Terry Tempest Williams' "When Women Were Birds: Fifty-Four Variations on Voice"

Terry Tempest Williams reads from "When Women Were Birds" at Bellingham High School on Thursday, June 21; $5. Co-sponsored by Village Books and North Cascades Institute.

 In recent years, Terry Tempest Williams has written about patriotism and democracy in America, Italian mosaics, the Sundance Film Festival, Rwandan genocide and Hieronymus Bosch's fifteenth-century Flemish masterpiece, The Garden of Delights. Not bad for a so-called “nature writer.”

In her latest book WhenWomen Were Birds: Fifty-Four Variations on Voice, the author returns to some of the themes found in Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place, her highly-regarded 1991 environmental memoir that intertwines reflections on family, mortality and the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge near her home in Salt Lake City.

The opening pages depict Williams’ mother, dying of ovarian cancer, passing on to her writerly daughter her lifetime collection of personal journals. The mother makes Williams promise not to read them until after she is gone. When that time comes to pass, Williams finds a plethora of colorful, clothbound journals:

The spines of each were perfectly aligned against the lip of the shelves. I opened the first journal. It was empty. I opened the second journal. It was empty. I opened the third. It, too, was empty, as was the fourth, the fifth, the sixth – shelf after shelf after shelf, all my mother's journals were blank.

When Women Were Birds then is an investigation in to the mystery of all those white, untrammeled pages. As the story unfurls from this startling prelude, Williams explores the power of silence, Mormon culture, marriage, feminism, a supernatural history of birds, relationships between mothers and daughters and grandmothers and granddaughters and the central question, “What does it mean to have a voice?”

The narrative toggles between short, distinct stories from Williams’ life – how her Mormon ancestors came to settle in Utah, learning bird songs as a young girl with her grandmother, meeting her husband Brooke, studying natural history in the Grand Tetons – and more emotive meditations that aren’t bound by conventional logic.

Anyone who has read Williams mesmerizing literature before knows to expect a wide-ranging, unconventional and empathic journey. This one touches upon experimental composer John Cage, the extinct Chinese language Nushu, writer Wallace Stegner, Navajo mythology, a battle for wilderness legislation in the US Congress, Richard Strauss’ operas and her beloved Southern Utah red rock wilderness. In a holistic feat similar to Annie Dillard’s For the Time Being, the author successfully makes comprehensive and connected what the reader may have previously imagined disparate. This is the kind of book that changes the ways in which we see the world.

Still, beneath Williams’ intriguing meanderings, the presence of the blank journals haunt the reader.

My mother’s journals are a love story. Love and power. What she gave and what she withheld were hers to choose. Love is power. Power is not love. Both can be brutal. Both dance with control. Both can be intoxicating, leaving us out of control. But in the end it is love, not power, that endures and shows us the consequences of our choices. My mother chose me as the recipient of her pages, empty pages. She left me her “Cartographies of Silence.” I will never know her story. I will never know what she was trying to tell me by telling me nothing.

But I can imagine.

It is an enjoyable feat to behold the nimble mind of Williams dancing across time and terrain, flitting from topic to topic like a bird from branch to branch, her graceful and poetic prose the airborne track of her compassionate inquiry.

-- Reviewed by Christian Martin

Tony Angell is For the Birds

Artist, educator, writer and conservationalist celebrates life of the Puget Sound

Watchful ravens standing sentinel at the entrance to the Mt. Baker Ski Area. A soaring bald eagle and playful river otters at the North Cascades Environmental Learning Center on Diablo Lake.  A parliament of owls gathered on the Whatcom Community College campus.

Whatcom County is fortunate to have Tony Angell’s inspired avian sculptures adding beauty and grace to our local land- and cityscapes. These iconic pieces join noetworthy installations at the Seattle Aquarium, Woodland Park Zoo, Tacoma Art Museum, The Sleeping Lady resort and countless public libraries and schools throughout Washington, not to mention Cornell University and the renowned Museum of Wildlife Art in Jackson, Wyoming.

