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Dear Readers,
I watched a clip of the movie 2012 and it got me thinking about the end of the world predictions for this year. It’s my hope that what ends this year are some of humanity’s old, tired, and downright dangerous ways of living on this earth. What if this is the year we toss out old paradigms about such things as war and consumerism and our attitudes toward non-human life and this home planet of ours? What if we end our fear-based us-or-them mentality?
One thing I’d love to see end is Alaska’s war on predators. When I moved here in 1986, I watched the end of aerial wolf hunting, and thought, progress will slowly come here, as we learn the lessons from the rest of the country, where wolves were being reestablished, at great cost, to some areas of the west. But now, along with wolf hunting occuring in those same western states, Alaska’s wolf killing is larger in both geographic area and methodology than it has been since pre-statehood, when wildlife killings were a free-for-all and there were bounties for everything, including the feet of bald eagles.
Our Board of Game now uses state funds for aerial hunting by helicopter, snaring, gassing pups in dens, baiting sows with cubs, lighting to hunt bears in their winter dens. All this in over 70,000 acres of mostly federally-managed lands. Public lands, land that belongs to every single American equally. All to satisfy the needs of less than 15 percent of Alaskans who hunt caribou and moose. And all this against any reasonable scientific argument that wolves and bears are not the problem, that predator control has not and never will work.
Could 2012 be the year we come to our senses?
As I work on my next book AMONG WOLVES: THE WORK AND TIMES OF DR. GORDON HABER, about a wolf biologist who spent more than 35 years closely researching the wolves of Denali National Park, I’m learning just how much we humans lose when we wholesale slaughter another society—and how much we have to gain by learning from and living with other species.
I’ll get some intimate time with Denali’s wildlife myself next summer, I've been chosen for an artist residency at Denali National Park. I'll stay in the Murie cabin near the Toklat River, right where Adolph Murie and Gordon Haber stayed while doing some of their groundbreaking research on Denali's wild life.
Here’s to the return of light, in all its forms –
Marybeth
Fall Equinox 2011
Dear Readers,
Happy Fall Equinox. Happy golden birch and emerald spruce and cerulean sky.
Last night’s clear skies gave me the first view of the Big Dipper and Casseopia since spring. A welcome sight, and a reminder of the expansiveness of our universe even as we enter this season of turning inward.
As we turn toward the darker months, I offer a selection of new works for you to read online.
An essay: "Going Down to the Water"
A blogpost: “Writer as Wilderness Ranger”
An article: “The Puppy at Om Beach”
I’ll spend much of October in residency at the Mesa Refuge, working on two book projects. When I return, I’ll read at the AQR November First Friday at Jitters.
In gratitude for this spinning planet, two opportunities for direct action with the power of the pen:
The Arctic Refuge’s coastal plain could at long last receive the protection it deserves – please ask the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to recommend Alternative E, recommending wilderness protection to all the refuge?. Comments due November 15.
And if you’re an Alaskan, speak out to protect the wilderness values of Chugach State Park.
And finally, in gratitude, a poem, published in Cirque Vol. 2 No. 2
The Fantastic Skies of Orphan Stars
I rejoice to live in such a splendidly disturbing time. -Helen Keller
Perhaps I’ve been searching
too close to ground.
Perhaps I’m blind to think
every answer lies beneath my feet.
Giving life should be enough to ask
of one blue sphere spinning in the dark.
Oh, to be an orphan star,
to see my birthplace from the outside,
the blue-white brilliance
encircled by yellow spirals,
the whole spinning parent galaxy,
and then to move slowly away
into the safety of the void.
Marybeth
Summer 2011
Dear Readers,
August, and chinook winds have knocked down my peas and beans and lavateria, soft pink petals bruised and torn. Hard on my gardens to get such fierce winds this time of year, when they're so tall and heavy with flowers and fruit.
My friend Michelle tells me this is Lammas, the time exactly between summer solstice and fall equinox, a time to give thanks for abundance. Abundant wind, as well.
I've got an abundance of work forthcoming, a veritable garden medley of different pieces: a short essay on climate change in AQR, an article on India's dogs in ActionLine, an essay on mothering in Literary Mama, a book review in Western American Literature, a poem in Ice Floe 11. I'll post links as they become available.
What's out now is the current issue of Cirque, in which I have two poems. Read it online at http://www.cirquejournal.com/index.php.
And I'm writing now about my wilderness adventure in the Tracy Arm Fords Terror Wilderness of the Tongass National Forest. I was there on the most unusual artist residency I've ever experienced; I'll post the link for my blogpost on the residency, "Writer as Wilderness Ranger," when it appears on 49 Writers.
