Veterans Day

As a pacifist, I don’t know what to do about Veterans Day. On this year’s November 11, I drove down the main street of a town that is home to a naval air station. Five days earlier I’d travelled that same route the opposite direction on my way to a writing workshop. That morning, winds had gusted at 35-45 miles per hour and whipped the American flags that lined the street in a wild dance.

But on Veterans Day, the sun shone, and the red and white stripes fluttered in a light breeze as I drove toward home. I tuned the car radio to NPR and listened to how some people across the country were honoring veterans. The station played an excerpt of Vice-President Joe Biden’s speech at Arlington Cemetery. I pictured the rows of white tombstones lined up over the burial ground’s 624 acres; over 400,000 veterans have been buried there since the Civil War.

The words and mental images got me thinking about those veterans and about the new poetry book in my backpack, Nothing Saved Us - Poems of the Korean War by Tamra J. Higgins. Intrigued by the title and the subject matter, I’d ordered the book a few weeks earlier when a friend posted a notice online about it.

    Ten percent of the book’s profits 

  donated to Vermont Peace Center

   

 Over the course of two years, Tamra interviewed her father about his experiences as a Marine on the front lines in the Korean War. She turned the results of those conversations into poems to show how soldiers cope with war’s absurdity. She used short and abrupt lines to reflect the rhythm and syntax of her father’s voice.  

Although I’d had time to read at the workshop, I hadn’t even opened the book. The author’s exploration of this “forgotten war” had compelled me to buy a copy, but it was also what made me resist reading it.

My stepfather served in the Marine Corps in Korea. That was nearly ten years before he came into my life when I was six. He never talked to me about his time in the Marines or about the war, but my mom was proud of his service and told me he’d received a purple heart medal. All that I remember is the tattoo on his left forearm—a ferocious-looking bulldog wearing a helmet with the letters USMC inked underneath. When my stepfather died twenty years later at age 54, that medal he’d been awarded entitled him to burial at Arlington Cemetery, a thousand miles from our home in southern Illinois. Instead, my mom arranged for Marines to preside at our small town cemetery; they presented her with an American flag crisply folded into a tight square.

Earlier this year I visited the Korean War Memorial in Washington, DC. Tears choked me as I walked among the 19 stainless steel, larger-than-life-size statues representing a squad on patrol. I looked for one that resembled my stepfather and tried to imagine him over sixty years ago, among those soldiers trudging through Korean villages. I walked the length of the 164-foot-long black granite memorial wall. Photographic images were sandblasted into it depicting soldiers, equipment and people involved in the war.  I was grateful that no matter how long I searched, I wouldn’t find my stepfather’s likeness, because he had survived.

In this past week I’ve read all of the poems in Nothing Saved Us, admired and appreciated those stories by another daughter of a Marine. A daughter who could listen, did listen, to her father’s stories. Tamra Higgins’s dad sounds like someone my stepfather would have liked.  He received a purple heart, too, for injuries he sustained that cost him his right leg.

But the soldier’s life is only part of the story of war Tamra wanted to portray through her poems. As she researched the Korean War, she read several memoirs of Korean women who had been trapped in the throes of that battle. In the second section of the book, Tamra explores the impact of war on civilians through the voice of a Korean woman. In these poems, Tamra used long lines, based loosely on sijo, a traditional style of Korean poetry developed more than 750 years ago.  That story is heartbreaking, too.

So, where does this exploration of Veterans Day and the Korean War leave me?

Tamra’s poems and the flag-lined street don’t evoke for me pride or even gratitude for the veterans’ service.

Instead, I grieve.

I grieve for my stepfather and Tamra’s father and all the other men and women—military and civilian—who experience the violence of war.  I grieve for the children who lose parents, the parents who lose children, the spouses who are widowed. I grieve for the land, the homes, the businesses, the places of worship, and the national treasures that are destroyed.

And as I drive along flag-lined streets, I pray that someday we’ll put an end to war.

Afterthought #33 QuakerQuaker – A Resource for 21st Century Friends

Early Quakers had their journals to record their spiritual life and journeys. Today, many Friends do the same through blogs, sharing how they live Quaker ideals in this time. For nearly ten years, Martin Kelley has been sifting through hundreds of websites to come up with a daily curated list of the best of the Quaker web. The result is QuakerQuaker, a website and a community of Friends exploring Quaker witness, ministry and beliefs through blogs, photos, videos and news of gatherings.

QuakerQuaker’s primary audience is Friends and seekers from all traditions who want to explore classic Quaker understandings of theology and practice as well as what challenges and inspiration these pose for Spirit-led twenty-first century Friends. There you’ll find posts, links, and websites that reflect the great diversity of Quakers today.

