Carrie George (00:00):
We found so many people who were so excited to have even the prospect of writing about the National Park. And then, once we found five or ten, it was almost like a poetry pyramid scheme . And they were just telling us, these three people you should reach out to, and these people you should reach out to. And it just branched out.
Laura Maylene Walter (00:21):
Welcome to Page Count, presented by the Ohio Center for the Book at Cleveland Public Library. This podcast celebrates authors, illustrators, librarians, booksellers, literary advocates, and readers in and from the state of Ohio. I'm your host, Laura Maylene Walter, the Ohio Center for the Book Fellow and author of the novel, BODY OF STARS. Today, we'll be discussing everything, from quite possibly monarchs and migration to milkweed and millipedes, ferns and fields and forests, turkey vultures, poison ivy, woolly bears, muskrats, lichen, and so much more. But more broadly, this episode focuses on the anthology, LIGHT ENTERS THE GROVE: EXPLORING THE CUYAHOGA VALLEY NATIONAL PARK, which is the Ohio Center for the Book's 2025 Great Reads from Great Places selection for adult readers. This book will represent Ohio at the National Book Festival this September. We're thrilled to be joined by Carrie George and Charlie Malone, two of the editors of this anthology. Thank you both for being here, and welcome to Page Count.
Charlie Malone (01:30):
Thanks for having us.
Carrie George (01:30):
Thank you.
Laura Maylene Walter (01:32):
We should say upfront that you have a third co-editor, Jason Harris, who unfortunately is not able to join us on this call, but we will be sure to discuss his contributions a bit later. But for now, let's get to it. We're lucky enough here in Northeast Ohio to have a national park right in our backyard, and this anthology of poetry celebrates that rich biodiversity in the Park, as well as, of course, poetry and language and some of our best hometown poets. So before we get into all the details about this anthology, I thought we should start with what matters most of all today, which is poetry. And I know you both have chosen some poems you might want to read. Can you each start by sharing a poem with our listeners to give them a taste of what this anthology is all about?
Carrie George (02:19):
I'm going to read "White-tailed Deer," by Benjamin Rhodes: "I'm sorry to say the way I know you best is strung-up by your hind legs, the cavity of your body on display, headless, skin flayed and peeled to be cured and stretched over a wooden stool later. I'm sorry, your meat was delicious as a pot roast, your youth and lack of fear at death made the gravy, the potatoes tender. If you didn't know better, you might not tell the flesh in your teeth was once wild. And no, I was never the one with the bow, with the camouflaged rifle and orange vest. I only ever perched in boxes nailed to trees as adventure in imagination, as play at being higher than my surroundings. I only ever saw the way men in my family treated you through pictures, only ever pet your neck as it hung on the wall."
Laura Maylene Walter (03:31):
Oof. That one got me too when I read it.
Carrie George (03:34):
Yeah. I mean, we'll talk about it later, but it shows the different ways people approached the creatures that they were interacting with. Yes, it's not exactly what you would expect from a book about the National Park.
Charlie Malone (03:47):
Well, in almost an opposite way, Benjamin's writing to the white-tailed deer, and the poem that I wanted to start with is Mary Biddinger's -- Mary writes in the voice of the killdeer, which if people aren't familiar with the killdeer, they're pretty common birds nesting often in gravel along the roadside. They're very beautiful. They have a really shrill call, but they also are kind of full of deceit, right? They act like they're wounded to draw predators away from their nests. They sort of limp around or act like their wing is broken. I remember learning that as a child, and that sort of fact of the animals always stuck with me. And I think Mary plays with that really skillfully in this poem, called, "Everyone Knows a Killdeer Means No Harm." And then, there's the killdeer and white-tailed deer echo too, right, which is great. "Find me by the ditch. Least glamorous stretch of dreadful meadow, former scrap heap turned cold cruising spot. You wouldn’t let kids sleep here. How could anything rest in this gravel-scape: runaway trash corner, riverbank of zero picnic tables, no hammocks or guitars? Enjoy my broken-wing act, legs like stems. Body loose newspaper. Song, or scream? If we both believe I’m hurt and dangerous, maybe it’s true."
Laura Maylene Walter (05:15):
You know, I love Mary's work in general. When I started reading this anthology, it's just such a delight. I'm not even a poet, I'm a prose writer through and through, but I recognize so many of these writers and feel like I've absorbed their voices over the years. And so, there's so many, mostly from Northeast Ohio, I believe, of poets who create this collection, and I think it's a really special book. And so I want listeners to get a sense of what this project is. So I suppose, how would you describe this book to someone who has not yet picked it up?
Charlie Malone (05:48):
You know, I think about the process, and Carrie was so vital in pulling it together that I want to leave some of that for Carrie to describe. But I think our goal from the beginning was to get a range of voices and poems that maybe complicated what we think of as nature poetry. Yes, we wanted poems that embraced the landscape and the species that inhabit it, but we also wanted pieces that surprised us, and I think both of the two that we just shared do, in a way. And so, we really wanted to stretch the idea of who could be a nature poet and what a nature poem was. And maybe in the simplest way, it was also an invitation for our writing community to connect with the Park. But the process was really vital. Carrie, do you want to talk about all of the hard work you did in assigning species?
Carrie George (06:33):
You know, I think a simple way to describe it is as a literary field guide, and there are several other publications that are similar to this. Charlie worked on one in Rocky Mountain National Park, there's one for Cascade Valley, there's one for Saguaro National Park. And they're all slightly different. They all have their own kind of local flavor, depending on the region. But I think what is great about field guides is that they help us orient ourselves in a particular landscape, but sometimes they don't give us any kind of familiarity or any touchstone for relating to what we're seeing. If it's the first time we've seen something, then we don't have a good entry point for finding it quickly through the paper of the book. So, I think this provides a little bit more familiarity, like a poem explaining the first time somebody would've encountered a creature that they find in the wild, like the white-tailed deer. They didn't encounter it in the wild necessarily, but they encountered it somewhere, and they have this core memory of it, which gives us a context from when we find it in the wild. And so, when we were putting everything together and kind of beginning the process of this book, we started with a spreadsheet of creatures that live in the National Park. We found these from something called the BioBlitz, which is community science. Basically, it happens in different regions, where citizens will be asked to go out into a region and identify all of the species they can find, and then it's tracked, and that's just a good way to get an actual biological inventory of a region. So we pulled those species, and then I used a random number generator to offer a couple of options to each poet who wanted to participate. And it was really lovely to see that, even though it was random, a lot of poets would already have a connection to some of the species that they were offered. So it just shows the ways that we are already interacting with these creatures, whether we live in Akron, or whether we live really close to the park, or how much time we spend in the park, or if it's just walking around our neighborhood.
Charlie Malone (08:40):
Okay, I like that you brought up the literary field guide element. One of the things we did, and this lives on a website that's cvnp.travelingstanzas.com, there's a map where we've taken each poem and paired it to the coordinates of a known observation from the BioBlitz. So, if you are curious about the poem about witch hazel, and you want to see it in the Park, that map can get you there. And yeah, the way that Carrie navigated that sort of assigning of species, I think one of the intents was that we wouldn't get a bunch of people fighting over the most charismatic species in the Park. We wanted to embrace the full biodiversity of the Park. But then that led us to people choosing species because the name was particularly interesting or evocative, or because they had a relationship. And they thought that the number generator had some sort of magic in it that the species they loved was offered to them, or they went through a process of learning about it through both the observational data, but also doing their own research on it.
Laura Maylene Walter (09:40):
Yeah, I love that the writers were assigned three random and they got to choose from those three. I feel like for a writer, that opens up so much possibility for creativity and for play, as you were saying, you know, learning about something new or discovering connections with something new. Even just reading through it, I was thinking about these plants or these animals or these birds and any associations I might have with them myself. It makes me want to do it on my own, just for fun as a writing exercise, pick three from that list at random and see what I'm drawn to. You know, there are some that I know I'm drawn to. For example, I love the poem about the turkey vulture, because I'm a big fan of vultures, and I did a lot of research on them for a story. So I was like, "septumless" -- I know that about turkey vultures. So, that was really fun. I love the diversity in the variety of the poems, because you've got poems that are more descriptive, some that are written in the persona of the animal or the bird -- one, I think is a screech owl, that poem is three lines long, and others are more like prose poems, or they are a few pages long. And every creature or plant is accompanied by an image, a color image, in the book. Can you tell us about the artwork in the book and where that comes from?
Carrie George (10:52):
When we were forming the website, we were working with the Wick Poetry Center to create this "poetic toolkit," is what it was initially called. And you can still see some remnants of that. There are some lesson plans that educators can use on that website that Charlie shouted out, and each and every one was working with Wick to help design that website. And we just loved the imagery that we were creating and going with that literary field guide feeling. We wanted there to be some sort of imagery in the book, because when you're looking at a field guide, you have a reference image to help identify it out in the wild, the images that they created. I think the line drawings are from old textbooks, and then they're kind of made into this collage, colorful style, by, I think it was someone named Katie, at each and every -- is that right? Katie or Kate?
Charlie Malone (11:43):
Yeah, Kate Jamba was one of the first illustrators who worked with us. I think Alex and some of the other staff helped us -- the project kept going, too, so Alex Kaney and some of the other team. So, probably over the couple of years that the project took from conception to print, a lot of folks at that design firm helped out.
