Nan Shepherd

Excerpted from Chapter 4, “Water,” in The Living Mountain, Canongate, 2008

Anna (Nan) Shepherd was born in Scotland in 1893 and died in 1981, she was reared and lived most of her adult life in the village of West Cults. She worked for forty-one years as a lecturer in English at what is now Aberdeen College of Education. She made many visits to the Cairngorms, a mountain range in the eastern Highlands.

The Living Mountain was first published in 1977 by Aberdeen University Press. The current Canongate edition features an introduction by Robert MacFarlane.

Jack Collom

Jack Collom: born Chicago 1931, grew up in nearby Western Springs. Woods and birds. Moved to Colorado, studied Forestry. USAF four years, factory, GI Bill English degrees. Freelance poetry teacher forty years. Longtime Naropa U. adjunct. Books on kids’ writings. 25 books of own poetry. National Arts Endowment awards, FCA award. Seeks to match nature’s variety with variety of ways to think/talk about it.

Rachel Wolfe

MELODI is a work with emphasis on the transitional, as contained in the referent (ice, water, snow, sand) of five separate black and white film exposures, arranged on a singular printed plane, affixed to an architectural structure.

UNDULATION is the frozen state of a repetitive movement through layers of water, sand and snow.

Rachel Wolfe was born in Illinois and works in L.A. and Oslo. She makes photographs, sculptures, video, and installations, often activating the senses of sound and smell. Her work investigates the emotional entanglement humans have with the unknown. In 2012, she was awarded a full scholarship in 2012 to study at Ehime University in Japan. She is a recipient of the Emerson Woeffler Scholarship at Otis College of Art and Design, where she will receive her MFA in 2015. Her work has been published, exhibited, and collected in Chicago, Los Angeles, Washington D.C., Brazil, Belgium, Italy and Japan.

Selah Saterstrom

Selah Saterstrom is the author of the novels The Pink Institution, The Meat and Spirit Plan and the forthcoming, Slab, all published by Coffee House Press. She is the Director of Creative Writing in the University of Denver’s PhD program and also teaches in the Naropa Summer Writing Program.

Margo Berdeshevsky — The Tsunami Notebook

A week ago today marked the 10th anniversary of the December 26, 2004 tsunami that hit Indonesia. The Tsunami Notebook is poet Margo Berdeshevsky’s record of that tragic event. Please click on the Vimeo link below to watch this moving montage.

Berdeshevsky writes: The Tsunami Notebook was made after the monstrous wave that devastated Aceh and so many other shores on December 26 2004. It is a montage that contains images of the immediate aftermath, the ruin to land and to human and all life forms from that wave and its suites. I have a dearest friend, Robin Lim, who was and is a midwife in Indonesia. She was called to create a survivors clinic there. It has lasted for the ten years. It is known as Yayasan Bumi Sehat Aceh. She reached out to me to come and help with my camera and my hands and my heart. With fear yet a willingness to answer, I was on the next flight to Sumatra. My time there was life changing. After one has witnessed nothing less than the end of the world — all else can only be a beginning.

http://vimeo.com/115521601

Margo Berdeshevsky often lives in Paris. Her poetry collections are Between Soul and Stone and But a Passage in Wilderness (Sheep Meadow Press). Her Beautiful Soon Enough (University of Alabama Press), a book of illustrated stories, received FC2’s Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Award. Other honors include the Robert H. Winner Award from the Poetry Society of America, the & Now Anthology of the Best of Innovative Writing, Pushcart Prize nominations and Pushcart “special mention” citations, a poem for the Academy of American Poet’s Poem-for-a-day [selected by the chancellors]. Her work is published in Europe and the United States. A new poetry manuscript, Square Black Key and a multi-genre novel, Vagrant, are forthcoming. She was born in New York City, where she had a first career as an actress. Today, she can be found reading from her books in London, Paris, and New York. ‪http://margoberdeshevsky.blogspot.com‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