QuakerQuaker is 100% reader-supported.  If you believe, as I do, that this kind of outreach and conversation is important, send a few bucks their way at the Quaker Tip Jar.

“Afterthoughts” are my blog version of a practice followed in some Quaker meetings. After meeting for worship ends, people continue in silence for a few more minutes during which they’re invited to share thoughts or reflect on the morning's worship. I’ve adopted the form here for last-day-of-the-month brief reflections on headlines, quotes, comments overheard, maybe even bumper stickers.

One of the Lucky Humans

Nine of us sat in the front row of seats at the Coupeville Performing Arts Center last Saturday. We wore wrinkled black robes.  Tassels draped over the left side of the black mortarboards perched on our heads. On the stage, faculty, staff, and board members of the Northwest Institute of Literary Arts wore similar regalia. Behind us, family and friends held cameras ready for photo opportunities. We were all there that warm, August afternoon to mark the milestone of completion of a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) degree in creative writing.

Nearly a year ago, the Class of 2014 began the process of selecting a graduation speaker. We were delighted when former guest faculty member Elizabeth Austen accepted our invitation. We had no idea that by the time the ceremony rolled around, Elizabeth would be Washington State Poet Laureate. 

Lucky us.

Elizabeth’s address, “The Hour of Fulfillment,” is posted at the Washington State Poet Laureate website.  Elizabeth reflected on some of what she’s learned in the dozen or so years since she completed her own MFA.  She began with this advice:

… stay focused on what really nourishes you as a writer, as one of the

lucky humans for whom language is a form of freedom, an instrument

of transformation rather than mere transaction.

On this day of celebration of our accomplishment, Elizabeth urged us to define “success” for ourselves:

Don’t calculate where you should be based on your age or where your classmates are or some other external measure.  Don’t discount, or let others discount, the things that you have decided constitute “success.”

Tune inward. Find and defend your quiet places.

Iris & Elizabeth Austen
in full regalia

I felt as though Elizabeth was reading my mind as she talked about her struggles with another element of the writing life—self-doubt:

  When I finally turn to confront the doubt, to engage with it and     dig underneath it, sure, there’s fear there. Fear that my best efforts will be inadequate or, worse, boring and foolish. But when I confront my doubt I’m also faced with the depth of my desire to make something astonishing, a poem that will startle me into new awareness, a poem with the capacity to provoke or nourish, to help someone grieve, or maybe even begin healing. Self-doubt is intimately connected to the desire to go further, risk more…At its best, self-doubt keeps us from becoming glib and complacent. Just don’t let it have the last word. Don’t let it silence you.

                                           

Fortunately, Elizabeth hasn’t let self-doubt silence her. She shared this poem from her book, Every Dress a Decision, that again seemed to speak directly to all of us.

 The Permanent Fragility of Meaning

Why persist, scratching across the white field

row after row? Why repeat the ritual

every morning, emptying my hands

asking for a new prayer to fold

and unfold?

                    Nothing changes, no one is saved.

I walk into the day, hands still

empty and beg

to be of use to someone. I lie down

in the dark and beg to believe

when the voice comes again with its commands,

its promises—

                                Unfold your hands. Revelation

is not a fruit you pluck from trees. This is the work,

cultivating the smallest shoot, readying your tongue

to shape the sacred names, your mouth already filling—

I lie down in the dark.

I rise up and begin again.

After our thesis advisors draped velvet hoods over our shoulders, we each walked across the stage to receive a hand-carved walking stick.   

One of the lucky humans

Once we returned to our seats, we switched the tassel to the right side of the mortarboards while the President of NILA, Allan Ament, waved a glittered star wand.

That day, I had no doubt that I’m “one of the lucky humans.” My thesaurus lists these synonyms for “lucky”—blessed, fortunate—even better words for how I feel about being a writer.

Fear and Writing About Faith

In just a few days I’ll make the trek to Whidbey Island for my final residency at the Whidbey Writers Workshop MFA program. This time, I’ll try my hand at teaching as well, collaborating with classmate Cynthia Beach on a workshop— Writing About Faith, Spirituality, and Religion.

Philip Zaleski, editor of The Best American Spiritual Writing series, defines this genre as,

“…poetry or prose that deals with the bedrock of human existence­—why we are here, where we are going, how we can comport ourselves with dignity along the way.”

I carry some fear about writing about faith (see my Feb. 27, 2013 post), and it turns out my co-presenter Cynthia does, too. As we explored ideas about how to discuss these worries, she told me she looked into her box of fears. 

“You keep yours in a box?” I asked.  “What a good idea.”