Laura Maylene Walter (12:00):
The end result is just gorgeous, and you can flip through it at random or you can read it straight through. It's really great. I'm curious about each of you personally, maybe your own experiences with the Park, or with nature in Northeast Ohio more generally. What would you like to share with us, like, how you ended up and why you became one of the editors on this project?
Charlie Malone (12:24):
I grew up not far from here. I grew up in Geauga County, in rural Geauga County, and sort of began my poetry career here in Kent, and I spent a lot of time -- kind of ironic now, 'cause this is part of Carrie's story, too -- but I worked for a summer camp that spent a lot of time in the Park when I was an undergraduate and grad student and really began to explore it at the end of my undergrad and graduate career and came to know the Park very well -- volunteered on trail maintenance crews, and it really felt like a place where I could restore myself and get back into my body and be a better version of myself while going through the stress of my education and my early career. And then moved out to Colorado and did my MFA in poetry there and was sort of right place, right time, got to be one of the editors on the anthology Carrie mentioned, for Rocky Mountain National Park. Very similar project, similar process. But I knew as soon as I came back and started working at the Wick Poetry Center that I wanted to bring that concept to Cuyahoga Valley National Park, to this park that had been my home and that was now, in a way, my home again, and I was really happy that Carrie was around to work with.
Carrie George (13:33):
Yeah, I think I kind of stumbled into it a little bit more accidentally. I was working at the Wick Poetry Center at the time that this was a digital project, and it was one of my main tasks to curate it digitally. And then, when it became evident that we were trying to pitch this as a book, I was just so invested in the work already, that I kind of just stuck around and kept going. But I'm actually not from Ohio originally. I'm from Maryland -- I grew up there. So, coming to Ohio, I didn't have a lot of experience in the National Park. I didn't have a really robust relationship to it until I started working on this project. This project coincided with a lot of other great opportunities. So, as we were putting together the toolkit, we were also working with local fourth grade classrooms and taking them on educational poetry hikes in the Park. We were working with rangers and educational staff at the Park, going on these hikes before we had the fourth graders and doing our own education and observations. And then, bringing the nine-year-olds and asking them what they see and what they hear, and letting them write some poems. So really, I came to love the Park through poetry. So, it's only fitting that I got to be a part of this book and continue that journey. And now, I am really invested in the National Park and also, I live in Akron, so my local park's in Summit County, and I can name a bunch more plants than I used to be able to name.
Laura Maylene Walter (15:04):
I love that. And we should mention that there is a forward by Jennie Vasarhelyi, the Chief of Interpretation, Education, and Visitor Services at Cuyahoga Valley National Park. So the forward is, I think, a good introduction for anyone who isn't super familiar with what's in the Park, or why it might matter. I think that's really important. And you know, I guess I'll just give a general plug for everyone to go visit the Park or support our parks. Especially right now, with cuts, I think it's really important that we have this National Park, and we want people to be writing poetry in and about it for a long, long time, right? So, let's talk about the process of putting this together. We can also give a shout out to Jason Harris, a wonderful Cleveland poet. He and I worked together on the Gordon Square Review through Literary Cleveland. And so I think a lot of us know Jason and really respect his work. Again, we're sorry he's not on the call today, but can you tell me how the three of you worked together? Were you soliciting writers individually? Did you have a call for submissions? How did it work, and how did you work together?
Charlie Malone (16:13):
I think all of the above. My hope was that it would be really democratic, that everyone who would be interested would somehow hear about it. But I also know I don't know every poet. Although we're a community, it's a big community, and it can be a broad community. I've been in the Kent area for a long time, and I know many Cleveland writers, but I don't know all the Cleveland writers. So, we were sort of strategic. Carrie was doing so much good work in Akron that I felt like we had some good connections there, and I was trying to find a poet who could really help us sort of spread the word in Cleveland. So we did an open call -- we sent it to everyone we knew. We used the Wick Poetry Center's social media and other communities as best we could. But it was really when I talked to Jason, I pulled him aside at Lit Cleveland one year, at the Inkubator, and said, "Hey, I've got this project, I think you'd be a really good fit." And he said, "Yeah, this is the kind of thing I'd be really interested in doing right now." And he pulled in so many amazing writers and really, really just special pieces that are in this collection that wouldn't be here without his help. And even some of the folks who I would've loved to have in, who didn't get back to him or get back to us, now that it's in print, they've been like, "Oh, Jason had talked to me about submitting, and I didn't get to, and now I wish I had," which I take as a great compliment. We would've loved to have those writers in here, but the fact that it exists now, and they're like, "Maybe I should have spent more time thinking if that was a fit." That's a kind of compliment to me. I'm excited that people respect the final product.
Carrie George (17:47):
Charlie and I had been working with these poems for a few years at the time when we had it accepted as a publication from Kent State University Press. So, bringing Jason on was also a fresh pair of eyes for the actual editorial process, noting if there were poems that we had looked at, like, a hundred times, and he might have been able to say, "Maybe this line break would be a little bit cleaner here," or he also helped us separate, because not all of the poems could ultimately make it into the book. He helped us separate which ones would be better online and which would be better in the book. So he was really invaluable throughout the entire solicitation and editorial process.
Laura Maylene Walter (18:26):
So, I know you've mentioned the website, which of course I'll be linking to so people can read poems online, as well as in the anthology. And I'm trying to remember myself the timeline, because I remember seeing the website a long time ago. But how did that work? The transition, or which came first, and how did that happen?
Charlie Malone (18:43):
The original start sort of coincided with the pandemic. We weren't able to do the kind of outreach and community work that we'd been doing, and I thought wrongly at the time that, "Oh, I'll just put this call out there and everyone will run out to the Park, 'cause that's a safe place to be right now, and have this magical interaction with the Park and send us something." In truth, it was much slower than that, and we had to be very persistent, especially once we sort of got a sense that a press might be interested, and then, it might be an anthology worth printing. You know, we really had to just give people time to get back to themselves as writers and get back to their voices. And so when I did the earlier version at Rocky Mountain National Park, the whole project from call to submissions to print was maybe six to eight months. And this was years, and it wasn't years where you aren't working, it was consistently doing something towards the project. If not every day, certainly every week. I think there's just over 80 poems in the anthology and maybe about a hundred on the website of other poems that, for various reasons, some that we love and some by writers who we love, that didn't fit as we began curating and arranging it.
Laura Maylene Walter (19:57):
Yeah, I can definitely imagine. With so many contributors and so much going on, this would be a huge job. What would you say for each of you were your biggest challenges in working on this anthology, or what would be your biggest surprise, or something that you learned throughout the process?
Carrie George (20:17):
I think the challenge that is maybe obvious is, that it can sometimes be difficult to wrangle poets . I think poets aren't always known for their organization and email skills . And also, as Charlie mentioned, it was during the pandemic, so it was a very sporadic time, at least in the beginning. So you know, making sure that people had received my emails and if they were interested in writing a poem, that they would send it to us in time, especially toward the end. We had a couple very last-minute poems that snuck through, and when you're dealing with a press and publication, it's a little bit less flexible than dealing with a website, which can be updated at any time. And the whole thing was really delightfully surprising, I guess. I would say the first celebration that we had for it, before it was even an idea for a book, was still around the pandemic. It was after we had launched the first round of poems on the website, and I think it might have been 2021 or 2022. Everybody was wearing masks, and I didn't expect to see so many people there at that reading. It was a packed house in the Architecture Building across from the Wick Poetry Center on Kent's campus. And everybody was so kind and excited. Poets who were in the collection felt really, really happy to be there. Poets and audience members who weren't in the collection were just so excited to see it. Everybody loved pulling out the different ways the poems connected between one another. There were just so many threads and through lines that we could finally see because we were able to look at it as a big picture, and not these individual poems. And I think that really gave it the energy to keep going, because we had already been working on it for a year or two at that point, and it just really pushed us to want to get more poets involved and explore fully what it could turn into.
Charlie Malone (22:13):
Yeah, I agree with Carrie. That first February event for it, where we got a good chunk of poets to read from it, was a needed surprise. It really infused the project with more life. I think that's felt true at many of our releases. You know, we did one in the Park at Happy Days Lodge, and that event was so nice and warm, and people were so lovely about the whole project. We did an event up at Hart Crane Park, and we did an event more recently with the Ohio Center for the Book at the Cleveland Public Library. And I think that was where I met the handful of contributors who I'd not met in person yet, 'cause Camille Ferguson had been traveling through a lot of the other national parks, and Quartez Harris had been pretty busy with some stuff. So, getting to meet both of them in person was lovely. I think one of the challenges for me was, at a point, the Press involved a botanist as a sort of scientific fact-checker, and they did a great job and they gave us a lot of feedback, but then we had to process that tension between scientific accuracy and metaphor.
Laura Maylene Walter (23:15):
Yeah, poetic license. Yeah.
Charlie Malone (23:17):
Yeah, right? And some of the poems, you know, the inaccuracies maybe opened up a lot of play or imagination or personal emotion in the piece. And so navigating that feedback in that round of revision I think was a challenge, and to make sure both that the feedback was honored and that the writer's original intent was honored. And we also didn't want to let a piece go through with a glaring error in it. Like, that bird isn't red. I don't know, that's a made-up example But that was part of the process that I maybe hadn't envisioned. And so it was at times a little delicate.
