Contributor Spotlight: Holly McKelvey

Holly McKelvey on "Portraits of Place: Walking the Lake Superior Hiking Trail"

My visual story "Portraits of Place: Walking the Lake Superior Hiking Trail" recounts a backpacking trip taken several years ago through the beautiful wooded landscape along the northwest shore of Lake Superior. It was a trip that had been planned months before, and as the day of departure grew closer, it became increasingly clear that the weather was not going to play along. Looking back through photos of that trip, I see rain jackets and ponchos channelling rivers of water from hunched figures down to the ground, marshy puddles around a camp fire coaxed into life from the reluctant grain of sodden wood, socks being held up to dry over limp flames, and tents being set up and broken down beneath the tentative cover of dripping tree branches. But I also see smiles, humor, and joy in our surroundings. And indeed, it is the beauty of the surroundings – the vibrant greenness of the woods, the grey canvas of birch bark that glowed under the rivulets of rain running down it, the animated roar of water in the rivers – that define this trip in my memory. The rain provides a context for understanding this northern temperate forest, a study in contrasts between the dry Californian chaparralscape where I was living at the time (and which was undergoing fire season), and the abundant greenness of this north Minnesotan landscape. 

This understanding of place through its ecology is something that I've long been fascinated by – with a background in geology and ecology, and having lived in ecosystems ranging from chaparral to cloud forest to coastal and from super urban to near wild, how could I not? More recently, I've tried to approach this exploration of place more intentionally as I identify the species and ecological systems places are shaped by. I seek to evoke these ecologies in my art: the roles they play, the emotions and the reactions and the feelings they elicit. Celebrate them. Draw them. Recreate feelings of place. This process forms the basis of my ongoing "Portraits of Place" series, which also includes chapters on urban biodiversity in cities like LA and Palermo; for my submission to Split Rock Review, however, I found myself wanting to step outside of the urban sphere and revisit this marvelously rain-drenched camping trip in the deep green wilds of a landscape deeply new to me.

Today I live in a coastal urban ecosystem in northern Germany. I haven't written a Portrait of Place for it yet . . . but as I listen to the gulls and the ship horns and watch the sky outside my balcony fold itself over into layers of sunshine on top of downpours on top of heavy mists, I have a feeling that a new chapter is on its way.

Contributor Spotlight: Janna Knittel

Janna Knittel on “Driftless”

Janna Knittel. Photo credit: Jean de Marais

I often get ideas for poems from reading about animals, plants, and landscapes. I was reading an article that referred to the Driftless Area in Minnesota and Wisconsin, which is so named because of the lack of glacial drift, deposits left behind by retreating glaciers. The terrain is so varied and rugged because the land was not scraped down as parts of the upper midwest were during glacial periods.

The name itself was very evocative for me: The word “driftless” hints at a vague emotional state, a feeling of being lost or stuck. I started writing the poem with an intent to simply describe the geology as mysterious, a place where a traveler could get lost, feel trapped, where things aren’t always what they seem. I read a bit more about the geology of the places so I could include names of the rock layers, which I included for their sounds as well as their factual place in the landscape.

What I didn’t expect, and what makes the poem work, is that, by the end of the poem and the last sentence—“If you were a glacier / you’d dig down to gems”—the poem had become an ars poetica, a poem about the art of poetry. The interlocutor, the “you,” is the poet being challenged by the speaker to defy difficulties and dig deeper in order to create.

Contributor Spotlight: Jenny Godwin

Jenny Godwin on "Promise Me Water"

My poem "Promise Me Water" featured in Issue 10 of Split Rock Review came to me at the peak of California’s drought. I write this essay on a plane leaving my now-home in Colorado to visit the town I wrote this poem in, Nevada City. It’s a much wetter world there in Northern California this Spring, no phantom gullies missing their waterfalls or wildflowers struggling to drink enough to bloom.

I wrote an enormous number of poems involving water during the three years I lived in California. It was instinctual, and maybe my own sort of water dance. Though I don’t consider myself religious, the feeling of rain cascading down after months of drought was truly the closest thing to holy I’ve ever felt. And that pull I experienced to water bodies during those months of intense drought felt spiritual. 

"Promise Me Water" arrived in pieces a few years ago as I sat by my former city’s trinity of river channels, the three forks of the mighty Yuba. I wanted an assurance these stream beds would fill up once again. The grass practically crackled that summer and the threat of fire was never far from us. When the water did finally come, I felt my body cracked open like a nut, and I literally did dance in the rain with friends. It was a technicolor experience. 

Now a Coloradan, deep in our own intense drought, my thoughts keep returning back to summer days spent on the Yuba, hoping for rain, watching how the river roared once fed.

Contributor Spotlight: Rosemarie Dombrowski

On Helium, Carbon, Nitrogen, and the Quirks of a Quirky Poet

Knee-deep in the cosmic overwhelm, I’m stricken / by the ricochet wonder of it all: the plain / everythingness of everything, in cahoots / with the everythingness of everything else.

—Dianne Ackerman, from “Diffraction (for Carl Sagan)”

“Helium,” “Carbon,” & “Nitrogen” are micro-poems from a twenty-poem sequence entitled Corpus Callosum, which is the name given to the thick band of nerve fibers that divides (and connects) the brain’s left and right hemispheres, and more importantly, allows for communication between them. I thought this was the perfect title for a series of poems based on the first twenty elements, poems dedicated to exploring the intersections of hard science, human narrative, and our emotional responses to each. Thus, the poems are not merely based on the scientific properties of the elements, but the history behind their discoveries/discoverers, as well as my own experiential reference points and contexts for understanding.  

I’m not exactly a science geek, but I love the geological, biological, and medical sciences. It’s rare for me to not be straddling at least one of those spheres alongside the personal. My son, who has non-verbal Autism, has been the focus of much of my work, as well as the geology and geography of the Southwest, in addition to anything ornithological (dead or alive, two-dimensional or three). But given that science isn’t my first language, I tend to gravitate toward the narratives of minerology and neurology. In those vast expanses of foreign terminology, I find the language of poetry, which is also the language of discovery—of discovering proofs and theories, subjective and universal truths, intersections of logos and pathos, contact zones between the indigenous and the imaginary landscapes of the self. 

If I had to classify myself, I’d say I’m a confessionalist with a quirky scientific bent, which might just make me quirky. I’m rarely witty or funny in verse—I save my humor for my fiction. I suppose my fervent belief in “poetic education and access for everyone” has also led me to explore and tout the benefits that come from regular and creative commingling of the sciences and the arts. Poetry is a form of processing, of personalizing the universal and spitting it back out again as a newly hybridized product. What could be more important for us to practice (and celebrate) in the 21st century than the hybridization of form, which is comparable to the multi-modal nature by which we transmit all other types of information? If news and entertainment can be blended so effectively, why not science and art? Perhaps the latter is the only thing we should be striving for.