May your August be filled with the abundance of the season -
Marybeth
Spring Equinox 2011
 Dear Readers,
OK, I'm jumping ahead here; spring equinox is a few weeks away. But since I'll be traveling all next month in India, I'll wish you a happy spring in advance.
The winter readings for The Heart of the Sound went very well. Interesting events and good crowds. At the event in Homer, Rika Mouw, a visual artist, made a compelling comment: using the word "environmental" or "environment" seems to immediately shut off a large percentage of the population. For most it denotes something "out there," some "other" that we can choose to engage in or ignore, something that doesn't affect our individual lives. She asked that we come up with new language.
Indeed, environmental causes seem to be on the sidelines of political discussions, whereas in truth environmental issues like climate change and biodiversity sit at the very center of the web of our lives. So, what can we as writers do about that? How can we use language differently?
In The Heart of the Sound, there's a scene of a planning session for the 10th anniversary of the oil spill. A Native woman in the back of the room stands up and says, "Can't we use another word besides 'anniversary?' That word connotes something good, and there's nothing good about this."
So think about language. See my blogpost on the responsibility of language: http://49writers.blogspot.com/2011/01/holleman-one-nation-divisble-under.html
In other news, a few upcoming events:
April 2 and 9: I'll lead a writing course called "Beginnings" at the 49 Writing Center (http://49writingcenter.org/.)
April 4: I'll do a reading, craft talk, and writing instruction at Anchorage Adventurers monthly potluck.
June 22-26: I'll be part of a panel presentation on climate change and metaphor at the biennial conference of the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment. (http://www.asle.org/site/conferences/biennial/)
Relish the returning light -
Marybeth
Winter Equinox 2010
Dear Readers,
Joyous winter equinox, merry christmas, happy new year, and glorious full moon eclipse.
The Heart of the Sound is now out in paperback. It’s available at your local bookseller or online at Amazon.com.
Note that many of these events are being co-presented with Nancy Lord,whose new book Early Warming: Crisis and Response in the Climate-Changed North, will also be released in January. We'll be reading together and speaking about environmental writing and writing as activists.
January 22, 4-6 p.m. -- Book signing at Gulliver's Books in Fairbanks, Alaska, with Nancy Lord.
January 23 -- noon. Unitarian Universalists Fellowship of Fairbanks after-service program. Nancy Lord and I will be presenting some of our environmental writing in a conversation moderated by Robert Hannon.
January 24 -- 7pm. Fairbanks. Northern Voices series sponsored by Northern Alaska Environmental Center, library. Nancy Lord and I will read, show some slides, and answer questions about environmental writing.
January 25 – Out North Theatre, 7pm. Nancy Lord and I in a reading and conversation moderated by Charles Wohlforth and sponsored by 49 Alaska Writing Center .
January 28 -- Homer, Kachemak Bay Campus of Kenai Peninsula College, 7 p.m. Nancy Lord and I in a reading and conversation moderated by Mike Hawfield.
February 4 -- Anchorage. First Friday Signing, sponsored by 49 Alaska Writing Center , at International Gallery of Contemporary Art, 427 D St., 5:30 – 7:30pm.
February 7 -- Anchorage. Talk, read, sign, and some writing instruction, after a potluck dinner. Anchorage Adventurers.
In celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, I wrote an opinion piece on the way to permanently protect it:
Opening ANWR only feeds oil addiction
If the BP Gulf of Mexico and Exxon Valdez oil spills teach us anything, it's that precious ecosystems can be forever damaged by oil.
Half a century ago this week, Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower created the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve for its "unique wildlife, wilderness and recreational values." Expanded and renamed, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge remains the largest and only intact Arctic ecosystem in the United States.
Its ecological values are unparalleled, especially in the coastal plain, the biological heart of the refuge. Like the Statue of Liberty, California's Giant Sequoias and the Everglades, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge stands as an American icon.
Read the full story online
And finally, for the month of January I’m participating in a small contemplative practice called A River of Stones. Here are my stones thus far:
January 1: Driving to a new song on the radio, I pull over to write down the lyrics: “Those were the days, but so are these.”
January 2: In front of me, three dogs bounding down a freshly-groomed trail through spruce woods. I ski on clouds.
January 3: A high soft yelp from downstairs: my dog Lilly dreaming of summer romps across tundra.
January 4: Cool gray skies and the steady drip of snow melting from my roof remind me that today is longer than yesterday. The chickadees and nuthatches flitting through willow confirm it.
Become a Facebook fan and read more of my small stones.
