Written River Winter Solstice Issue 2011 Now in Print
Due to popular demand: Written River’s Winter Solstice issue is now available in print!
Loosely based around the theme of “mountains,” this issue features an interview by Frank Owen from Bodhiyatra Poetry with the filmmakers of Shugendō Now.
Poets Andrea Witzke Slot, Robin Scofield, T. Parker Sanborn, Francine Tolk, Frank Owen, Jenny Ward Angyal, Peter Neil Carroll, William Cullen, Jr. and J.K. McDowell join their voices to speak to the mystery and mind of mountains, earth and what it means to be human.
Also featured in this issue is landscape photography by Duncan George, Jamie K. Reaser and Teresa Conner.
Immerse your mind in the wildness of mountain with Written River!
Go to Magcloud to Buy Your Copy
Review of Western Solstice Featured in Zoland Poetry
A Review of Western Solstice by Leonore Wilson recently featured in Zoland Poetry
Review by Kent Leatham
Three thousand miles away from Mazur’s shifting sands and cityscapes of New England, Leonore Wilson has set her first book of poems, Western Solstice, firmly in the fecund backcountry of central California. Wilson lives and writes on her family’s 96-year-old, 1,200-acre cattle ranch draped across the foothills overlooking Napa Valley’s famous wine country, and, like countless generations of California writers before her, the geography has gotten into her blood. “We are now in the [Sierra Nevada] mountains and they are in us,” wrote the naturalist John Muir in 1911, “beauty beyond thought everywhere, beneath, above, made and being made forever.” The segue is almost invisible between Muir describing a visit to Yosemite as “the first time I have been at church in (more...)
Now Available: Border Crossings
Border Crossings: Walking the Haiku Path on the International Appalachian Trail by Ian Marshall has been released! The book is currently available in Hiraeth’s online bookstore and will be coming to Amazon, Barnes & Noble and other outlets next week.
Border Crossings follows Ian Marshall on his journey over the International Appalachian Trail, which runs from Mt. Katahdin in Maine up through New Brunswick and out to the tip of Quebec’s Gaspé Peninsula. Countless books have been done to chronicle the individual’s communion with nature, from the classics written by naturalists such as Henry David Thoreau or John Muir, to the more contemporary offerings such as Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer and A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson; however Border Crossings stands out as unique among its fellows. Composed of Haiku and contemplative prose Border Crossings is book of braided styles: poetry, prose and travel writing. This style, as the author explains, is akin to that of haibun — a style of writing made popular by such Japanese poets as Matsuo Bashō that merges poetic and meditative prose, literary criticism and cultural meditation.
First Pages of Border Crossings by Ian Marshall
Next week, on February 24th, we will celebrate the release of Border Crossings: Walking the Haiku Path on the International Appalachian Trail by Ian Marshall. But we thought, instead of making you wait until then to begin reading, we would give you the first few pages to savor. Enjoy!
L.M. Browning Interviews Don Hudson of the International Appalachian Trail
- Matane Gaspésie Photo by Will Richard
Each year Hiraeth Press donates 1% of its annual profits to an eco-charity. Our 2011 we lent our support to the Sierra Club. This year, in honor of Border Crossings: Walking the Haiku Path on the International Appalachian Trail by Ian Marshall, we have chosen the International Appalachian Trail as the 2012 recipient.
Most of you are familiar with the Appalachian Trail or the “AT” as it is known, which runs from Springer Mountain, Georgia north through fourteen states to Mount Katahdin in Baxter State Park, Maine; roughly 2,180 miles in all. The lesser-known sister trail to the AT is the International Appalachian Trail/ Sentier International des Appalaches or (IAT/SIA). The IAT picks up at Mount Katahdin and extends northward winding its way to Crow Head in Newfoundland; adding an additional 1800 miles of hiking trails as it follows the remainder of the Appalachian Mountains in North American.
Many believe that the Appalachian Mountains end in Maine where the AT ends, when in fact the range stretches through North America and across the Atlantic Ocean. As the IAT community explains: “The Appalachian Mountains were formed more than 250 Million years ago during the Paleozoic Era, when the Earth’s plates collided to form the supercontinent Pangea. They straddled the central part of that continent in what is today eastern North America, eastern Greenland, Western Europe, and northwest Africa. When today’s continents separated to form the Atlantic Ocean, remnants of the Appalachians ended up in the eastern United States, eastern Canada, Greenland, Scandinavia, the British Isles, Brittany, the Iberian Peninsula, and the Atlas Mountains of Morocco and Algeria.”