Laura Maylene Walter (23:58):
Yeah, that could be really challenging. Did you often address it by having a conversation with the poet and seeing what they thought?
Charlie Malone (24:05):
Some of them were small, and we would say, "Hey, we've been asked to make this change." Some of the ones that maybe came closer to the heart of the piece did involve a bit of a conversation, and I think Carrie took on some of the more challenging ones with that. So, we got to talk through it together, but I think you handled most of the conversations.
Carrie George (24:23):
Yeah, and I would say, most people took it really well. A lot of the poets in the collection I don't think would self-identify as botanists or naturalists. So for some of them, it was the first time really interrogating the species. But I think some of the observations from botanists, Charlie and I discussed first whether we would even consider it as needed to be edited, 'cause we were like, "This isn't really claiming anything untrue. This is more of a metaphor." So, only a handful of contributors probably got that email from me. But it went well, the conversations with the poets, for sure. Just one of those tricky things.
Laura Maylene Walter (24:59):
Well, I think it's really impressive that you had that opportunity to have a botanist go over it, though, because as writers, I don't know, I always want to be fact-checked, even if I might turn something down because of the poetic license or because I had a reason for it. I still think that it is important. I'm sure no one wanted glaring errors or something that would pull someone out of the poem, but also, that you left room for so much play. I love the muskrat poem written in the voice of a muskrat. There's a really, I think, steamy love poem about lichen in here . That was one of my favorites as well. And so, this is definitely not just a factual guide to all of these plants and creatures and flowers and birds.
Charlie Malone (25:42):
That author is actually a med student, Clara Britton, who wrote the lichen poem...
Laura Maylene Walter (25:45):
Oh, interesting.
Charlie Malone (25:45):
...is one of the few full-fledged scientists in the collection, yeah.
Laura Maylene Walter (25:51):
Nice. Scientists, they write the hottest poems of all, I suppose That's funny.
Charlie Malone (25:57):
Yes.
Carrie George (25:57):
Yeah, I guess so.
Laura Maylene Walter (25:59):
And you have an editor's introduction in the anthology, which I also really loved. It's fashioned as if we're all taking a walk or a hike through the Park together. Can you talk a bit about putting together that introduction, which includes input from all three of you as editors?
Charlie Malone (26:16):
Yeah, I may have been heavy-handed in that element. I had gone for that sort of arc of a hike through the park that's described starting at the Jaite trailhead and going up along the ridges over the valley, and then back down through the forest and along the towpath and river. But you know, it's probably an ambitious 12-mile loop and it's one of my favorite hikes to do in the park. But I'd noticed the collection was probably in my head all of the time, and I did it maybe twice that year, and at different times, saw different species in their cycles. And I remember, I think the first thing I saw was trillium in the spring when I was doing the hike. And so, I thought of Kimberlee Medicine Horn Jackson's poem, and then that whole hike I began to, not just recognize the species, but think of the poet and the poem that were associated with it. And so, I began thinking, can we organize the intro in that way? If that's the governing structure, can we weave all of our voices together? Because I want each editor's voice to be represented in it. I'm really happy with how it turned out. But it was a challenge to sort of braid them together in that way. But at least, for the way my mind works, having that real physical arc to help us organize it, help talk about the structure of the book, was useful. Carrie, on your end, what was me floating that idea like?
Carrie George (27:43):
Well, I think it helped. Because up until that hike as a structure, we had kind of tossed out a bunch of different ideas, which none of them really felt helpful. We wanted there to be an editor's note and introduction, but we didn't know whether we should all get together and write it together, or have a Google doc where we were all editing each other's sentences, or if it should be Carrie's editor's note, then Charlie's editor's note, then Jason's editor's note. None of them really felt like they were what the collection was calling for. And so, when Charlie had that idea, it really felt like it fit. And then what happened was, I believe he asked me and Jason to each write our own, what we would want included, and then you, Charlie, took those together and made a really wonderful introduction. And I don't think we helped that much with that part of it, other than maybe copy editing it once it was done. And then, it suits the order of the book as a whole, I think.
Charlie Malone (28:38):
Yeah, that may be when we decided, oh, then we can sort of use that as the sections, 'cause there were a number of ways -- do we go alphabetical by species? Alphabetical by author? And then, "Oh, what if we arranged them by habitat? And then that kind of matched the introduction. I think that's where -- you don't always think of the editorial part as creative, but those choices for me were really exciting, because you could see the possibilities and you could see how pieces echoed and spoke to each other and how arranging them in that way....and then Carrie did a great job of sequencing the species within those habitats. So yeah, I think it ended up providing us a lot of guidance as we made those decisions.
Laura Maylene Walter (29:18):
Yeah, yeah -- I really liked the structure. That had been one of my questions, so thank you for speaking to that. But it's structured in sections: field, forest, and then rivers, lakes, ponds, wetlands. It really made sense for the anthology when you have so much, so many poems on so many different types of living beings. So, I thought that was fantastic. And if I may, I pulled out just a few lines from the intro that I'm sure you wrote, Charlie, that I just wanted to share because I thought it could give listeners kind of a good feeling of what's in the collection: "This collection is an invitation to explore with each writer, get your hands muddy in the Eastern red-backed salamander's habitat, crane your neck down to the twisted lung of the jack-in-the-pulpit, learn the names of sassafras and strangers, wake to spring with trillium's tri-petaled bloom." I love that -- "learn the names of sassafras and strangers." I just think that's beautiful, and I hope our listeners will do the same. So, in terms of editing a project like this, which is a big project, lots of different writers around this cohesive theme of the National Park and the life that's in it, do you have any suggestions for other writers or editors who might be interested in embarking on a somewhat similar project, like putting together an anthology that celebrates a place or a part of our world? What advice would you give editors who are thinking about doing this?
Carrie George (30:48):
I think -- just do it. Number one, as you mentioned earlier, with so many parks facing cuts, facing defunding, it's really important to anthologize it, inventory it, document it while we have it in its current state, in its less diminished state and will probably only get more diminished, at least for the time being. And the only way we can reverse that is if we pay attention to it, in my opinion. But then, in terms of the practicality of actually doing it, people are probably going to be really enthusiastic about participating. We found so many people who were just so excited to have even the prospect of writing about the National Park, and then once we found five or ten, it was almost like a poetry pyramid scheme and they were just telling us, "These three people you should reach out to, and these people you should reach out to," and it just branched out. And so, I think if somebody is looking to do this, all you need to do is find a few connected people who are passionate about it, and then you'll have more poems than you know what to do with. And then the next part is just putting them together.
Charlie Malone (31:54):
Yeah, I agree with all of that. I think place-based anthologies have this built-in potential to make a community or to reveal a community that's already there. And if you've got a theme, like the Park, then you're already working with like-minded people, in a way. But the advice I'd give is, be persistent and be patient. There were times when I was frustrated at the pace in which things were happening. There were times that I was terrified because of how quickly everything was happening. But I feel so grateful whenever we get a small group or a large group of writers together to share their work, hearing it in their voices is so special, and getting to meet so many poets who I admired, or hadn't come across yet, or who are just starting out on their journeys. It's been a real privilege and something that I'm really proud to have been a part of. But I think what Carrie's also alluding to, that these could serve a really important role in helping advocate for threatened places, I think that's an implicit part of these projects that unfortunately needs to be made more explicit right now. When we did that first reading that February, when it was still just a website, there was such an urgency about the state of the environment and how many of these species are threatened. It felt like a really interesting dynamic, and a really important part of this collection is how time is of the essence here. And so if you've got a place or something special that you want to celebrate, and it doesn't have to be nature-related, but these kinds of collections can really bring folks together, and I think people shouldn't be afraid of the work -- but it is a lot of work.
Laura Maylene Walter (33:37):
I think those are all really good points of treasuring what we have and paying attention to it. Like you say, Carrie, that's what poets do, that's what writers do, right? Is, we give our attention. I also love "poetry pyramid scheme" just because in this case no one's getting ripped off so it's like a happy pyramid scheme.
Carrie George (33:55):
Right, exactly.
Laura Maylene Walter (33:55):
It's a good one. Okay, well, hearing you talk about all that makes me eager to hear some more poetry. So as we start to wrap up, I'd love to hear some more work from you. I know you both have your own poems in the anthology if you'd like to share, or if you'd like to share poems by someone else, I'd love to hear it.
Charlie Malone (34:12):
I'm going to start with Connor Bracken's poem, "Knuckle," because we talked about attending to things that maybe aren't as obvious. And Connor really looks at the crayfish, which you know is often hiding under the rock. It's hard to find, and you know, has this important role in the health of the waterways of cleaning up what's in there. And this is a poem that I think raises more questions than it answers. And I like that it comes near the end of the collection and I find myself thinking about the sorts of ideas Connor puts out there more than I feel like I've landed on anything firm. So, this is "Knuckle": "God is everywhere but has his preferences. Or she does. Or they. Some pronoun that plunges through the coarse weave of language like light through fog as it fumbles, failing again to laminate the world. God lurks but not in majesty, whatever the monks in their stony redoubts say, distilling the zing from high meadows. Not in me, turning rocks in the brook and weighing the fate of the crayfish. Maybe the crayfish? Shredding the dead into silt, anxious to shiver back into its niche and sieve the current? It curls in my hand like a knuckle, or a hand cupping flame. Some absences burn. Some can be held."