Under the influence of his powerful hands – Angell is a former University of Washington shot-putter, discuss-thrower and arm-wrestling champ – blocks of granite, onyx, marble, chlorite, limestone and serpentine reveal sinuous shapes of Pacific Northwest wildlife, often birds, but also orcas, turtles, salmon, salamanders and other denizens of our region.

“(While) I do address matters of detail and I am generally sensitive to accuracy of my detail, I don’t put a lot of it into my work,” Angell once explained in a radio interview. “What I am trying to do is emphasize the spiritual side of the subject.”

 

Angell is also a gifted wildlife illustrator, and has just published Gifts of the Crow: How Perception, Emotion,and Thought Allow Smart Birds to Behave Like Humans, a follow-up to 2005’s In the Company of Crows and Ravens. Both volumes are a collaboration with John Marzluff, Professor in the School of Environmental and Forest Sciences at the UW, bringing together the artistry and field naturalist skills of Angell with the scientific expertise of Marzluff to examine the fascinating, uncanny world of corvid behavior, the bird family that includes ravens, crows, jays, magpies and nutcrackers

Raised in the dry topography of Southern California, Angell fell in love with the natural world at a young age while hiking the Santa Monica Mountains, birdwatching, keeping snakes and reptiles in his room, even studying taxidermy so he could learn the inner workings of animals. Moving to Washington as a teenager, his intimate relationship with wildlife continued as he rehabilitated owls, trained falcons and hawks and built a rustic cabin on Lopez Island where he observed the marine mammals and migratory birds of the Salish Sea.

Alongside his prolific career as an artist, Angell is an elected Fellow of the National Sculpture Society and an active board member of Washington's chapter of The Nature Conservancy and he served as Director of Environmental Education for the state of Washington for 30 years.

“Angell's work is known for how it combines elegance and strength,” an art critic for The Seattle Times wrote, “but it is most remarkable in how it represents the convergence of his personality, passion and life…. Seattle novelist Ivan Doig describes him as ‘a rushing river threatening to break its banks.’”

A generous selection of his sculptural and illustrative work was collected alongside essays and commentary in PugetSound Through An Artist’s Eye, published in 2009 by University of Washington Press. He described the book as “an invitation to enjoy the world artistically, and in a way, inspire other people to be artists. Because there are plenty of people out there who can use art as their avenue of discovery and action and commitment and enjoyment of living here. Once you do that, you’ve invested in what’s here.”

But why is Angell so invested in corvids?

“When a raven was given to me many years ago, it soon became my most important emissary from the larger world of nature,” he explains. “My friend the raven “gifted” me a richer understanding of Nature in general and animal behavior in particular. They have given us fuel for our myths, song, literature, music, dance, painting, and sculpture over tens of thousands of years -- gifts beyond measure.  Now science is just beginning to discover other gifts they have to offer us.

“Sometimes we hear people say, there are only two ways of looking at a crow, “you either love them or hate them,” he continues. “From our book I would hope that these two attitudinal poles might be replaced with a more middle ground of admiration for these special birds. I would hope that the readers, while seeing these species as a revealing subject for scientific discovery, would also consider them to be exceptional sources of subtle beauty and provocative emotional possibilities.  Should one apply his or her artistic mind to the corvids, the aesthetic gifts will be great.”

Gary Snyder on Ish River Country

Gary Snyder at Bellingham High School, 2004

"In the fall of 2004, I heard Gary Snyder read from his most recent collection of poems, Danger on Peaks.  In a calm, steady tone, Snyder delivered his selection to what is likely the most attentive audience that the Bellingham High School auditorium has ever boasted. His poetry is renowned for its ability to arrest and articulate specific moments in nature.  The simplicity and clarity of Snyder’s rendering almost masks the careful rhythm, which implicitly structures his voice.  His work blends respect for the natural world with Zen Buddhist thought, achieving truly innovative modes of telling.

