This is The Creative Way on the Jefferson Exchange.I'm Vanessa Finney.Writer Ellen Waterston has just begun her two-year term as Oregon's 11th Poet Laureate.
She talked with me recently from her home in Bend to share how she plans to use this role to reach into rural communities as well as bring poets of all ages together.
She also described the strong influence that teachers and the landscape can have on writers. So Ellen, poet laureates are chosen partly based on their own body of work and partly for their activities in the world of literature.
So I wanted to start by taking a look at how you've been serving that community.Tell me about the Writing Ranch and then the Waterston Desert Writing Prize.
Well, I have been dedicated to the literary arts basing out of the high desert, which is my muse as a writer.But I launched a nonprofit in
basically 2000, I started the Writing Ranch in 2000, which is a for-profit and leads writing workshops and retreats for emerging and established authors.
But I also started two years later, The Nature of Words, which ran for 13 years as a literary arts nonprofit, a literary festival in every November featuring well-known authors and poets from around the world, really.
And then during the year, offered workshops at a literary art center in Bend for students after school for free.And we conducted creative writing workshops in high schools and social welfare programs all over the place, really, during that run.
The Nature of Words morphed into what is the Waterston Desert Writing Prize now, and that ran for five years before being adopted as a program of the High Desert Museum.
It is much more focused than The Nature of Words in that it honors and recognizes a nonfiction book proposal about a desert anywhere in the world. and awards a cash prize and a retreat experience for the writer, the winner.
And it will be celebrating its 10th birthday this month.
Congratulations on all that.You've been quite the literary citizen.
Do you have any favorite memories in any of those endeavors, whether it was really seeing somebody light up in a workshop or go on after receiving a prize to really have a terrific writing career?
Well, I experienced those moments both in the workshops that the Writing Ranch runs, particularly each summer somewhere out in the high desert and in each February on the Baja, the idea being that the landscape itself sort of sabotages or ambushes what people think they came to write or what they ought to write.
And I love the effect of landscape on I think we've all, you know, we write slightly differently when we're sitting in a rainforest or out in a desert as opposed to our office or our coffee shop downtown that we favor.
So it truly is a magical thing, and I think writers, having the opportunity to get together for a minute, you feel as though you've found your tribe, if briefly.
Everybody experiences a little sadness when it's over, and they have to go back to the favorite coffee shop and the job and all the rest. In terms of the nonprofits, it's very similar to that.
It was a far broader invitation in that the emphasis was on the guest authors who came, but regardless of their fame and fortune, they were obliged to conduct a workshop during the festival weekend.And, you know, that was electric, electric.
And, of course, then throughout the year, offering the workshops, the staff of the Nature Awards, myself included, would dispatch ourselves you know, across the region to offer additional workshops.And it's the same thing.
You know, you're blowing on pilot lights, suddenly something wonderful occurs.And, you know, it's just a great pleasure.And the hope is that that ignition carries them forward for a period of time.
Yes.Let's hear some of your work.You have a poem that you'd like to share with us?
I do.I have one that might be a good one as we head into fall.It's about a sunflower.
It's hurrying the fall a little bit, but never mind that.November sunflower stands like stork, stubborn on one thin yellowed stalk.Serrated head slung slack, hangman's fracture.
Her beaded orb cast downward, spent seeds tumble groundward from its single round eyeball.
intent on one socket of dirt in front of its craned pencil foot, as if sheer willing pods of unfinished flower business beneath insulating leaf, mud, snow, so that patiently, later, not now, when March looses the jellied hold, first stirs the buried soggy resolve, when all that's left
of the brittle-maned lioness is rotted, crumpled, hellness.This hunched cyclops will have stared down the earth and won the right to another round.
What a vision.Ellen, have you found that you've always gravitated toward nature, describing it in words?
Was there an aha moment when you were a young person where someone else's poem really grabbed you or that you realized, I can render this thing in the landscape onto the page and share it?
Well, I have to credit, it just sounds sort of trite, but I did have that wonderful high school English teacher.And I remember being encouraged in creative writing at that time.
And I took an assignment and I wrote some little phrase about throwing a book bag down the hallway, this character in whatever little fiction I was inventing, and that the book bag twitched in the air before it landed.
And I thought, oh my gosh, you know, I've created an action, I've described it, it's suspended in the air during in this moment of this sentence, it's suspended in the air, and the whole thing just seemed rather magical.
I guess the response to that would be, I need to get out more often.It didn't take much to get me excited.But yes, there are these moments.Also, I grew up in the country, in New England, and so had lots of nature to explore.
Frozen lakes in the winter, black ice, woods, orchards, and so I think
you know, sort of God help us all that our relationship with the out of doors is a little bit compromised, in any case, has a lot of competition, given cell phones and computers and everything else.
If you're just joining us, this is The Creative Way on the Jefferson Exchange.I'm Vanessa Finney talking with Ellen Waterston, who's just starting a two year term as Oregon's 11th Poet Laureate.