Carrie George (35:39):
I am going to read -- I'm deciding -- I think I'll go ahead and read the one that I had planned and then maybe another one. There's just so many to choose from. So this one is maybe more what you would expect a nature poem to be, and Connor Bracken's is too. Benjamin's is maybe more violent than people expect or darker than people expect when they think about a nature poem. I think people think it's just paying close attention to an animal or to nature. But I still love the seeing and the attention in this poem. So this is about the splendid earth -boring beetle, which is a really wonderful name, and it's by Kortney Morrow, who's a Cleveland poet. "Variation on Wings": "Dazzling is a flash of green bursting out from under an old leaf as dozens of iridescent insects scatter towards the sun. Their metallic bodies holding hidden wings. Six delicate legs skimming the soil, surrending to the decomposition of the earth. Their ancient eyes looking at the rot running through the forest floor and seeing possibility. Deep breaths are not a lung expanding in and out. They are the air passing through every opening of a body. To be wrapped up by the wind, to be anchored in the ground."
Laura Maylene Walter (37:08):
Yeah, I love that one.
Carrie George (37:10):
And it's about a beetle.
Laura Maylene Walter (37:12):
The "splendid earth-boring beetle," thank you very much.
Carrie George (37:14):
Exactly right? We just don't think about them, you know?
Charlie Malone (37:18):
Our two beetle poems were read side by side at that event at Hart Crane Park, and they're both so different from each other and really, really lovely.
Laura Maylene Walter (37:27):
Yeah, just beetles. .
Charlie Malone (37:29):
Carrie, what's the other one you're thinking about reading? 'Cause I'm only going to read mine if you're going to read yours.
Laura Maylene Walter (37:33):
I think you should both read both of yours. That's my request personally, but...
Carrie George (37:38):
We've just both read ours so many times and I think we're both tired of it. If you'd like us to both read ours, we can do that. The other poem I was going to read was maybe Cameron's.
Laura Maylene Walter (37:46):
Why don't you read Cameron's, and then each of you read your own poems -- why not? Our listeners haven't heard your poems over and over again, so...
Carrie George (37:54):
Right, exactly. Exactly. We'll just have to pretend we haven't. Okay, let me find Cameron. Okay, so this is maybe one of the odder species in the book, the star jelly, which are, I think, just a type of bacteria. I honestly couldn't even really figure out what they were when I was researching them. And I think this poem encapsulates the mystery that this little critter has had throughout time and all of the different ways that humans have interacted with it. "Star Jelly," by Cameron Gorman: "then the meteors came, and they left us. we fell down from some bright place, blanketed the grass, the branches, the thing we called sleep. nobody knows how we eat sunbeams, where we go when the rain stops. they call us remains. they call us earth-star. they have tried to name us. we were uligo, which meant fat from the earth, a star which has fallen. we remember the atmosphere, its dizzy wash of blue-beams. the streaming before we were star-slubber, star-slough, caca de luna. we remember fire, the heat close to heaven. the coldness that could not touch us. the showers came, and they carried us down, and we became your star-shot, and we became translucent, which means allowing some light to pass through."
Laura Maylene Walter (39:26):
Yeah, that's lovely. Okay, and now let the record show I am forcing Charlie and Carrie to read their own poems.
Charlie Malone (39:35):
All right, so mine's on the fishing spider, and a lot of it is inspired by the time my wife Susan and I were hiking and we met one, and it was bigger than you'd think. So, this is "The Fishing Spider": "You meet her, among the cracks and right angles of Deep Lock Quarry. She crabs back to cover her clutch of eggs. Your muscles go taut in the same way wild, and unconsidered—heart quick without enough breath to compare your relative mass, you back away. I tell you she can prey on fish five times her body size just to turn your blood on. Pumping too loud in your ears to consider her family: the nursery web spiders —a different way to name her. I wonder what is/isn’t automatic or natural? We ought to be careful, looking over the menu at Fisher’s Cafe, that no one decides to name us by what we consume: Bread people, beef people, egg crushers & cheese melters, oil folks & forest eaters, mountain top destroyers, those who confuse shame for power — then swallow it all, drainers of rivers, desert makers, 73 hot dogs in 10 minutes, entire neighborhoods of old homes, feeding on memory, feeding on self-improvement, clutching our eggs & our pets close to the tangle of veins & arteries & nerves in our core, web of ribs, sternum & carapace."
Laura Maylene Walter (41:04):
Thank you. I love that line about turning your blood on, you know, we all know what that feels like. Can you describe the one that you saw? Like, how big?
Charlie Malone (41:13):
Yeah, I would describe her as a hand size, like in The Addam's Family. Yeah, she was quite large, and I heard Susan call out. She'd seen it and startled, and my initial toxic response was to minimize her concern. And then I went over there...
Laura Maylene Walter (41:29):
...and then you saw it...
Charlie Malone (41:30):
...and then I screamed. And then, I was fascinated because it was this big striking species that I didn't know we had.
Laura Maylene Walter (41:38):
Yeah, amazing. And Carrie, what about you? What's your poem?
Carrie George (41:43):
My poem is about the American chestnut, which is technically extinct. There was a blight that ran through American chestnuts in the 1900's and the blight essentially causes them to die when they start to become more than shrubs, but they keep dying and regrowing. So, you might be able to find an American chestnut in the park that's not a full tree, but a sort of bush, and then it's likely to die and go through this over and over again. When I heard this and learned about this, it just sounded so scary to be trapped in this cycle where you're constantly dying and being reborn, and to think about how these were the most prolific, beautiful trees across the U.S. for a time, until they were not. So this is a villanelle, which uses repeated forms to echo that repetition, that cycle. "Blight of the American Chestnut, with observations from the naturalist, Donald Culross Peattie": "The chestnut grows blighted and destined to die on the bodies of giants that once feathered and bloomed like a sea with white combers plowing across its surface. Illness inhabits a legacy, inhabits a system of root, trunk, and vein swirling black thunder through the chestnut, grown blighted and destined to die. Muted browns resurrect in lovely women’s locks, in fine silk cuts pleated into dresses, curtains, tablecloths made like seas with white combers plowing across the surface. Resurrected in memory and laboratories where needles shock cankers into surviving samples. We play god on the chestnuts, growing blighted and destined to die, or to try, at least, as generational loops curse roots back into fatal sprouts with only distant dreams of parents flourished like a sea with white combers plowing across its surface. We treasured their wood in pianos, barn timbers, fences, smoothed their tall torsos into human shapes and desires. The blighted chestnut we sentenced to drown its white combers still bobbing on the surface."
Laura Maylene Walter (44:04):
That is such a perfect subject matter for a poem, really -- this tree that is destined to die. And also I think blight is a great poetic word. But that was beautiful. Thank you so much. Well, after hearing these lovely poems, I'm wondering if you have any advice or thoughts for listeners who maybe are feeling inspired to go out and write a nature poem, something in their backyard, or something in the park, or beyond. I don't know. Do you have any suggestions for how people could get started, if this isn't something they usually do? What can you offer them to help them get started?
Charlie Malone (44:42):
I think the most important tool, and this is something I always go back to in my teaching writing, is, we've talked about attention a lot, but it's really our senses. When we were doing a project called River Stanzas, where we're doing hike-and-writes in the park, we were working usually with fourth or fifth graders and we would just sort of get them out there. Be like, "What do you see? What do you notice? What do you hear? What do you smell? What does this feel like? What does this feel like? What is your skin picking up?" We try not to get them to taste too many things -- but just on your own time, you can. But we really wanted to waken ourselves in that way, like, open up our attention. And the more you do that, the more you perceive. And I think if you want to do this kind of writing, that's a great place to start. And I think starting there, Carrie might give you the opposite advice, but I think doing that first and then going into some of the research can be fun. But yeah, I really hope that we get to come across what the chestnut is going through in the park. I think there's a balance between those two things, between the research element. There are other ways into this work. Like Kortney's poem with the splendid earth-boring beetle, just the name of that beetle opens doors. Star jellies, too. So, there are a lot of ways in, but for me, the poems are more successful when I start with my senses.
Carrie George (46:02):
Something that's really generative for me is language. So, if language to me is odd or unfamiliar, it makes me really think over the words and get a rhythm, which is often an opening to a poem. So, one thing that I really like to do is to go on guided hikes with people who kind of speak a different language than me. And some at Metroparks where I live, you can go on a lot of free programs with naturalists, and they're trained in the language of the ecosystem and in words that are super unfamiliar and just different, and sometimes, poetic. A recent hike I went on, the naturalist explained that you could see that this one tree was bigger than all of the others, which probably meant that at one time it was alone on the farmland. And the trees like that are called witness trees, or lone wolf trees. And so, I didn't know that. But now I went on this hike, and I had this image of a witness tree or a lone wolf tree. I don't know if these are as common in the National Park, just because those are so much bigger, and it's harder for them to do programs like this. But if you live in Summit County, or if you're close, Cleveland Metroparks also has programs like this, just going on hikes with people who know different things and paying attention to that language and bringing a notepad and taking note of the words that are unfamiliar, and then, employing those senses that Charlie was talking about -- I find that really, really generative.
