair of Google, and his wife, Wendy, own the only privately-owned oceanographic research vessel on the sea, the R/V Falkor. They provide grants for ocean scientists worldwide to do deep-ocean mapping and pure oceanographic research from on board. Article Most excitingly, in my opinion, they’re now …
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Happy 2014!
Just in time for the New Year: the Straw Dogs Writer’s Guild has posted an interview with me as part of a series on their volunteers. I volunteer as the emcee of the Straw Dogs’ monthly reading series & writers’ gathering, Writer’s Night Out. Interview It’s a fun start to the turn of the year …
Adélia Prado and poetry’s core
Brazilian mystic poet Adélia Prado visited Smith College this week to share her work and thoughts with us. She gave a reading of her poetry – collaboratively with her translator, Smith professor Ellen Doré Watson – and two question and answer sessions about her work. She spoke in Portuguese and I translated on the fly, …
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Secret lives
For the last couple mornings, with a feeling of complicated sadness, I’ve passed a downed young black birch tree sprawled halfway across the gravel drive to my apartment. It’s a beaver tree: the flakes of evidence lie scattered around the conical incision that took down the trunk as surely as an axe. It’s an old …
The loss of the frog prince
Frogs. They’re familiar and otherworldly, slimy and charming, the kind of odd liminal animal that spurs the imagination. Their voices range from the brute croak of the bullfrog to the fairy-sweet, bell-like chorus of the spring peeper. Our complex relationship with frogs shows up even in our childhood in the deeper meanings of the well-known …
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Ferrying
The Pacific Northwest seems to recur in my life. This summer, for instance, I spent a week in southeast Alaska for a field project on Prince of Wales Island. I’ve been asked to repost this blog entry from 2004, which recalls the first time I set foot in the region, and the impression its vastnesses …
What’s in a Name
I have an unusual name, and most people can’t pronounce it. So much so, in fact, that I usually tell baristas at cafes and sandwich shops to write down “Nyla” so I don’t get called up as Neila or Nayla. Sometimes people say Nalia, or – inexplicably – Naomi or Nadia. That may explain my …