Ellen, you write poetry and prose, and I noticed at least two of your works were inspired by walking.
You have Walking the High Desert, Encounters with Rural America Along the Oregon Desert Trail, and a novel in verse, I believe, called Via Lactea, about the Camino de Santiago, which is a trail followed by perhaps millions of pilgrims over the centuries.
What arises for you when you're walking in nature that makes you want to put that experience down on the page?
You know, I think it's not all that difficult to understand why walking, going from point A to point B, is a structural device in writing, whether it's prose or poetry, and whether it's contained within a poem or within a short story or extended out over a longer piece of writing.
So I think there are many devices that writers use to hold the telling together and for the writer to kind organize how they'll unfold their thinking about it.
Because given the writer's want, there's generally more going on than just the walking itself.But one of the lines in the Alactea that relates to this is that the great poet Antonio Machada said, the footstep is the path.
You know, I did the Camino de Frances, parts of it.We started in Paris and went westward, ended up in Santiago as part of a month-long trip with which I graduated college.
And I'm just flashing back to a lot of the younger students were very chatty on the trail.And I remember the teacher leaders purposefully saying, OK, I'm going to separate you.
You need to just be silent and think while you walk during those footsteps.And I thought that was really important.You're from the East Coast, as you mentioned.
Here in Oregon, what would you say the landscape, no pun intended, is like for poetry and literature?You know, people might know about the Portland Book Festival, but how would you describe the literary life here in other ways?
Well, we all know that the literary life and activity is vibrant up and down the valley area. of the state of Oregon.
And I think thanks to the cultural hub of Ashland, there's a variety of expressions of the power of the word on stage and in readings and literary events in Ashland.
I think that the vast part of the state, three quarters of it, which lies on the other side of the Cascades and is referred to as the high desert or Oregon's outback, and it also actually travels all the way up to northeastern Oregon in the Wallows.
So there are these oases of very strong literary activity, such as fish trap in the Wallows.And Bend obviously is more of a cultural center for that high desert region.But I think that the thing to underscore is that despite the distances and
And despite the competition, all the ways people can access books or get books, I have to say that my sense in these, as I say, these sort of oases, the independent bookstore is alive and well, very, very active with readings.
The state universities that have branch campuses, whether it's in La Grande or here with Oregon State University, they have active events in and around the literary arts as well.
So no competition for the valley, but I am delighted that the governor saw fit to put the spotlight on this part of the state with this appointment and this enormous honor.
And may I say, I feel a real responsibility to carrying this message, the great privilege of living in a state that values the word enough to appoint somebody every two years or four or however long the term lasts, to carry the word out.
And each Poet Laureate has had their own vision and style.What can't you wait to do during your term as Poet Laureate?
Well, it's new.As you know, the announcement of this position was delayed a bit.
And as I formulate this, I spoke to a former Poet Laureate, Kim Stafford, and he said, be careful because you both, once you want a plan, and on the other hand, you want it to allow to define itself organically.
What I do know is that I plan on reaching every region of the state in some form, and I mean in person by that statement, and that I both want to work with and feature young poets, middle or high school age, depending on how things settle for each community.
But I also want to, since I am a card-carrying member, of the class of women of a certain age, I want to feature elders as well.
And I would love to have us be side by side in the communities I visit when that's possible, because I think there is an exchange there that would be a very exciting one to bring those voices together.
Also, because I spent a long time living out in the desert, away from Bend, I hope to pay close attention to rural communities in my travels, whether in the valley or on this side of the mountains.
So that's sort of the broad brush, and I'm very, very excited about it and look forward to getting on the road once this initial upswelling of interest and more kind of interviews such as this and that sort of opportunity to introduce myself.
It sounds very inclusive, your vision does.We have time for one more reading.Can you share one more poem with us?
Yes.I mean, this one is not about nature particularly, but I do think it underscores close observation.I wrote it when I learned of my father's death and it's titled, Cropped Short.Once I had hair to my waist and when finally I had it cut short,
I still, for the longest time, ran my brush past where the cropped strands now so abruptly ended, moving it carefully through the imaginary locks to avoid tangles.They may as well have been real.That's how it feels to have you gone.
Ellen Waterston, the current Oregon Poet Laureate.Thank you for talking with me today and good luck with connecting with communities throughout Oregon, both old and young, rural and city.
Thank you so much, Vanessa.What a privilege.
You've been listening to The Creative Way on the Jefferson Exchange.I'm Vanessa Finney, and my guest was Oregon's newly announced poet laureate, Ellen Waterston.You can hear more episodes at jefexchange.org or on your favorite podcast platform.
That's it for today's exchange.jefexchange.org is our website where you can find these conversations and more, or you can subscribe to our shows wherever you get your podcasts.Thanks for joining us and have a great day.
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