"I am trying to check my habits of seeing, to counter them for the sake of greater freshness. I am trying to be unfamiliar with what I'm doing." - John Cage


Saturday, October 18, 2025

Thoughts on how writers can inspire action for the environment, wild spaces and rivers, and for communities

I'm preparing to speak at the Become the River Literary Festival in Coloma this afternoon. One of the questions we'll be addressing is: How can writers use their connection to wild spaces and rivers to utilize the power of the pen to activate and inspire action? 

Here are my notes to organize my thoughts: 

 Protest & Witness

“Poems are visible right now, which is terribly ironic, because you rather wish it weren’t so necessary,” she said. “When poetry is a backwater it means times are O.K. When times are dire, that’s exactly when poetry is needed.” – Jane Hirshfield

 

Poems, for me, are written because there is some fracture thatneeds addressing,” Hirshfield says. “You write because something is off-kilter, bewildering, devastating. If you’re built the way poets are, one way to remit the fabric of the world is to find language that will let in the grief and the beauty of these things.”- Jane Hirshfield

 

On January 24, President Trump’s fifth day in office his first time, media outlets reported that the White House had banned Environmental Protection Agency scientists from posting about their research on social media, instructing them to relay their research to the public only after obtaining prior approval. By the end of that day, Hirshfield had channeled her outrage into a poem called “On the Fifth Day.” She sent it to a few scientist friends. They sent it to a few more, and soon the poem went viral.

 

When organizers announced the March for Science a few days later, Hirshfield contacted the volunteer committee and offered a few ideas.

 

The recent resurgence of protest poems reflects a new strain of contemporary American poetry, one that is deeply engaged with public policy and the latest executive orders coming from the White House.

 

On the fifth day by Jane Hirshfield

 

the scientists who studied the rivers

were forbidden to speak

or to study the rivers.

The scientists who studied the air

were told not to speak of the air,

and the ones who worked for the farmers

were silenced,

and the ones who worked for the bees.

Someone, from deep in the Badlands,

began posting facts.

The facts were told not to speak

and were taken away.

The facts, surprised to be taken, were silent.

Now it was only the rivers

that spoke of the rivers,

and only the wind that spoke of its bees,

while the unpausing factual buds of the fruit trees

continued to move toward their fruit.

The silence spoke loudly of silence,

and the rivers kept speaking,

of rivers, of boulders and air.

Bound to gravity, earless and tongueless,

the untested rivers kept speaking.

Bus drivers, shelf stockers,

code writers, machinists, accountants,

lab techs, cellists kept speaking.

They spoke, the fifth day,

of silence.


2.     Education and Healing

Hirshfield had begun Poets for Science to grapple with her own emotions over the state of politics and science policy. Partnering with Poets for Science founder, poet and environmental spokesperson Jane Hirshfield, the Wick Poetry Center joined the marchers at the Teach-In on the National Mall in Washington D.C. Today, Poets for Science is both an exhibit and a movement exploring the connections between poetry and science.

 

“Poetry and science are allies, not opposites. Both are instruments of discovery, and together they make the two feet of one walking. We can only weigh the full meaning of facts by how we feel about them. Feelings are meaningful and useful to us because they emerge from the truths of this shifting, astonishing world. Observation and imagination, the microscope and the metaphor, the sense of amazement—you need all of them to take the measure of a moment, of a life. Poetry and science each seek to ground our lives in both what exists and the sense of the large, of mystery and awe. Every scientist I know is grounded in curiosity, wonder, the spirit of exploration, the spirit of service. As is every poet.” - Jane Hirshfield, 2017

 

The Hope River project in Davis, California, shows just how powerful expression through poetry can be for young people. In 2021, Julia B. Levine, a retired clinical psychologist and now the Poet Laureate of Davis, began developing a pilot program introducing middle schoolers to poetry to cope with climate-related fears.

 

She developed a 5-week course for middle schoolers at a public charter school, Da Vinci Junior High, in which students would read poetry about the environment and then write their own poems. At the end of the 5 weeks, the teens would walk down a path behind the school while listening to recordings of their poems on a smartphone app, the flow of cyclists and pedestrians on Davis’ bike trails reminiscent of the flow of a river.

 

Sixteen Rivers Press, a poetry collective based in Northern California, is publishing a selection of 22 of the Hope River poems, along with all of Levine’s instructional materials from the class. The book is called Dear Earth: Hope River Poems from Young Teens.