Laura Maylene Walter (47:30):
I have to thank both of you for sharing these poems and your process for creating this fabulous anthology. Just a reminder, everyone, that LIGHT ENTERS THE GROVE will represent Ohio at the National Book Festival in Washington, DC, on September 6th. So, we're all very excited for that. But in the meantime, do you have any favorite, maybe independent bookstores that you would encourage people to order the anthology from?
Carrie George (47:58):
I believe Elizabeth's Bookshop & Writing Centre in Akron has it. You can get that at Northside Marketplace in Akron or on bookshop.org. You can get it on bookshop.org, supporting any local bookstore. I think Loganberry and Mac's Backs also have some copies, so if those are your preferred stores, we love those too.
Charlie Malone (48:17):
That's a pretty good list. I think maybe the Learned Owl in Hudson had some at some point too, but those are all. Mac's Backs has been a good supporter, as well as Elizabeth's, and Loganberry had us up for an event, too. That's maybe one of the other surprises. We had so many events around this book that I feel like we're reaching a tail end to that, which is kind of a relief. They've been a joy, but they've been a lot. We've gotten to read from this collection and gather with the writers from it in so many wonderful places that the celebrations around this have been almost a part-time job in itself.
Laura Maylene Walter (48:49):
I'm sure. I'm sure, no doubt, it's definitely a big project, but a really wonderful one. I feel proud, as a Northeast Ohio writer, that we have the anthology for our National Park and for so many of our local poets. Listeners, I'll be linking to everything, including the book on Kent State University Press's website and the Traveling Stanzas site -- everything else you need. So please, everyone, I encourage you to not only read these poems, but to get out in a favorite park of your own and connect with nature. Carrie and Charlie, thank you so much for being here and for discussing your work with us. It has been a delight. Thank you.
Charlie Malone (49:27):
Thank you.
Carrie George (49:28):
Thank you so much.
Laura Maylene Walter (49:35):
Page Count is presented by the Ohio Center for the Book at Cleveland Public Library. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, rate, and leave a review for Page Count wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more online, or find the edited transcript for this episode at cpl.org/podcast/page count. Follow us on Instagram at Ohio Center for the Book, or find us on Facebook. If you'd like to get in touch, email ohiocenterforthebook@cpl.org, and put "podcast" in the subject line. Thanks for listening, and we'll be back in two weeks for another chapter of Page Count.
We found so many people who were so excited to have even the prospect of writing about the National Park. And then, once we found five or ten, it was almost like a poetry pyramid scheme . And they were just telling us, these three people you should reach out to, and these people you should reach out to. And it just branched out.
Laura Maylene Walter (00:21):
Welcome to Page Count, presented by the Ohio Center for the Book at Cleveland Public Library. This podcast celebrates authors, illustrators, librarians, booksellers, literary advocates, and readers in and from the state of Ohio. I'm your host, Laura Maylene Walter, the Ohio Center for the Book Fellow and author of the novel, BODY OF STARS. Today, we'll be discussing everything, from quite possibly monarchs and migration to milkweed and millipedes, ferns and fields and forests, turkey vultures, poison ivy, woolly bears, muskrats, lichen, and so much more. But more broadly, this episode focuses on the anthology, LIGHT ENTERS THE GROVE: EXPLORING THE CUYAHOGA VALLEY NATIONAL PARK, which is the Ohio Center for the Book's 2025 Great Reads from Great Places selection for adult readers. This book will represent Ohio at the National Book Festival this September. We're thrilled to be joined by Carrie George and Charlie Malone, two of the editors of this anthology. Thank you both for being here, and welcome to Page Count.
Charlie Malone (01:30):
Thanks for having us.
Carrie George (01:30):
Thank you.
Laura Maylene Walter (01:32):
We should say upfront that you have a third co-editor, Jason Harris, who unfortunately is not able to join us on this call, but we will be sure to discuss his contributions a bit later. But for now, let's get to it. We're lucky enough here in Northeast Ohio to have a national park right in our backyard, and this anthology of poetry celebrates that rich biodiversity in the Park, as well as, of course, poetry and language and some of our best hometown poets. So before we get into all the details about this anthology, I thought we should start with what matters most of all today, which is poetry. And I know you both have chosen some poems you might want to read. Can you each start by sharing a poem with our listeners to give them a taste of what this anthology is all about?
Carrie George (02:19):
I'm going to read "White-tailed Deer," by Benjamin Rhodes: "I'm sorry to say the way I know you best is strung-up by your hind legs, the cavity of your body on display, headless, skin flayed and peeled to be cured and stretched over a wooden stool later. I'm sorry, your meat was delicious as a pot roast, your youth and lack of fear at death made the gravy, the potatoes tender. If you didn't know better, you might not tell the flesh in your teeth was once wild. And no, I was never the one with the bow, with the camouflaged rifle and orange vest. I only ever perched in boxes nailed to trees as adventure in imagination, as play at being higher than my surroundings. I only ever saw the way men in my family treated you through pictures, only ever pet your neck as it hung on the wall."
Laura Maylene Walter (03:31):
Oof. That one got me too when I read it.
Carrie George (03:34):
Yeah. I mean, we'll talk about it later, but it shows the different ways people approached the creatures that they were interacting with. Yes, it's not exactly what you would expect from a book about the National Park.
Charlie Malone (03:47):
Well, in almost an opposite way, Benjamin's writing to the white-tailed deer, and the poem that I wanted to start with is Mary Biddinger's -- Mary writes in the voice of the killdeer, which if people aren't familiar with the killdeer, they're pretty common birds nesting often in gravel along the roadside. They're very beautiful. They have a really shrill call, but they also are kind of full of deceit, right? They act like they're wounded to draw predators away from their nests. They sort of limp around or act like their wing is broken. I remember learning that as a child, and that sort of fact of the animals always stuck with me. And I think Mary plays with that really skillfully in this poem, called, "Everyone Knows a Killdeer Means No Harm." And then, there's the killdeer and white-tailed deer echo too, right, which is great. "Find me by the ditch. Least glamorous stretch of dreadful meadow, former scrap heap turned cold cruising spot. You wouldn’t let kids sleep here. How could anything rest in this gravel-scape: runaway trash corner, riverbank of zero picnic tables, no hammocks or guitars? Enjoy my broken-wing act, legs like stems. Body loose newspaper. Song, or scream? If we both believe I’m hurt and dangerous, maybe it’s true."
Laura Maylene Walter (05:15):
You know, I love Mary's work in general. When I started reading this anthology, it's just such a delight. I'm not even a poet, I'm a prose writer through and through, but I recognize so many of these writers and feel like I've absorbed their voices over the years. And so, there's so many, mostly from Northeast Ohio, I believe, of poets who create this collection, and I think it's a really special book. And so I want listeners to get a sense of what this project is. So I suppose, how would you describe this book to someone who has not yet picked it up?
Charlie Malone (05:48):
You know, I think about the process, and Carrie was so vital in pulling it together that I want to leave some of that for Carrie to describe. But I think our goal from the beginning was to get a range of voices and poems that maybe complicated what we think of as nature poetry. Yes, we wanted poems that embraced the landscape and the species that inhabit it, but we also wanted pieces that surprised us, and I think both of the two that we just shared do, in a way. And so, we really wanted to stretch the idea of who could be a nature poet and what a nature poem was. And maybe in the simplest way, it was also an invitation for our writing community to connect with the Park. But the process was really vital. Carrie, do you want to talk about all of the hard work you did in assigning species?
Carrie George (06:33):
You know, I think a simple way to describe it is as a literary field guide, and there are several other publications that are similar to this. Charlie worked on one in Rocky Mountain National Park, there's one for Cascade Valley, there's one for Saguaro National Park. And they're all slightly different. They all have their own kind of local flavor, depending on the region. But I think what is great about field guides is that they help us orient ourselves in a particular landscape, but sometimes they don't give us any kind of familiarity or any touchstone for relating to what we're seeing. If it's the first time we've seen something, then we don't have a good entry point for finding it quickly through the paper of the book. So, I think this provides a little bit more familiarity, like a poem explaining the first time somebody would've encountered a creature that they find in the wild, like the white-tailed deer. They didn't encounter it in the wild necessarily, but they encountered it somewhere, and they have this core memory of it, which gives us a context from when we find it in the wild. And so, when we were putting everything together and kind of beginning the process of this book, we started with a spreadsheet of creatures that live in the National Park. We found these from something called the BioBlitz, which is community science. Basically, it happens in different regions, where citizens will be asked to go out into a region and identify all of the species they can find, and then it's tracked, and that's just a good way to get an actual biological inventory of a region. So we pulled those species, and then I used a random number generator to offer a couple of options to each poet who wanted to participate. And it was really lovely to see that, even though it was random, a lot of poets would already have a connection to some of the species that they were offered. So it just shows the ways that we are already interacting with these creatures, whether we live in Akron, or whether we live really close to the park, or how much time we spend in the park, or if it's just walking around our neighborhood.