On Earth Day 1994 Governor Joe Brennan announced his intention to establish what is now the IAT. It began as an idea to create a trail that would link the highest peaks in Maine, New Brunswick and Quebec. The project has since grown beyond what those initially involved could have ever hoped for. Since 1995 the trail has been extended north twice. Originally the end of the trail was at Mont Jacques Cartier in Quebec but a new trail was made pushing east, bringing the end to the Gaspé Peninsula at Cap Gaspé. Then, in 2002, the trail was expanded again upon a request from a Newfoundland delegation, up through the Appalachians of Newfoundland to Belle Isle. At present, the trail is nearly 1800 miles long.
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Don Hudson
Over the last weeks, in the course of promoting for Border Crossings, I was given the opportunity to work with members of the IAT Board of Directors. Seeking an authority on the trail, I was directed to Donald Hudson — President of the Maine Chapter and a founding member of the IAT. Together with Richard Anderson — a past President of the IAT, Mr. Hudson has in a quite literal sense, been working to blaze the trail.
Listing Donald’s achievements is no small thing. He first developed an interest in plants and ecology in the early 1970s while leading expeditions for the Chewonki Foundation in Maine and Quebec. He graduated from Dartmouth College in 1972 with a degree in French and Environmental Studies. He earned a Master’s degree from the University of Vermont and a Ph.D. from Indiana University. Don became the Head Naturalist at Chewonki in 1982, was appointed President in 1991, retiring in July 2010.
Don is a founding member of the International Appalachian Trail, the Friends of Baxter State Park and the Maine Green Campus Consortium. He is currently Chair of the Allagash Wilderness Waterway Advisory Council. He received the Green Heart award from the Quimby Family Foundation in 2009. Then in 2010 he was bestowed an Environmental Merit Lifetime Achievement award from the US EPA, the Distinguished Service Award from the University of Maine at Machias, the Espy Conservation Award from the Maine Land Trust Network and an Outdoor Hero Award from LL Bean.
Former Maine Commissioner of the Department of Conservation, Dick Anderson conceived the idea in October 1993 and asked Chloe Chunn, Dick Davies and me to help. Dick and I had traveled to the Chic Choc Mountains on the Gaspé in 1988 and had talked there about the common origin of the landscape and ecological communities. I suspect that trip might have helped the idea of the trail to gel in Dick’s mind. A few months later, on Earth Day, April 22, 1994, Governor Joe Brennan announced the plan.
Hudson: I met Dick in 1988 when he invited me to accompany a group of wildlife biologist on that trip to the Chic Choc Mountains on the Gaspé. Dick was managing a caribou reintroduction project in Maine, and the group was interested to visit a place where caribou are still a part of the wildlife community. Dick thought that my experience with Arctic/alpine plant communities – the source of much of the food that the Chic Choc caribou eat – might be a help to the group. We stayed in touch through the years (more...)
Ian Marshall | Ripples Blog Series
To conclude our exploration of hiraeth, we offer you a piece by Ian Marshall, author of Border Crossings: Walking the Haiku Path on the International Appalachian Trail. This is the final post in this chapter of the Ripples Blog Series. Border Crossings is set to be Hiraeth Press’ first book of 2012; it will be released in just a few short weeks on February 24th.
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Hiraeth
by Ian Marshall
Hiraeth: “longing”; “homesickness.” To long for something means that it is not present; to be homesick means you are away from home. The notion puts us in the position of Odysseus, the hero whose name has become synonymous with wandering — all in the name of trying to get back home. We have a bit of a fetish for home, don’t we? Especially those of us who care about the natural world. We want to restore landscapes, return them to the way they once were. We speak of the natural world as our home, the setting in which, for which, our senses, our whole beings have evolved. I think of a project I did with a class this past semester, where we read Henry Thoreau’s Walden and as an experiment in experiential learned built a replica of Thoreau’s cabin at Walden Pond. And what is a cabin but a home and a symbol of a grounded life?
But I wonder if the wandering isn’t just as much a part of our genetic make-up as the desire to be settled and at home is. Our ancestors, prior to the Agricultural Revolution, were likely nomadic, wandering from place to place, following the migrations, heading out for the spot where they knew the berries were ripening, or where the water source was reliable during a dry season.