“One thing poetry helps you do is speak to your higher self,” Levine says. Writing makes young poets “feel as if they matter, as if their voice counts,” she adds. “It’s an antidote to what’s happening all around them.”

3.     Equity for people and environment

Listen to Camille Dungy in her article "Is All Writing Environmental Writing?":

 

"We are in the midst of the planet’s sixth great extinction, in a time where we are seeing the direct effects of radical global climate change via more frequent and ferocious storms, hotter drier years accompanied by more devastating wildfires, snow where there didn’t used to be snow, and less snow where permafrost used to be a given. Yet some people prefer to maintain categories for what counts as environmental writing and what is historical writing or social criticism or biography and so on. I can’t compartmentalize my attentions. If an author chooses not to engage with what we often call the natural world, that very disengagement makes a statement about the author’s relationship with her environment; even indifference to the environment directly affects the world about which a writer might purport to be indifferent. We live in a time when making decisions about how we construct the products and actions of our daily lives—whether or not to buy plastic water bottles and drinking straws, or cosmetics with microbeads that make our skin glow—means making decisions about being complicit in compromising the Earth’s ecosystems. 

 

"What we decide matters in literature is connected to what we decide will matter for our history, for our pedagogy, for our culture. What we do and do not value in our art reveals what we do and do not value in our times. What we leave off the page often speaks as loudly as what we include. 

 Writers exploring ecopoetics ask themselves questions such as these: How does climate change affect our poetics? How do we write about resource extraction, agribusiness, endangered bird species, the removals of indigenous peoples, suburban sprawl, the lynching of blacks, or the precarious condition of gray wolves and the ecosystems dependent upon them? Our contemporary understanding of ecopoetics takes into account the ways human-centered thinking reflects on, and is reflected in, what we write. And, contemporary ecopoetics questions the efficacy of valuing one physical presentation of animated matter over another, because narratives about place and about life contribute to our orientation in, and our interpretation of, that place and that life. 

 

"All of our positions on the planet are precarious at this moment in history, and attentive writers work to articulate why this is the case—including many writers of color who were already engaging in this mode of writing long before the ecopoetics movement took off. (Works by Alice Dunbar Nelson, Lucille Clifton, Claude McKay, Anne Spencer, Sterling Brown, June Jordan, Evie Shockley, Sean Hill, and Ed Roberson spring immediately to mind.) But only as the ecopoetics movement gained traction has such de-pristined writing finally been identified as environmental writing and, therefore, begun to be seen in a new light.

 

"The history of human divisions is often constituted of stories about one set of people being hostile toward the presence of others. An ideology that would demand the exclusion or subjugation of whole populations of human beings is an ideology quick to assume positions of superiority over all that is perceived to be different. If you can construct a narrative that turns a human into a beast in order to justify the degradation of that human, how much easier must it be to dismiss the needs of a black bear, a crayfish, a banyan? The values we place on lives that are not our own are reflected in the stories we tell ourselves—and in which aspects of these stories resonate with us. To separate the concerns of the human world (politics, history, commerce) from those of the many life forms with which humans share this planet strikes me as disastrous hubris and folly. We live in community with all the other lives on Earth, whether we acknowledge this or not. When we write about our lives, we ought to do so with an awareness of the other lives we encounter as we move through the world. I choose to honor these lives with attention and compassion." - Camille Dungy

 

______
*From What to Eat, What to Drink, What to Leave for Poison (Red Hen Press, 2006).

 

 

Sources

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/21/books/review/american-poets-refusing-to-go-gentle-rage-against-the-right.html

 

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2319793120

 

https://poetsforscience.org/about/

 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2017/04/14/on-the-fifth-day/

 

https://www.thegeorgiareview.com/posts/is-all-writing-environmental-writing/

 

Tuesday, October 14, 2025

Submission Strategies for Publication Workshop Series: Where, how and when to submit October 24, Nov 7 & Nov 20

 

This series is a practical workshop where I will present the newest and latest calls for submissions, give insights and strategies for organizing, planning, and tracking your submissions, and help with manuscript preparations. We will work on our research, selection, plans, and prepping the second half of the time together as we gather and submit our work. One take away will be a long term plan for organizing your submissions over the next 6 -12 months, taking a look at project goals and timing them with future open reading periods.