Charlie Malone (08:40):
Okay, I like that you brought up the literary field guide element. One of the things we did, and this lives on a website that's cvnp.travelingstanzas.com, there's a map where we've taken each poem and paired it to the coordinates of a known observation from the BioBlitz. So, if you are curious about the poem about witch hazel, and you want to see it in the Park, that map can get you there. And yeah, the way that Carrie navigated that sort of assigning of species, I think one of the intents was that we wouldn't get a bunch of people fighting over the most charismatic species in the Park. We wanted to embrace the full biodiversity of the Park. But then that led us to people choosing species because the name was particularly interesting or evocative, or because they had a relationship. And they thought that the number generator had some sort of magic in it that the species they loved was offered to them, or they went through a process of learning about it through both the observational data, but also doing their own research on it.
Laura Maylene Walter (09:40):
Yeah, I love that the writers were assigned three random and they got to choose from those three. I feel like for a writer, that opens up so much possibility for creativity and for play, as you were saying, you know, learning about something new or discovering connections with something new. Even just reading through it, I was thinking about these plants or these animals or these birds and any associations I might have with them myself. It makes me want to do it on my own, just for fun as a writing exercise, pick three from that list at random and see what I'm drawn to. You know, there are some that I know I'm drawn to. For example, I love the poem about the turkey vulture, because I'm a big fan of vultures, and I did a lot of research on them for a story. So I was like, "septumless" -- I know that about turkey vultures. So, that was really fun. I love the diversity in the variety of the poems, because you've got poems that are more descriptive, some that are written in the persona of the animal or the bird -- one, I think is a screech owl, that poem is three lines long, and others are more like prose poems, or they are a few pages long. And every creature or plant is accompanied by an image, a color image, in the book. Can you tell us about the artwork in the book and where that comes from?
Carrie George (10:52):
When we were forming the website, we were working with the Wick Poetry Center to create this "poetic toolkit," is what it was initially called. And you can still see some remnants of that. There are some lesson plans that educators can use on that website that Charlie shouted out, and each and every one was working with Wick to help design that website. And we just loved the imagery that we were creating and going with that literary field guide feeling. We wanted there to be some sort of imagery in the book, because when you're looking at a field guide, you have a reference image to help identify it out in the wild, the images that they created. I think the line drawings are from old textbooks, and then they're kind of made into this collage, colorful style, by, I think it was someone named Katie, at each and every -- is that right? Katie or Kate?
Charlie Malone (11:43):
Yeah, Kate Jamba was one of the first illustrators who worked with us. I think Alex and some of the other staff helped us -- the project kept going, too, so Alex Kaney and some of the other team. So, probably over the couple of years that the project took from conception to print, a lot of folks at that design firm helped out.
Laura Maylene Walter (12:00):
The end result is just gorgeous, and you can flip through it at random or you can read it straight through. It's really great. I'm curious about each of you personally, maybe your own experiences with the Park, or with nature in Northeast Ohio more generally. What would you like to share with us, like, how you ended up and why you became one of the editors on this project?
Charlie Malone (12:24):
I grew up not far from here. I grew up in Geauga County, in rural Geauga County, and sort of began my poetry career here in Kent, and I spent a lot of time -- kind of ironic now, 'cause this is part of Carrie's story, too -- but I worked for a summer camp that spent a lot of time in the Park when I was an undergraduate and grad student and really began to explore it at the end of my undergrad and graduate career and came to know the Park very well -- volunteered on trail maintenance crews, and it really felt like a place where I could restore myself and get back into my body and be a better version of myself while going through the stress of my education and my early career. And then moved out to Colorado and did my MFA in poetry there and was sort of right place, right time, got to be one of the editors on the anthology Carrie mentioned, for Rocky Mountain National Park. Very similar project, similar process. But I knew as soon as I came back and started working at the Wick Poetry Center that I wanted to bring that concept to Cuyahoga Valley National Park, to this park that had been my home and that was now, in a way, my home again, and I was really happy that Carrie was around to work with.
Carrie George (13:33):
Yeah, I think I kind of stumbled into it a little bit more accidentally. I was working at the Wick Poetry Center at the time that this was a digital project, and it was one of my main tasks to curate it digitally. And then, when it became evident that we were trying to pitch this as a book, I was just so invested in the work already, that I kind of just stuck around and kept going. But I'm actually not from Ohio originally. I'm from Maryland -- I grew up there. So, coming to Ohio, I didn't have a lot of experience in the National Park. I didn't have a really robust relationship to it until I started working on this project. This project coincided with a lot of other great opportunities. So, as we were putting together the toolkit, we were also working with local fourth grade classrooms and taking them on educational poetry hikes in the Park. We were working with rangers and educational staff at the Park, going on these hikes before we had the fourth graders and doing our own education and observations. And then, bringing the nine-year-olds and asking them what they see and what they hear, and letting them write some poems. So really, I came to love the Park through poetry. So, it's only fitting that I got to be a part of this book and continue that journey. And now, I am really invested in the National Park and also, I live in Akron, so my local park's in Summit County, and I can name a bunch more plants than I used to be able to name.
Laura Maylene Walter (15:04):
I love that. And we should mention that there is a forward by Jennie Vasarhelyi, the Chief of Interpretation, Education, and Visitor Services at Cuyahoga Valley National Park. So the forward is, I think, a good introduction for anyone who isn't super familiar with what's in the Park, or why it might matter. I think that's really important. And you know, I guess I'll just give a general plug for everyone to go visit the Park or support our parks. Especially right now, with cuts, I think it's really important that we have this National Park, and we want people to be writing poetry in and about it for a long, long time, right? So, let's talk about the process of putting this together. We can also give a shout out to Jason Harris, a wonderful Cleveland poet. He and I worked together on the Gordon Square Review through Literary Cleveland. And so I think a lot of us know Jason and really respect his work. Again, we're sorry he's not on the call today, but can you tell me how the three of you worked together? Were you soliciting writers individually? Did you have a call for submissions? How did it work, and how did you work together?
Charlie Malone (16:13):
I think all of the above. My hope was that it would be really democratic, that everyone who would be interested would somehow hear about it. But I also know I don't know every poet. Although we're a community, it's a big community, and it can be a broad community. I've been in the Kent area for a long time, and I know many Cleveland writers, but I don't know all the Cleveland writers. So, we were sort of strategic. Carrie was doing so much good work in Akron that I felt like we had some good connections there, and I was trying to find a poet who could really help us sort of spread the word in Cleveland. So we did an open call -- we sent it to everyone we knew. We used the Wick Poetry Center's social media and other communities as best we could. But it was really when I talked to Jason, I pulled him aside at Lit Cleveland one year, at the Inkubator, and said, "Hey, I've got this project, I think you'd be a really good fit." And he said, "Yeah, this is the kind of thing I'd be really interested in doing right now." And he pulled in so many amazing writers and really, really just special pieces that are in this collection that wouldn't be here without his help. And even some of the folks who I would've loved to have in, who didn't get back to him or get back to us, now that it's in print, they've been like, "Oh, Jason had talked to me about submitting, and I didn't get to, and now I wish I had," which I take as a great compliment. We would've loved to have those writers in here, but the fact that it exists now, and they're like, "Maybe I should have spent more time thinking if that was a fit." That's a kind of compliment to me. I'm excited that people respect the final product.
Carrie George (17:47):
Charlie and I had been working with these poems for a few years at the time when we had it accepted as a publication from Kent State University Press. So, bringing Jason on was also a fresh pair of eyes for the actual editorial process, noting if there were poems that we had looked at, like, a hundred times, and he might have been able to say, "Maybe this line break would be a little bit cleaner here," or he also helped us separate, because not all of the poems could ultimately make it into the book. He helped us separate which ones would be better online and which would be better in the book. So he was really invaluable throughout the entire solicitation and editorial process.
Laura Maylene Walter (18:26):
So, I know you've mentioned the website, which of course I'll be linking to so people can read poems online, as well as in the anthology. And I'm trying to remember myself the timeline, because I remember seeing the website a long time ago. But how did that work? The transition, or which came first, and how did that happen?
Charlie Malone (18:43):
The original start sort of coincided with the pandemic. We weren't able to do the kind of outreach and community work that we'd been doing, and I thought wrongly at the time that, "Oh, I'll just put this call out there and everyone will run out to the Park, 'cause that's a safe place to be right now, and have this magical interaction with the Park and send us something." In truth, it was much slower than that, and we had to be very persistent, especially once we sort of got a sense that a press might be interested, and then, it might be an anthology worth printing. You know, we really had to just give people time to get back to themselves as writers and get back to their voices. And so when I did the earlier version at Rocky Mountain National Park, the whole project from call to submissions to print was maybe six to eight months. And this was years, and it wasn't years where you aren't working, it was consistently doing something towards the project. If not every day, certainly every week. I think there's just over 80 poems in the anthology and maybe about a hundred on the website of other poems that, for various reasons, some that we love and some by writers who we love, that didn't fit as we began curating and arranging it.
Laura Maylene Walter (19:57):
Yeah, I can definitely imagine. With so many contributors and so much going on, this would be a huge job. What would you say for each of you were your biggest challenges in working on this anthology, or what would be your biggest surprise, or something that you learned throughout the process?