Warmest wishes,
Marybeth
November 2010
Dear Readers,
It's important to take stock, every now and then, of what we have to be thankful for. The Volunteer Coordinator at Providence Hospital, where I volunteer holding babies in the NICU, sent this quote:
Thanksgiving Day comes, by statute, once a year; to the honest woman it comes as frequently as the heart of gratitude will allow.
~~ Edward Sandford Martin
In less than two months, The Heart of the Sound will reappear in paperback. Below are the events I'm lined up for so far.
Note that many of these events are being co-presented with Nancy Lord,whose new book Early Warming: Crisis and Response in the Climate-Changed North, will also be released in January. We'll be reading together and speaking about environmental writing and writing as activists.
January, 2011 -- official release date of paperback edition of The Heart of the Sound.
January 22, 4-6 p.m. -- Book signing at Gulliver's Books in Fairbanks, Alaska, with Nancy Lord.
January 23 -- Unitarian Universalists Fellowship of Fairbanks after-service program, noon. Nancy Lord and I will be presenting some of our environmental writing in a conversation moderated by Robert Hannon.
January 24 -- Fairbanks. Northern Voices series sponsored by Northern Alaska Environmental Center, library, time TBA. Nancy Lord and I will read, show some slides, and answer questions about environmental writing.
January 25 -- Anchorage. Cyrano's Off-Center Playhouse, time TBA. Nancy Lord and I will read and speak in a conversation moderated by Charles Wohlforth, sponsored by 49 Alaska Writing Center .
January 28 -- Homer, Kachemak Bay Campus of Kenai Peninsula College, 7 p.m. Nancy Lord and I in a reading and moderated conversation about our environmental writing.
February 4 -- Anchorage. First Friday Signing, sponsored by 49 Alaska Writing Center, at International Gallery of Contemporary Art, 427 D St., 5:30 – 7:30pm.
With thanks for all who share this lovely blue planet with me -
Marybeth
Fall Equinox 2010
Dear Readers,
Outside the golden birch leaves dance to the ground, and last night's frost gives way to today's sunshine. Inside, my windowsills are lined with green tomatoes.
So I enjoy falltime in Alaska while my husband Rick Steiner endures upper 90's weather in the Gulf states to work with the Gulf Restoration Network on how to mop up BP's mess and ensure it never happens again.
Meanwhile, my book The Heart of the Sound, a cautionary tale about the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska, will hit the shelves in paperback this January, 2011, from University of Nebraska Press. I'll be posting events to celebrate its release later this fall.
In a few weeks, I'll be on the road as well, presenting at the Under Western Skies conference in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. The conference is an interdisciplinary examination of the effects of and solutions to global warming in Northwestern America. It's my belief that it will take great creative vision and bravery from every part of the world and every trade and discipline to tackle this issue. As Barack Obama said when he was running for office, global warming requires all hands on deck.
Books I'm reading and rereading: Dwellings by Linda Hogan, The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger, and A Buddhist Response to the Climate Emergency, edited by John Stanley, David R. Loy, and Gyurme Dorje.
Enjoy Fall, and remember to vote!
Marybeth
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The Gulf Spill
Summer 2010
Dear Readers,
Like many of you, I've been in astonishment and grief over the ongoing gusher of oil in the Gulf of Mexico. Though in many ways this spill (if we can even call it that) is so different than the Exxon Valdez oil spill 21 years ago, the story of it seems hauntingly familiar.
Early on, I wrote an op-ed for the South Mississipi papers - I've pasted it below this letter. And this past week, my friend Michelle Wilson Nordhoff and I hosted an oil spill vigil on the Coastal Trail. See photos and writeups here: http://www.themudflats.net/2010/06/09/voices-from-the-flats-a-vigil-for-the-gulf/, http://www.ktuu.com/Global/story.asp?S=12618847, http://www.adn.com/2010/06/08/1313973/gulf-oil-spill-vigil.html.
My husband, Rick Steiner, has been there at ground zero for much of the past 6 weeks, and what he reports back is even more dire than what we're reading in the national media. So - what then can we do?
We can continue to take steps in our own lives toward lessening our carbon footprint.
But this won't be enough unless the vast majority of people do so. And that's unlikely. We need government to either lead or get out of the way.
We can demand that our government hold BP accountable, and disentangle us from the stranglehold that corporations have on our economies, communities, and lives.
We can demand that our government turn its full attention toward clean energy - energy efficiency, energy conservation, and alternative energy sources - and away from our oil addiction.
We can continue to speak up, and speak out, for what we know to be true: our life on this planet depends upon our courage, our voices, our actions.
Nothing less.
Marybeth
The BP Gulf Oil Spill: All Too Familiar
The image of the first oiled bird pulled my heart strings. It brought that sinking feeling, like my heart just dropped into my gut. That old pain. That anger. That question: will this one do it?
