Vanessa Finney: 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.
Ellen Waterston: 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 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 every November featuring well known authors and poets from around the world, really. And then during the year, offered workshops at a literary arts 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 winner. And it will be celebrating its 10th birthday this month.
VF: 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?
EW: Well, I experience 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 writers.
I think we all 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 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. And of course, then throughout the year, offering the workshops the staff of The Nature of Words, myself included, would dispatch ourselves 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.
VF: Yes, let's hear some of your work. You have a poem that you'd like to share with us?
EW: 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 sun-
flower stands like stork, stubborn on one thin yellowed
stalk, serrated head slung slack, hangman鈥檚 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 鈥�
so that patiently, later, not now, when March looses the gelid hold, first stirs
the buried, soggy resolve, when all that鈥檚 left
of the brittle-maned lioness is rotted, crumpled humus, this hunched
Cyclops will have stared down the earth and won
the right to another round.
VF: What a vision. Ellen, have you found that you've always gravitated toward nature, describing it in words? And 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?'
EW: Well, 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. 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. I've created an action. I've described it suspended in the air during 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 I had lots of nature to explore, frozen lakes in the winter, black ice, woods, orchards. So I think, 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.
VF: Ellen, you write poetry and prose, and I notice 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 V铆a Lact茅a 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?
EW: 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 鈥� whether it's prose or poetry 鈥� and whether it's contained within a poem or within a short story or extended out over a longer piece of writing. I think there are many devices that writers use to hold the telling together and for the writer to kind of organize how they'll unfold their thinking about it, because, given the writer鈥檚 wont, there's generally more going on than just the walking itself. But one of the lines in V铆a Lact茅a that relates to this is that the great poet Antonio Machado said, 鈥淭he footstep is the path.鈥�
VF: The journey. You know, I did the Camino Franc茅s, parts of it. We started in Paris and went westward, and ended up in Santiago as part of month-long trip with which I graduated college. I'm just flashing back to how a lot of the younger students were very chatty on the trail, and I remember the teacher leaders purposefully saying, 'Okay, I'm going to separate you. You need to just be silent and think while you walk during those footsteps.' 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? People might know about the Portland Book Festival, but how would you describe the literary life here in other ways?
EW: Well, we all know that 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, 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 Wallowas. So there are these oases of very strong literary activities, such as Fish Trap in the Wallowas - 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 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 carry 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.
VF: And each Poet Laureate has had their own vision and style. What can't you wait to do during your term as Poet Laureate?
EW: 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 want to plan and, on the other hand, you want it to allow it 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 a woman 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 interviews such as this and that sort of opportunity to introduce myself.
VF: It sounds very inclusive, your vision does. We have time for one more reading. Can you share one more poem with us?
EW: 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 鈥淐ropped Short.鈥�
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 stands now so abruptly ended,
moving it carefully through
the imaginary locks to avoid tangles.
They may as well have been real.
That鈥檚 how it feels
To have you gone.
VF: 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.
EW: Thank you so much. Vanessa, what a privilege.
This interview was lightly edited for clarity.
Poetry reprinted with permission.