Carrie George (20:17):
I think the challenge that is maybe obvious is, that it can sometimes be difficult to wrangle poets . I think poets aren't always known for their organization and email skills . And also, as Charlie mentioned, it was during the pandemic, so it was a very sporadic time, at least in the beginning. So you know, making sure that people had received my emails and if they were interested in writing a poem, that they would send it to us in time, especially toward the end. We had a couple very last-minute poems that snuck through, and when you're dealing with a press and publication, it's a little bit less flexible than dealing with a website, which can be updated at any time. And the whole thing was really delightfully surprising, I guess. I would say the first celebration that we had for it, before it was even an idea for a book, was still around the pandemic. It was after we had launched the first round of poems on the website, and I think it might have been 2021 or 2022. Everybody was wearing masks, and I didn't expect to see so many people there at that reading. It was a packed house in the Architecture Building across from the Wick Poetry Center on Kent's campus. And everybody was so kind and excited. Poets who were in the collection felt really, really happy to be there. Poets and audience members who weren't in the collection were just so excited to see it. Everybody loved pulling out the different ways the poems connected between one another. There were just so many threads and through lines that we could finally see because we were able to look at it as a big picture, and not these individual poems. And I think that really gave it the energy to keep going, because we had already been working on it for a year or two at that point, and it just really pushed us to want to get more poets involved and explore fully what it could turn into.
Charlie Malone (22:13):
Yeah, I agree with Carrie. That first February event for it, where we got a good chunk of poets to read from it, was a needed surprise. It really infused the project with more life. I think that's felt true at many of our releases. You know, we did one in the Park at Happy Days Lodge, and that event was so nice and warm, and people were so lovely about the whole project. We did an event up at Hart Crane Park, and we did an event more recently with the Ohio Center for the Book at the Cleveland Public Library. And I think that was where I met the handful of contributors who I'd not met in person yet, 'cause Camille Ferguson had been traveling through a lot of the other national parks, and Quartez Harris had been pretty busy with some stuff. So, getting to meet both of them in person was lovely. I think one of the challenges for me was, at a point, the Press involved a botanist as a sort of scientific fact-checker, and they did a great job and they gave us a lot of feedback, but then we had to process that tension between scientific accuracy and metaphor.
Laura Maylene Walter (23:15):
Yeah, poetic license. Yeah.
Charlie Malone (23:17):
Yeah, right? And some of the poems, you know, the inaccuracies maybe opened up a lot of play or imagination or personal emotion in the piece. And so navigating that feedback in that round of revision I think was a challenge, and to make sure both that the feedback was honored and that the writer's original intent was honored. And we also didn't want to let a piece go through with a glaring error in it. Like, that bird isn't red. I don't know, that's a made-up example But that was part of the process that I maybe hadn't envisioned. And so it was at times a little delicate.
Laura Maylene Walter (23:58):
Yeah, that could be really challenging. Did you often address it by having a conversation with the poet and seeing what they thought?
Charlie Malone (24:05):
Some of them were small, and we would say, "Hey, we've been asked to make this change." Some of the ones that maybe came closer to the heart of the piece did involve a bit of a conversation, and I think Carrie took on some of the more challenging ones with that. So, we got to talk through it together, but I think you handled most of the conversations.
Carrie George (24:23):
Yeah, and I would say, most people took it really well. A lot of the poets in the collection I don't think would self-identify as botanists or naturalists. So for some of them, it was the first time really interrogating the species. But I think some of the observations from botanists, Charlie and I discussed first whether we would even consider it as needed to be edited, 'cause we were like, "This isn't really claiming anything untrue. This is more of a metaphor." So, only a handful of contributors probably got that email from me. But it went well, the conversations with the poets, for sure. Just one of those tricky things.
Laura Maylene Walter (24:59):
Well, I think it's really impressive that you had that opportunity to have a botanist go over it, though, because as writers, I don't know, I always want to be fact-checked, even if I might turn something down because of the poetic license or because I had a reason for it. I still think that it is important. I'm sure no one wanted glaring errors or something that would pull someone out of the poem, but also, that you left room for so much play. I love the muskrat poem written in the voice of a muskrat. There's a really, I think, steamy love poem about lichen in here . That was one of my favorites as well. And so, this is definitely not just a factual guide to all of these plants and creatures and flowers and birds.
Charlie Malone (25:42):
That author is actually a med student, Clara Britton, who wrote the lichen poem...
Laura Maylene Walter (25:45):
Oh, interesting.
Charlie Malone (25:45):
...is one of the few full-fledged scientists in the collection, yeah.
Laura Maylene Walter (25:51):
Nice. Scientists, they write the hottest poems of all, I suppose That's funny.
Charlie Malone (25:57):
Yes.
Carrie George (25:57):
Yeah, I guess so.
Laura Maylene Walter (25:59):
And you have an editor's introduction in the anthology, which I also really loved. It's fashioned as if we're all taking a walk or a hike through the Park together. Can you talk a bit about putting together that introduction, which includes input from all three of you as editors?
Charlie Malone (26:16):
Yeah, I may have been heavy-handed in that element. I had gone for that sort of arc of a hike through the park that's described starting at the Jaite trailhead and going up along the ridges over the valley, and then back down through the forest and along the towpath and river. But you know, it's probably an ambitious 12-mile loop and it's one of my favorite hikes to do in the park. But I'd noticed the collection was probably in my head all of the time, and I did it maybe twice that year, and at different times, saw different species in their cycles. And I remember, I think the first thing I saw was trillium in the spring when I was doing the hike. And so, I thought of Kimberlee Medicine Horn Jackson's poem, and then that whole hike I began to, not just recognize the species, but think of the poet and the poem that were associated with it. And so, I began thinking, can we organize the intro in that way? If that's the governing structure, can we weave all of our voices together? Because I want each editor's voice to be represented in it. I'm really happy with how it turned out. But it was a challenge to sort of braid them together in that way. But at least, for the way my mind works, having that real physical arc to help us organize it, help talk about the structure of the book, was useful. Carrie, on your end, what was me floating that idea like?
Carrie George (27:43):
Well, I think it helped. Because up until that hike as a structure, we had kind of tossed out a bunch of different ideas, which none of them really felt helpful. We wanted there to be an editor's note and introduction, but we didn't know whether we should all get together and write it together, or have a Google doc where we were all editing each other's sentences, or if it should be Carrie's editor's note, then Charlie's editor's note, then Jason's editor's note. None of them really felt like they were what the collection was calling for. And so, when Charlie had that idea, it really felt like it fit. And then what happened was, I believe he asked me and Jason to each write our own, what we would want included, and then you, Charlie, took those together and made a really wonderful introduction. And I don't think we helped that much with that part of it, other than maybe copy editing it once it was done. And then, it suits the order of the book as a whole, I think.
Charlie Malone (28:38):
Yeah, that may be when we decided, oh, then we can sort of use that as the sections, 'cause there were a number of ways -- do we go alphabetical by species? Alphabetical by author? And then, "Oh, what if we arranged them by habitat? And then that kind of matched the introduction. I think that's where -- you don't always think of the editorial part as creative, but those choices for me were really exciting, because you could see the possibilities and you could see how pieces echoed and spoke to each other and how arranging them in that way....and then Carrie did a great job of sequencing the species within those habitats. So yeah, I think it ended up providing us a lot of guidance as we made those decisions.
Laura Maylene Walter (29:18):
Yeah, yeah -- I really liked the structure. That had been one of my questions, so thank you for speaking to that. But it's structured in sections: field, forest, and then rivers, lakes, ponds, wetlands. It really made sense for the anthology when you have so much, so many poems on so many different types of living beings. So, I thought that was fantastic. And if I may, I pulled out just a few lines from the intro that I'm sure you wrote, Charlie, that I just wanted to share because I thought it could give listeners kind of a good feeling of what's in the collection: "This collection is an invitation to explore with each writer, get your hands muddy in the Eastern red-backed salamander's habitat, crane your neck down to the twisted lung of the jack-in-the-pulpit, learn the names of sassafras and strangers, wake to spring with trillium's tri-petaled bloom." I love that -- "learn the names of sassafras and strangers." I just think that's beautiful, and I hope our listeners will do the same. So, in terms of editing a project like this, which is a big project, lots of different writers around this cohesive theme of the National Park and the life that's in it, do you have any suggestions for other writers or editors who might be interested in embarking on a somewhat similar project, like putting together an anthology that celebrates a place or a part of our world? What advice would you give editors who are thinking about doing this?
Carrie George (30:48):
I think -- just do it. Number one, as you mentioned earlier, with so many parks facing cuts, facing defunding, it's really important to anthologize it, inventory it, document it while we have it in its current state, in its less diminished state and will probably only get more diminished, at least for the time being. And the only way we can reverse that is if we pay attention to it, in my opinion. But then, in terms of the practicality of actually doing it, people are probably going to be really enthusiastic about participating. We found so many people who were just so excited to have even the prospect of writing about the National Park, and then once we found five or ten, it was almost like a poetry pyramid scheme and they were just telling us, "These three people you should reach out to, and these people you should reach out to," and it just branched out. And so, I think if somebody is looking to do this, all you need to do is find a few connected people who are passionate about it, and then you'll have more poems than you know what to do with. And then the next part is just putting them together.
