Terrain: “Poems and Gardens as Kind Companions”

A year into the pandemic, when everything was grim, Hannah, a friend who I knew from my time working at a farm in the Berkshires, called to ask if I would like to build an anthology of contemporary gardening poems. “People are taking such solace in gardening now,” she told me.

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Seattle Times - Digging my way out of climate grief

This winter there were moments when I wasn’t sure I was going to make it back into my garden. I wasn’t sure I wanted to, would have time, would care. I wasn’t sure it would ever stop raining.

After six of the warmest years ever recorded in California, after five years of record wildfires, amid the driest period in 1,200 years, this year’s record snowfall, its deluge after deluge of violent rain seemed more than the earth could take.

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CNN - Opinion: A Californian’s message to East Coasters struggling in smoke-filled air

CNN — What do you do when the air fills with smoke from wildfires?

Well, if you’re a New Yorker or East Coast person and this is new to you, just know that you’re joining a reality that people across the West have been facing for several years now, in increasing chapters. In my life, we’ve experienced worsening wildfires in California and fled smoke several times, as well as just making do with it sometimes hanging over our lives for weeks.

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LA Times - Opinion: How to dig your way out of climate grief

This winter there were moments when I wasn’t sure I was going to make it back into my garden. I wasn’t sure I wanted to, would have time, would care. I wasn’t sure it would ever stop raining. 

After six of the warmest years ever recorded in California, after five years of record wildfires, amid the driest period in 1,200 years, this year’s record snowfall, its deluge after deluge of violent rain seemed more than the earth could take.

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CNN - Opinion: The surprising antidote to burnout

CNN — I know they say that April is the cruelest month. But honestly, May, just before the school year ends, seems to be pretty wild, as well. How can everything on earth be due now?

Recently, just when I thought I was far too busy to take on another thing under the sun, I remembered that I had volunteered for a whole day at my son’s school to teach some poems to the sixth grade class and then to take a bunch of third graders to do weeding and garden bed-clearing at a community orchard.

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Harper's Magazine

By Tess Taylor

Art as civic repair

Throughout his political career, Joe Biden has frequently invoked his favorite poet, Seamus Heaney. Accepting the Democratic nomination for president, Biden quoted Heaney’s “The Cure at Troy,” an adaptation of Sophocles’ play Philoctetes,which posits that “once in a lifetime / the longed-for tidal wave / of justice can rise up / and hope and history rhyme.” Months later, after the brutal attack on the U.S. Capitol, Biden assumed office under the watch of fifteen thousand members of the National Guard. He did not quote Heaney, but he did suggest that his presidency might usher in one such rhyming moment, and he promised to end “our uncivil war.” Read more…

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Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright: Artists must sound the alarm

(CNN) Somewhere in the middle of "Homeland Elegies," the sprawling, ambitious novel published earlier this year by playwright Ayad Akhtar, the main character of the novel, who is alsoa playwright called Ayad Akhtar, is speaking to his mentor, a college professor named Mary Moroni, who suggests that he write down his dreams. "The more you can dwell along the weave, feel the lattice work, the closer you'll be to the vital, vivid stuff," she advises him. Read more…

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