Submission Strategies for Publication Workshop Series: Where, how and when to submit

October 24, Nov 7 & Nov 20

@ Lunchtime, Noon – 1:30 pm

$35/session

In person and Online

Fall is the season for sending your work out for publication: poetry, short story, personal essay, journalism, book chapters, artist collaborations, mixed-media and hybrid genres. Get the details you need to plan where, how and when to submit. Handouts, tea, and chocolate too.

Work in a supportive community of writers to research the field, prepare your manuscripts, and submit them to a carefully selected field of publications:

·       Contests

·       Literary journals and Magazines

·       Anthologies

·       Calls for submissions

·       Collaborative arts

Discover new opportunities for your writing:

·       reviews

·       translation

·       prose and verse chapbooks (short story and essay)

·       first chapter submissions

·       artist residencies

·       conferences

My personal goal is to get caught up in my own submissions - join me in making this process happen for your writing too. Submitting work is a part of the business side of being a writer that can at times fall to the wayside as we write and read and imagine. For this reason, I think during the submission season in particular it's super productive to work in an accountability community of writers.

Check in with me with questions and thoughts : )
Happy writing,
Kat

Tuesday, October 7, 2025

Reflections in preparation for the Poet Laureate Panel conversation at the Tahoe Literary Festival Saturday 10/11

Our newly appointed 25th poet laureate of the United States, Arthur Sze, has stated, “Poetry speaks to our deepest selves and connects us all, and it also speaks to the exigencies our time.”With this in mind, do you feel poetry can be a way to bridge differences, bring people together,offer hope and expression even in the most challenging environment? How do you see yourself as an advocate for poetry in your own community?

I’ve begun saying that I’m learning how to be a Poet Laureate as I go along. I’m asking myself how can I best be an advocate for my community, with poetry as my sustenance to offer? First, the question of poetry being sustenance to some, but can I make the selfish assumption that everyone can feed on poetry, find something satiating within it? And it’s not just that poetry is what I have to give – I could be quite creative in how I give, and poetry is only one of the offerings in my hands.

In answer to the question “Does poetry play a role in social change?Adrienne Rich once answered:

Yes, where poetry is liberative language, connecting the fragments within us, connecting us to others like and unlike ourselves, replenishing our desire. . . . In poetry words can say more than they mean and mean more than they say. In a time of frontal assaults both on language and on human solidarity, poetry can remind us of all we are in danger of losing—disturb us, embolden us out of resignation.

Poet Laureate Chen Chen in Redmond, Washington has literally figured out in Read Local Eat Local program how to transform poetry into recipes on postcards that can be handed out to people on the street at festivals. Just released in Santa Cruz is an anthology of youth voices in poetry. “Waking Up: Teen Poems of Resistance and Resilience” was edited by three teens from the Santa Cruz County Youth Poet Laureate Program’s inaugural cohort of youth poetry leaders: Simon Ellefson, Sylvi Kayser and former Youth Poet Laureate Dina Lusztig Noyes. Ellefson, a 19-year-old Cabrillo College student, said the idea came about from Farnaz Fatemi — former Santa Cruz County poet laureate and director of the youth poet laureate program. Farnaz is also a friend of mine through the Community of Writers Poetry Workshops.

I’m asking myself how can poetry be made into a thing that helps everyone/anyone find a moment to “slow down, hear clearly, see deeply, and envision what matters most in our lives,” as Arthur Sze says poetry does for us in a recent interview. These are the questions I’m asking as I design a project for Nevada County.

These questions do ask how can poetry bridge the differences between individuals, between you and me? Some of the answer is in relationships building over time between readers and writers, teachers and students, poets and poets. I’ve begun meeting with several high school students, slowly building some mentoring relationships. At a workshop, I asked each to choose one book from my bookshelves to read and write from, and the collected essays of Adrienne Rich was chosen. So, I began reading her essays, and in one called Someone is Writing a Poem, she writes:

We go to poetry because we believe it has something to do with us. We also go to poetry to receive the experience of the not me, enter a field of vision we could not otherwise apprehend.

Someone writing a poem believes in a reader, in readers, of that poem. The “who” of that reader quivers like a jellyfish. Self-reference is always possible: that my “I” is a universal “we,” that the reader is my clone. That sending letters to myself is enough for attention to be paid. That my chip of mirror contains the world.