I see the fishermen filing their lawsuits, angrily saying they’ll make BP pay. Do they know it took 20 years for Exxon to finally pay Alaska Natives and fishermen, and that then it was just one-tenth of the initial 1994 jury verdict? Do they know thousands of those people had died before ever seeing one red cent from Exxon?
I see the beach cleanup efforts, the booms and boats and skimmers. It’s impressive, how many are out there so quickly. But do they know that after two years of cleanup efforts on the water and on the beaches, after $2 billion spent by Exxon alone, less than ten percent of the crude from the Exxon Valdez was recovered? The rest stayed in the environment—sunk into the water column, buried into sediment, washed deep between rocks, and continues to poison the fish and marine mammals of Prince William Sound.
I see the workers standing ready to rescue oiled birds, the volunteers arriving to help however they can. Thousands of volunteers came here, too. I was among them. I stood beside a woman from Connecticut, cleaning oiled sea otters. I was on a boat in Kachemak Bay, trying to capture oiled murres. I camped with volunteers from New York, working on beach cleanup efforts. Do they know, these thousands of brave and compassionate volunteers in Louisiana, how low the survival rate was here in Alaska? How we spent an average of $80,000 for every sea otter—and that’s with all the time volunteered and many materials contributed—and even then the survival rate was discouraging?
I hate to sound fatalistic. I remember all too well that feeling that there must be something I could do to stave off this disaster, to fix what we’d broken. I hear of the volunteer who is waiting to be given something to do, and sits watching images on T.V. that shows the oil spreading to all the places she loves, and I remember doing the same thing. I remember that feeling of needing to do something.
But I also remember what I concluded, after all the herculean volunteer efforts: once the oil is in the water, it’s all over. There’s very little that can be done to clean it up.
It’s all over—except for bearing witness. So my advice to our friends in Louisiana is to do that well. Whether you’re cleaning oiled birds or running a skimmer or sitting in a diner talking to fishermen, bear witness and record all the death and destruction, all the horror and heartbreak. Record it well.
And then let us use it, use the lessons from the Santa Barbara spill, the Exxon Valdez spill, and now the BP Gulf spill, to finally bring about real change, to finally end our addiction to fossil fuels and the stranglehold of mega-corporations on our seats of justice and reason, on our civil society and our environment.
We’ve known since the 1970s that this energy path was neither sustainable nor safe. We’re reaping the consequences of our failure to change course then. Just look at the toll of human lives in the last month: 29 coal miners in West Virginia, 11 rig workers in the Gulf of Mexico, 2 coal miners in Kentucky. And now the toll of fish and wildlife mounts. How many more sacrifices to the gods of fossil fuels will it take before we wake up, before our leaders create real, substantial change in our energy policy?
Let us use this disaster to usher in a new clean, green day of energy efficiency, energy conservation, and renewable energy. That’s what we can do, all of us, no matter where we stand today. We can demand a safe, sustainable energy future, without oil spills.
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Spring Equinox
2010
Dear Readers,
Spring. My garden is under four feet of snow. Hard to believe the changes I’ll witness in the coming month.
Change is the only constant, but it still throws us for a loop. Last October, my friend and Alaska wolf biologist Dr. Gordon Haber died when his plane crashed into Denali’s mountains during a research flight. Gordon was a tireless scientist and advocate for Alaska’s wolves, in the face of incredible resistance from Alaska’s Board of Game and Department of Fish and Game. His website, www.alaskawolves.org, is a must-read for anyone interested in knowing the truth about the lives of wild wolves.
Several of us, from across Alaska, banded together and tried to get the Board of Game to create a buffer adjacent to Denali National Park – the buffer Gordon first proposed in 1972 – to protect those wolf families most often seen by the hundreds of thousands of park tourists from being trapped and shot when they forayed outside park boundaries in winter. We failed. Worse, the Board removed the sliver of existing buffer, so the wolves are now more at risk than ever. See my opinion piece about this buffer at the Anchorage Daily News online.
We have our work cut out for us. If you’re interested in learning more, email me.
Balancing activism—the urge to do something direct now—and writing—the creative work that will, in the long haul, foster change—is always a challenge for me. But it’s a challenge I love.
My essay, “From the Ground,” first published in Alaska Quarterly Review Spring/Summer 2007, is included in the new anthology To Everything on Earth: New Writing on Fate, Community, and Nature (http://www.ttup.ttu.edu/Book%20Pages/9780896726550.html).
Some books I’m reading and re-reading: The Gangster We Are All Looking For by le thi diem thuy, Approaching Ice by Elizabeth Bradfield, and The Maytrees by Annie Dillard.
Enjoy the returning light -
Marybeth
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