Snyder was born in San Francisco and grew up in the Pacific Northwest.  Over the years he has undertaken many endeavors:  he was a logger in his youth, he studied anthropology at Reed College, then Chinese language at Berkeley, and Buddhism while living in Japan.  In the late 1950s, he was influential in the Beat Generation/San Francisco Movements (along with Ginsberg and Kerouac).  Snyder is now the critically acclaimed author of sixteen collections of poetry and prose and was awarded numerous literary prizes, including a Guggenheim fellowship (1968) and the Pulitzer Prize (1975).  Until recently, he taught Creative Writing and literature as a professor at UC-Davis.

Snyder and I met on the morning following his reading in the lobby of the Fairhaven Inn in Bellingham....

Anne Greenfield:  You mention Bellingham in Mountains and Rivers Without End and, more recently, in Danger on Peaks.  How did you come to know Bellingham and how has this relationship changed over time?

Gary Snyder:  I was raised on a little dairy farm just north of Seattle, through the thirties and up early into WWII.  The country between Seattle and the Canadian border was mostly dairy farming or logging in those days. We had a little dairy farm, so in our spare time when we wanted to go out and travel and look at things we would go look at dairy farms.  That would bring us all the way up here once or twice to Bellingham, Sedro-Woolley, up the Skagit Valley, Mount Vernon, and back down.  That’s my first memory of Bellingham.

Later, from the age of fifteen on, I started mountaineering.  And one of those summers (I think 1946 or 1947) I came up with some Mazamas (a climbing group from Portland, Oregon) to climb Mount Baker. And I worked in the forest service, up the Skagit, in the summers of 1952 and 1953, when it was still the Mt. Baker National forest.  I often came to Bellingham with friends, particularly one friend who I’m going to meet for dinner tonight: Jack Francis, who’s lived in Bellingham all these years. I came through here with Alan Ginsberg in 1966 on my way to British Columbia.

So, Bellingham has been in my consciousness as part of Ish Country (the Puget Sound region) and the culture of Maritime Northwest Pacific.

AG:  Speaking of sense of place, much of your work is grounded in and speaks to location and specific places.  In fact, your recent collection takes up the 1980 blast at Mount St. Helens.  Have the recent eruptions there triggered anything new for you?

GS:  Well more thoughts of the same. Pacific Rim Circle of fire:  the chain of volcanic activity down the west coast as far south as Mount Lassen, actually as far south as Mono Lake.  The actual instability of the earth’s crust and that fact that every volcano that exists on the west coast is more apt to erupt again than any place that doesn’t exist as a volcano already.  Mt. St. Helens – if you look at its history- which I did – erupts every few centuries. It has been erupting every few centuries for some time.  Mt. Rainier is quite capable of doing a major eruption at any time.  So this is part of our life here. Except, being very short lived creatures, human beings, and being new to the region – that is to say the present American population has only been here for a hundred and fifty years – we don’t have much consciousness of it. I am exploring what that consciousness would tell us. So, having some recent events at Mt. St. Helens is hardly surprising.  It’s part of the story and the story goes on.  Who knows what comes next?

AG: Danger on Peaks has been deemed your “most personal collection yet.”  To what degree do you see your poems as autobiographical?

GS:  I’ve never written autobiographical poetry as such. On the other hand, whatever one does in poetry has to be grounded in deep personal experience.  But personal experience is not necessarily autobiographical experience because we are all vertebrate mammals.  And we live in very much the same body and the very same mind. To be grounded in your body is not autobiographical.  And to be aware of the world is our mutual heritage, but not everybody sees it immediately and clearly.  Which is something that my own artistic inclination, plus my Buddhist practice, pushes me towards: mindfulness in the present moment."



From "Grasping the Natural: A Conversation with Gary Snyder" by Anne Greenfield, published in 2004 in the Bellingham Review. Photo copyright Christian Martin.

Tom Robbins live from the Boundary Bay Brewery Beer Garden!

Video & photos by S. Glackman. Editing by me. If you like this, check out my Tom Robbins interview 'zine at http://magcloud.com/browse/Issue/14846 !

Darius Kinsey, Photographer

Ansel Adams of the Pacific Northwest

You have to wonder what drove Darius Kinsey to sojourn away from the comforts of his stately 12-room Seattle home to enter the dripping, dark primeval forests of the Pacific Northwest so incessantly. Over the course of two decades, he was frequently finding excuses to jump a train or motor coach north out of the city to return to the logging camps, shantytowns, deep groves and snowy summits of the Cascadian back-of-beyond. Of course, he always packed along his large-format camera and crates of negatives with him. The tools of his art lent purpose to his wanderings.