The truth is we like to wander just as much as we like to return home. The exercise of the muscles as you walk along the path, the rhythms of the road, the excitement of encountering the unfamiliar — we respond to that. And doesn’t the accompanying longing for home add a certain poignancy to the travelling? That element of something absent — the knowledge that at the end of the road lie the comforts of home — doesn’t that add some emotional depth to the journey?
Ah, but here’s the rub — the blister on the hiker’s heel. We can’t do both at once, can we? We can’t be at home and on the road at the same time. We can yearn for home when we’re on the road, and we can feel the itch to be on the road again when we’re at home — but we can never have it all. There’s a law of nature inherent in all this — maybe it’s Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, which says that in the realm of subatomic particles we can measure the position of a particle, and we can measure its velocity, but when we find one we lose the other.
Maybe now I’m leaving the realm of science and entering the realm of philosophy — specifically Buddhist thought, with its sense that existence is marked by suffering, dissatisfaction, and desire. Always, it seems, there is the longing for where you are not at the moment. Is it too quirky to believe that there is something to savor in the longing for that which is absent? Part of the joy of a journey is the planning beforehand (when you’re still at home), the reflection afterward (when you’ve gotten back home), just as part of the thrill of the road comes from the anticipation of the return home.
Our nomadic ancestors, it occurs to me now, may not have been much angst-ridden while they were out wandering. For while they may well have travelled a great deal, they likely did so in circuits repeated annually — a trip to the seacoast for salt, a trip to the mountains for berries, to a sheltered valley for the winter. It was all home, and every long, longing step was a return.
We will be starting up the series again later on in the year with a fresh theme and new perspectives. Until then, we would love to hear your feedback on the series and perhaps suggestions for the next theme. Tell us your thoughts by clicking here »
Ian Marshall is a professor of English and Environmental Studies at Penn State Altoona and a former president of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment. He is the author of Story Line: Exploring the Literature of the Appalachian Trail, Peak Experiences: Walking Meditations on Literature, Nature, and Need and Walden by Haiku. On February 24th Ian will release his fourth book, Border Crossings: Walking the Haiku Path on the International Appalachian Trail.
Announcing Our 2012 Eco-Charity
Each year Hiraeth Press donates 1% of its annual profits to an eco-charity of our choice. This year, in honor of Border Crossings: Walking the Haiku Path on the International Appalachian Trail by Ian Marshall, we have chosen the IAT (International Appalachian Trail) as the 2012 recipient.
“The Missions of the IAT: The mission of the International Appalachian Trail is to establish a long-distance walking trail that extends to all geographic regions once connected by the “Appalachian Mountain” range, formed more than 250 million years ago on the super-continent Pangea. In addition to connecting people and places, the goal is to promote natural and cultural heritage, health and fitness, environmental stewardship, fellowship and understanding, cross-border cooperation, and rural economic development through eco and adventure tourism.”
Ripples Blog Series | Jason Kirkey
Four weeks ago we announced the launch of the Ripples Blog series. Continuing on our chosen theme of hiraeth, we offer this contribution by Hiraeth Press Founder Jason Kirkey. Jason is the author of four volumes of poetry, most recently Estuaries. He is also the author of the award-winning non-fiction title, The Salmon in the Spring: The Ecology of Celtic Spirituality.
Hiraeth is a word of Welsh origin. Loosely it translates as a “longing” or “homesickness” or “a longing for something our soul once knew.” Drawing from his love of verse and landscape, Jason reflects on poetry as a form of longing — be it to connect with the beauty of earth or to a deeper part of ourselves.
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The Ecology of Longing
Jason Kirkey
Poetry longs to break free from the confines of words. It wants to be something more than sound and syllables. Precisely what it wants to be is as diverse as the poets — whether they are mammal, plant, or fungus — who write it or speak it. My poetry longs to be water over stones and the feathers of heron and crow — it longs to speak in “the common tongue of mushroom and moss, sorrel and sprout.” So too, I think, these wild voices long for deep communion with the myriad of other polyphonic voices which make up this wild earth. Just as I cannot understand the bullfrog or wren, they cannot understand me in the way another human can — yet their utterances are beautiful and evocative, change me in the hearing, and influence my own articulations. Though I do not speak the language of herons and they do not speak English — we each speak the language of beauty and through it find communion.
