I visit the Oregon coast annually, staying longer each time. The stay in September 2023, lingered into October and I fell into a rhythm of writing, a poets dream.
Life provides a variety of roles and titles, some easy, others challenging, many out of necessity to survive. Each revealing an intangible resilience, daring me to shed shame and take comfort. When I am in Oregon on extended stays, this resilience becomes soft, it explains things to me on the trail, a language the trees and I understand. My poems become a conversation with a person I recognize, the daughter of pine needles. I need time to map out this family tree.
Chores are a welcome friend to a writer, providing structure and accountability to the hazy ponderances of, what the hell am I doing? I am no stranger to a task list, be it indoors or out. Have you ever met someone who willingly took up residence in a tipi during a blizzard, -5 degrees, cooking game hen and frozen veggies on a wood stove? It is my hope to unfold during this residency program. I am a student of the wild.
Above is a brief description of why this residency appeals to me and what experiences might suit me for it. Below is an edited sample of where I believe this residency can take me.
Observation is an education free of charge, a school of ones mind. I remember as a young girl, each new academic year, the intoxicating mixture of melancholy and excitement. Two seasons of my young mind, colliding, recognized with pen and paper in my very first poem, I am Sad.
Back then, you could smell the onset of September in California. A season lasting only days. Rain falling before hills caught fire on Halloween, sad, but palpable. A reliable sensory imprint of color, texture, aroma that validated enrollment to elements beyond semesters.
I come from a place where heritage was severed. I have no choice but to leave my daughters a family tree able to root in the fertile ground of invitation. Who is to say that intuition and perception are not DNA? My poems are like field notes scribbled from the study of a hushed sky. My real mothers name is pine needle. She is waiting for me to come home and share my dissertation of discovery, a collection of memory that thrived like the sunny dandelion bursting from a crack in the sidewalk. It is time to blow in the wind, my father, who carries us all along, inviting curiosity and awe.
They understand the climate of my soul that inhabits dancing ferns and raging storms. Like ships on the horizon, I listen for the lullaby of the moon, swaying to her amniotic flow, through the dense fog of that first poem, I am Sad, knowing it is a temporary kind of permanence.
There is something about the Pacific Northwest that calls me back. Like an alum, reunion reveals two familiar seasons, solitude and belonging, magnetic fields that tug at my bones, begging them to rip open and write their song.
My hope is to navigate new and existing poetry, resulting in a linguistic, genealogical, roadmap for my daughters. For all sons and daughters who need permission to study the wilderness of themselves. Permission to see their own softness when they reach down and pick up the molted feather of a mourning dove and ask, what happens to her at night? What is beyond the wingspan of myself, how far can I fly?
Always Writing,
Kathie
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