Traveling through the untamed Northwest undergrowth, with its thickets of devil's club, vine maples and salal and ankle-twisting maze of downed and decomposing old-growth trees, was seldom an easy affair, and Kinsey didn't travel light. His 11x14 Eastman View camera weighed around 15 pounds and the large 20x24 inch glass negative plates were both fragile and unwieldy. The Skagit Courier reports in 1902 that Kinsey traveled with over 250 pounds of photographic gear to shoot one remarkable Doug Fir.

Even though his Eastman View was advertised as "an excellent camera of strong and substantial construction," it is doubtful that many Kodak customers pushed their equipment to the extremes that Kinsey did: shooting in all vagrancies of weather, crawling up and down fern-choked gorges, teetering across the goat trails of hard rock miners.

"For Kinsey," explains the Whatcom Museum of History and Art website, "finding the perfect shot sometimes meant dodging avalanches, crossing crevasses and jumping over rattlesnakes."

If he wasn't lugging around his camera, which occasionally was an even-heavier 20x24 model, he could be found next to waterfalls or a cedar shake cabin experimenting in the improvised arts of taking stereo-camera shots, making glass lantern slide images and capturing panoramic perspectives with his "Cirkut" camera, a self-revolving 50-pound behemoth that spooled out negatives 10 inches wide and 20 feet long.

The breadth of Kinsey's work gives off a sense of restlessness matched by an insatiable curiosity. I imagine a man who, so in awe of the raw landscape around him, couldn't sit still. The Whatcom Museum notes that even on family trips to the wood, Kinsey "was known to jump out of the car on a moment’s notice, set up his equipment on the shoulder of the road or disappear up a trail."



Kinsey is most well known for the record he created of the Pacific Northwest logging culture. His photos immortalize tableaus of mustachioed men in tin pants and suspenders, buckers crosscutting fallen cedars, horses slipping down skid roads, shake-splitters retiring to their smoldering stump huts and steam engines traversing massive trestles.

"Through a fifty-year career in photography," museum archivist Jeff Jewell recently explained to me, "Kinsey captured the monumental interaction between men, machinery and mammoth trees that defined early logging in northwest Washington."

Though he created a visual history of our corner of the continent majestic in scope, Kinsey's work isn’t simply about quantity or the dry assemblage of a historical record. There is a majestic, bold and original artistic quality to the prints he produced that calls to mind the similarly stunning work of Ansel Adams. Both share the same palette of rich inky blackness and the thousand subtle shades of grey, the shockingly sharp detail and eye for dramatic composition. Much like Adams and his beloved Yosemite Valley, Kinsey’s work presents the Northwest woods as a cathedral. There is a sense of architecture, space and depth, and a somber, serious light in many of his prints of the forest.

The Whatcom Museum, which holds and tends the world's largest Kinsey archive, has recently put on display 38 Kinsey prints, 21 of which have never been displayed in public before. Many of the “new” images are donations from locals who have found Kinsey pieces among their family possessions – large format negatives, photographs and an extremely rare custom album of 11x14 original prints.

“The real star of the exhibit is a four piece panoramic of a lumber mill with workers and their families, circa 1910,” says Jewell. “It's from four original photographs that revealed how Kinsey shot a series of 11" x 14" negatives that, once printed, (his wife) Tabitha could match and glue together as a panoramic image. It was an aspect of the Kinseys' work that was unknown until the donation of these photographs to the Whatcom Museum in 2003.”



“Some photographers take reality... and impose the domination of their own thought and spirit,” Adams once remarked. “Others come before reality more tenderly and a photograph to them is an instrument of love and revelation.” Kinsey, as revealed in his sensitive body of work, falls in the later camp. Those of us fascinated by the history of the Pacific Northwest – and in love with the forest -- are all the more fortunate for it.

photos copyright Whatcom Museum of History and Art.