Spotlight: Claire Scott

Claire Scott on “Night Ride”

As a writer, I enjoy weaving the real with the non-real, creating something new that speaks of both. My poems grow from seeds within me. Some are watered by life and some by imagination. “Night Ride” is a combination of both. The inspiration came from a friend who told me that once her mother had woken her at night to go for a car ride. I found the story intriguing and mulled it over for several weeks. I grew up with a depressed, often suicidal mother. I could imagine my mother taking me with her on a night ride to prevent her from hitting a tree or driving off a bridge.

As an adult, I realized how tragic my mother’s life was. She was a brilliant woman who struggled with mental illness and alcoholism. In the last stanza I tried to show how empathy allows understanding and possibility. I would like to think the mother in the last stanza is reaching out to her mother’s experience, rather than taking a night ride with her young daughter. I feel writing by the light of a poem keeps my heart open and allows great sorrow to roll through.

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.