But most often someone writing a poem believes in, depends on, a delicate, vibrating range of difference, that an “I” can become a “we” without extinguishing others, that a partly common language exists to which strangers can bring their own heartbeat, memories, images. A language that itself has learned from the heartbeat, memories, images of strangers. – Adrienne Rich

I think as writers, the use of “we” can become a generalization that can erase the experiences of others. I often think of this if I unconsciously write “we” in my poem. Who am I bringing into my tribe of “we”, and who can I not bring in because truly I do not know them well enough to speak for them?

However, on the reader’s side of the experience of the poem, how fulfilled I would feel if my “I” on the page could be gathered into the arms of the reader to become a “we” even if also “we” contain differences as strangers?

So yes, I do believe that writing a poem that then is read by others can become a bridge between differences. And also reading a poem calls for paying attention, slowing down, listening in, seeing clearly, and asking what is it that is most important in our lives?

 

Saturday, October 4, 2025

"Keep your practice. Be your full, complete, authentic self" - Danielle Brazell, Ex. Dir. California Arts Council

September was filled with a surprising harvest of Fall gatherings and Tangled Roots Writing offerings.

September 5th I led a workshop at the Truckee Library that is Free once a month, writing stories of our lives with guidance and prompts. Our next workshop meets 11/14 from 10:30-noon and all ages are welcome to join us.

On September 7th I attended the Sierra Arts Literary Community meeting which happens every second Sunday of the month at the Sierra Arts Gallery on S Virginia St in Reno. This is a chance to network and learn and find encouragement from other local writers and authors. 

On Sept. 8th the Fall Monday night creative writing workshop series began, running 6 weeks through Oct. 13. The next 6 week series begins on Oct. 20 and enrollment is now open. This is my longest running generative writing workshop for all genres and levels of experience.

September 12 kicked off the artists' reception at The Holland Project for the Nevada Humanities Reno Literary Pub Crawl. So fun - I'm inspired by so many of these writers and having the opportunity to gather was a blast.

Later that evening, I attended the Dark Skies Photo Award Ceremony at the Truckee Hospital. I read and presented a framed copy of "Cento: Tahoe Stars" poem to the mayors of Nevada City and Truckee. 

Saturday morning, Sept 13, Alexis Cota, our new Truckee Cultural District Intern and I drove down to Mountain Bounty Farm in Nevada City. I led a reading and writing workshop in a circle of hay bales beneath a centuries old Oak tree with Ingrid Keriotis and Rooja Mohassessy.  We listened and wrote poems while gazing out at the sun glinting off ready-for-picking red peppers, corn, purple kale, and lush green rows of many vegetables and bright flowers.

That afternoon I somehow made it down to Reno to perform in the Literary Crawl at 1864 on California Ave to read along with Jillian Makhouts and Tony Berendson for an appreciative crowd of poetry-lovers. I love all the work of Nevada Humanities - performing and sharing my poems in that event felt welcoming, like I was in my tribe with others who value the deep thinking and feeling that writing and reading involve. 

 Truckee threw it's first Block Party on Thursday evening, Sept 18 by the train depot. Almost 50 booths, food trucks, stage performances of dance and music by local kids and bands, and a poem reading with myself and Alexis. Alexis translated one of my poems into Spanish and you can watch the video of our performance here. 

Sierra Valley north of Truckee holds wide golden vistas, old cemeteries within pine knolls, cows and raptors, and farms, artists, and barns angling against blue sky. On Sept 20 Kurt and I traveled the Ag and Art Trail through the countryside visiting Gary Romano's farmers market and several other farms. Hosted in a local barn that evening was a paella and bluegrass gathering - a magical performance. Our communities are rich.

The Business of Art Symposium on Sept 25, hosted on the Sierra College Grass Valley campus, was a full day of workshops, talks, and panels. I moderated a panel on Literary arts as a sustainable career path. The  wide-ranging conversation between Dean Rader, Mary Volmer, and Leta Seletzky pondered how to face challenges today of cuts to funding, political animosity, and loss of perceived value in the Humanities. 

The keynote speaker at the Symposium summed up this month's events for me with her clarity of purpose. Danielle Brazell is the Executive Director of the California Arts Council. She asked the audience three questions:

  1. What are you working towards?
  2. What are your barriers?
  3. What are potential opportunities or hidden silver linings? 

Her closing advice was: "Keep your practice. Be your full, complete, authentic self. Artists have the Imagination"