Beauty speaks to us through longing. Poetry goes beyond understanding to the mutual enlivening of the whole earth community through the reciprocity of our longings. Any lover of poetry — or indeed any art, in the broadest sense of the word — knows that it can bring healing and wholeness to areas of the psyche which were fragmented and dis-eased. Whenever I collapse into a sense of suffering I routinely read Rumi — not to make myself feel better but to remind myself of those deeper currents of life in which everything is already perfectly good and beautiful. (more...)
L.M. Browning Interviews Author Ian Marshall
In his book, The Stars, The Snow, The Fire, Alaskan poet and essayist John Haines said: “The trails I made led outward into the hills and swamps, but they led inward also. And from the study of things underfoot, and from reading and thinking, came a kind of exploration, myself and the land. …to take the trail and not look back.”
On February 24th Hiraeth Press will be releasing its first title of 2012, Border Crossings: Walking the Haiku Path on the International Appalachian Trail by Ian Marshall. This book follows Ian Marshall on his journey over the International Appalachian Trail, which runs from Mt. Katahdin in Maine up through New Brunswick and out to the tip of Quebec’s Gaspé Peninsula. Countless books have been done to chronicle humanity’s communion with nature, from the classics written by naturalists such as Henry David Thoreau or John Muir, to the more contemporary offerings such as Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer and A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson; however Border Crossings stands out as unique among its fellows. Composed of Haiku and contemplative prose Border Crossings is book of braided styles: poetry, prose and travel writing. This style, as the author explains, is akin to that of haibun—a style of writing made popular by such Japanese poets as Matsuo Bashō that merges poetic and meditative prose, literary criticism and cultural meditation.
Ian Marshall is a professor of English and Environmental Studies at Penn State Altoona and a former president of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment. Border Crossings is Mr. Marshall’s fourth book. He is the author of Story Line: Exploring the Literature of the Appalachian Trail published in 1998, Peak Experiences: Walking Meditations on Literature, Nature, and Need published in 2003, and Walden by Haiku published in 2009.
L.M. : Ian, when did the thought to hike the International Appalachian Trail first come into your mind?
Ian: Probably the first moment I heard of it, which was sometime around the turn of the century. I had finished hiking the Appalachian Trail as a section hiker in 1998, and I was looking for another sort of long-term hiking project — to give me something to look forward to each summer. That, and a reason to get in shape at least once a year. My partner Megan and I could only get away for two weeks at a time each summer, so we did the trail in pieces over six consecutive summers. That’s not a bad way to hike a long trail, since it’s a part of your life for a long time, and every year the afterglow from one year’s hike flows into the anticipation and excitement of planning and preparation for the next stretch.
L.M.: Did you set out on the trail intending to write a book about your experiences or did the book evolve organically from your own travel journal?
Ian: Because I had done a book on the Appalachian Trail that combined my hiking experiences with my reading pleasures, called Story Line, I had the book in mind from the start. The plan to hike the IAT was taking shape just when I was starting to learn about (more...)
Ripples Blog Series | J.K. McDowell
A few weeks ago we launched our Ripples Blog Series. It is a themed conversation of sorts, over which our authors, as well as special guest contributors, offer you their perspective on a topic chosen by our circle of editors.
In honor of our press, the first topic chosen for the series was: hiraeth. As some of you may know, hiraeth is a word of Welsh origin. Loosely the word translates as a “longing” or “homesickness” or “a longing for something our soul once knew.” Using this as inspiration we asked our authors to compose a short piece on what comes to mind when they ponder hiraeth.
Each Sunday leading up to the release of our next title: Border Crossings: Walking the Haiku Path on the International Appalachian Trail by Ian Marshall on February 24th, we will release another installment of the series. This latest contribution is penned by J.K. McDowell, author of Night, Mystery & Light. In it he shares his thoughts on hiraeth gleaned from the maelstrom of longing and reflection.
...my steps
By J. K. McDowell
So much sadness pours over me and now this body
Is broken. Some pieces of my Soul left years ago
And the spaces filled with greed instead of yearning.
Fountain pen ink is no match for the rain.
“I can never see you again.” The writing flees
In illegible smears. The train is leaving the station.
How does this end, this grief? Tiny – Deep – These hidden
Punctures sometimes do not bleed at all, even (more...)
We donate 1% of our yearly profits to an Eco-Charity. The 2012 charity is the International Appalachian Trail.