Next week, we’ll literally pull our fears out of a box to initiate a conversation about what gets in the way of writing about those bedrock issues.

Cheryl Strayed, author of the memoir Wild, tells her writing students, “…the invisible, unwritten last line of every essay should be and nothing was ever the same again. By which I mean the reader should feel the ground shift, if even only a bit, when he or she comes to the end of the essay.  Also there should be something at stake in the writing of it. Or, better yet, everything.”

                                   

Scary stuff.  And yet…

I Know No Other Way

Everything I write

is in service

of making sense,

of shining light

on fears, hopes,

beliefs, questions.

I know of no other way

to map my search

than with a pen

on blank pages.

Knowing the Farms That Feed Us

When Summer Moon Scriver and I collaborated on the book Hands at Work, we talked with and photographed a number of farmers. One of them, Henning Sehmsdorf, offered this vision:

Our dream is the community will feed itself. The only question people will ask about their food is which of their neighbors’ farms it came from. We believe we’re the future.

Photo courtesy
Hands at Work - Portraits & Profiles
of People Who Work with Their Hands

Two Lopez Island organizations—Lopez Community Land Trust (LCLT) and Lopez Locavores —have embarked on a three-year project to help Henning’s dream (and that of many of his neighbors) become a reality. BOUNTY - Lopez Island Farms, Food, and Community will tell the Lopez food story through photographs and profiles of twenty-seven Lopez Island farms (including S & S Homestead Farm, home to Henning and his wife, Elizabeth Simpson).

Sue Roundy, a past member of the board of the LCLT and current secretary of the Lopez Locavores, conceived of the project. “It’s time to celebrate our farmers and thank them for their hard work and delicious food,” Sue says. As Artistic Project Manager for Bounty, Sue has put together a team of photographers, interviewers, advisors, a graphic designer, and a writer for this effort.   In the project’s first year, photographers Steve Horn, Robert Harrison, and Summer Moon Scriver will develop a color slide show of the farmers, their land, and the food they produce.  The show will premier October 25, 2014 to celebrate the LCLT’s 25th anniversary at the organization’s Harvest Dinner.  The slide show also will be presented at the San Juan County Agricultural Summit in March 2015.

In Fall 2015, framed black-and-white portraits of farmers will be exhibited, first at Lopez Center in conjunction with the LCLT Harvest Dinner, then at Lopez Library and the Lopez Post Office. I'm honored to be involved in the project’s third phase, publication of a book including the photographs, stories and recipes. Bounty - Lopez Island Farmers, Food, and Community is scheduled for release in 2016.

The photographers and interviewers are documenting the process of telling the Lopez food story at the BOUNTY website.  Notes and images from farms such as Sunnyfield Farm Goat Dairy,

Julie, from Helen’s Farm, at the
Lopez Farmers’ Market

Sweet Grass Farm Beef, and Helen’s Farm  are filled with the same kind of passion that Summer and I found when we talked to people for Hands at Work. I look forward to discovering what themes will emerge from those whose hands are in the soil, those who witness cycles of birth and death of their animals, and those for whom their work is a way of life in which it really matters if it rains or not. 

BOUNTY is just the next phase in the LCLT’s history of supporting local agriculture  through its Sustainable Agriculture and Rural Development (SARD) program. It also joins the international movement to promote local, sustainable, seasonal foods and eating, ideas brought to public awareness by authors such as Michael Pollan, Barbara Kingsolver (Animal, Vegetable, Miracle), and Alisa Smith and J.B. Mackinnon (The 100-Mile Diet). Most recently, Vicki Robin chronicles the experience of local eating even closer to home with her latest book, Blessing the Hands That Feed Us. She committed to a month of eating only food grown within ten miles of her home on nearby Whidbey Island, WA and then wrote about it. During a visit last month to Lopez, Vicki talked about how she was “…surprised, peeved, moved, deprived, curious and empowered…” by her month of hyper-local eating and how she fell in love with the hands and lands that fed her. 

As so often happens, one person’s experience inspires others, and now the LCLT and the Lopez Locavores are organizing the “Lopez Bounty Food Experiment.” Beginning this September, participants will choose a month, or part of a month, to dedicate themselves to eating locally and blogging about it.  They’ll share what they miss most, what they’re most grateful for, and what new local foods they discover.  Interested? Contact the LCLT at lcltda@rockisland.com.

Whether you participate in the Lopez Bounty Food Experiment or not, you can be part of the community-funded effort to celebrate local farms and farmers. Contributions to BOUNTY will support the creation of the slide show, photography exhibit, and book that all will help tell the Lopez food story. I hope you’ll join us.

What questions do you ask about the food you eat? What do you know about the farms that feed you?