Charlie Malone (31:54):
Yeah, I agree with all of that. I think place-based anthologies have this built-in potential to make a community or to reveal a community that's already there. And if you've got a theme, like the Park, then you're already working with like-minded people, in a way. But the advice I'd give is, be persistent and be patient. There were times when I was frustrated at the pace in which things were happening. There were times that I was terrified because of how quickly everything was happening. But I feel so grateful whenever we get a small group or a large group of writers together to share their work, hearing it in their voices is so special, and getting to meet so many poets who I admired, or hadn't come across yet, or who are just starting out on their journeys. It's been a real privilege and something that I'm really proud to have been a part of. But I think what Carrie's also alluding to, that these could serve a really important role in helping advocate for threatened places, I think that's an implicit part of these projects that unfortunately needs to be made more explicit right now. When we did that first reading that February, when it was still just a website, there was such an urgency about the state of the environment and how many of these species are threatened. It felt like a really interesting dynamic, and a really important part of this collection is how time is of the essence here. And so if you've got a place or something special that you want to celebrate, and it doesn't have to be nature-related, but these kinds of collections can really bring folks together, and I think people shouldn't be afraid of the work -- but it is a lot of work.
Laura Maylene Walter (33:37):
I think those are all really good points of treasuring what we have and paying attention to it. Like you say, Carrie, that's what poets do, that's what writers do, right? Is, we give our attention. I also love "poetry pyramid scheme" just because in this case no one's getting ripped off so it's like a happy pyramid scheme.
Carrie George (33:55):
Right, exactly.
Laura Maylene Walter (33:55):
It's a good one. Okay, well, hearing you talk about all that makes me eager to hear some more poetry. So as we start to wrap up, I'd love to hear some more work from you. I know you both have your own poems in the anthology if you'd like to share, or if you'd like to share poems by someone else, I'd love to hear it.
Charlie Malone (34:12):
I'm going to start with Connor Bracken's poem, "Knuckle," because we talked about attending to things that maybe aren't as obvious. And Connor really looks at the crayfish, which you know is often hiding under the rock. It's hard to find, and you know, has this important role in the health of the waterways of cleaning up what's in there. And this is a poem that I think raises more questions than it answers. And I like that it comes near the end of the collection and I find myself thinking about the sorts of ideas Connor puts out there more than I feel like I've landed on anything firm. So, this is "Knuckle": "God is everywhere but has his preferences. Or she does. Or they. Some pronoun that plunges through the coarse weave of language like light through fog as it fumbles, failing again to laminate the world. God lurks but not in majesty, whatever the monks in their stony redoubts say, distilling the zing from high meadows. Not in me, turning rocks in the brook and weighing the fate of the crayfish. Maybe the crayfish? Shredding the dead into silt, anxious to shiver back into its niche and sieve the current? It curls in my hand like a knuckle, or a hand cupping flame. Some absences burn. Some can be held."
Carrie George (35:39):
I am going to read -- I'm deciding -- I think I'll go ahead and read the one that I had planned and then maybe another one. There's just so many to choose from. So this one is maybe more what you would expect a nature poem to be, and Connor Bracken's is too. Benjamin's is maybe more violent than people expect or darker than people expect when they think about a nature poem. I think people think it's just paying close attention to an animal or to nature. But I still love the seeing and the attention in this poem. So this is about the splendid earth -boring beetle, which is a really wonderful name, and it's by Kortney Morrow, who's a Cleveland poet. "Variation on Wings": "Dazzling is a flash of green bursting out from under an old leaf as dozens of iridescent insects scatter towards the sun. Their metallic bodies holding hidden wings. Six delicate legs skimming the soil, surrending to the decomposition of the earth. Their ancient eyes looking at the rot running through the forest floor and seeing possibility. Deep breaths are not a lung expanding in and out. They are the air passing through every opening of a body. To be wrapped up by the wind, to be anchored in the ground."
Laura Maylene Walter (37:08):
Yeah, I love that one.
Carrie George (37:10):
And it's about a beetle.
Laura Maylene Walter (37:12):
The "splendid earth-boring beetle," thank you very much.
Carrie George (37:14):
Exactly right? We just don't think about them, you know?
Charlie Malone (37:18):
Our two beetle poems were read side by side at that event at Hart Crane Park, and they're both so different from each other and really, really lovely.
Laura Maylene Walter (37:27):
Yeah, just beetles. .
Charlie Malone (37:29):
Carrie, what's the other one you're thinking about reading? 'Cause I'm only going to read mine if you're going to read yours.
Laura Maylene Walter (37:33):
I think you should both read both of yours. That's my request personally, but...
Carrie George (37:38):
We've just both read ours so many times and I think we're both tired of it. If you'd like us to both read ours, we can do that. The other poem I was going to read was maybe Cameron's.
Laura Maylene Walter (37:46):
Why don't you read Cameron's, and then each of you read your own poems -- why not? Our listeners haven't heard your poems over and over again, so...
Carrie George (37:54):
Right, exactly. Exactly. We'll just have to pretend we haven't. Okay, let me find Cameron. Okay, so this is maybe one of the odder species in the book, the star jelly, which are, I think, just a type of bacteria. I honestly couldn't even really figure out what they were when I was researching them. And I think this poem encapsulates the mystery that this little critter has had throughout time and all of the different ways that humans have interacted with it. "Star Jelly," by Cameron Gorman: "then the meteors came, and they left us. we fell down from some bright place, blanketed the grass, the branches, the thing we called sleep. nobody knows how we eat sunbeams, where we go when the rain stops. they call us remains. they call us earth-star. they have tried to name us. we were uligo, which meant fat from the earth, a star which has fallen. we remember the atmosphere, its dizzy wash of blue-beams. the streaming before we were star-slubber, star-slough, caca de luna. we remember fire, the heat close to heaven. the coldness that could not touch us. the showers came, and they carried us down, and we became your star-shot, and we became translucent, which means allowing some light to pass through."
Laura Maylene Walter (39:26):
Yeah, that's lovely. Okay, and now let the record show I am forcing Charlie and Carrie to read their own poems.
Charlie Malone (39:35):
All right, so mine's on the fishing spider, and a lot of it is inspired by the time my wife Susan and I were hiking and we met one, and it was bigger than you'd think. So, this is "The Fishing Spider": "You meet her, among the cracks and right angles of Deep Lock Quarry. She crabs back to cover her clutch of eggs. Your muscles go taut in the same way wild, and unconsidered—heart quick without enough breath to compare your relative mass, you back away. I tell you she can prey on fish five times her body size just to turn your blood on. Pumping too loud in your ears to consider her family: the nursery web spiders —a different way to name her. I wonder what is/isn’t automatic or natural? We ought to be careful, looking over the menu at Fisher’s Cafe, that no one decides to name us by what we consume: Bread people, beef people, egg crushers & cheese melters, oil folks & forest eaters, mountain top destroyers, those who confuse shame for power — then swallow it all, drainers of rivers, desert makers, 73 hot dogs in 10 minutes, entire neighborhoods of old homes, feeding on memory, feeding on self-improvement, clutching our eggs & our pets close to the tangle of veins & arteries & nerves in our core, web of ribs, sternum & carapace."
Laura Maylene Walter (41:04):
Thank you. I love that line about turning your blood on, you know, we all know what that feels like. Can you describe the one that you saw? Like, how big?
Charlie Malone (41:13):
Yeah, I would describe her as a hand size, like in The Addam's Family. Yeah, she was quite large, and I heard Susan call out. She'd seen it and startled, and my initial toxic response was to minimize her concern. And then I went over there...
Laura Maylene Walter (41:29):
...and then you saw it...
Charlie Malone (41:30):
...and then I screamed. And then, I was fascinated because it was this big striking species that I didn't know we had.
Laura Maylene Walter (41:38):
Yeah, amazing. And Carrie, what about you? What's your poem?
Carrie George (41:43):
My poem is about the American chestnut, which is technically extinct. There was a blight that ran through American chestnuts in the 1900's and the blight essentially causes them to die when they start to become more than shrubs, but they keep dying and regrowing. So, you might be able to find an American chestnut in the park that's not a full tree, but a sort of bush, and then it's likely to die and go through this over and over again. When I heard this and learned about this, it just sounded so scary to be trapped in this cycle where you're constantly dying and being reborn, and to think about how these were the most prolific, beautiful trees across the U.S. for a time, until they were not. So this is a villanelle, which uses repeated forms to echo that repetition, that cycle. "Blight of the American Chestnut, with observations from the naturalist, Donald Culross Peattie": "The chestnut grows blighted and destined to die on the bodies of giants that once feathered and bloomed like a sea with white combers plowing across its surface. Illness inhabits a legacy, inhabits a system of root, trunk, and vein swirling black thunder through the chestnut, grown blighted and destined to die. Muted browns resurrect in lovely women’s locks, in fine silk cuts pleated into dresses, curtains, tablecloths made like seas with white combers plowing across the surface. Resurrected in memory and laboratories where needles shock cankers into surviving samples. We play god on the chestnuts, growing blighted and destined to die, or to try, at least, as generational loops curse roots back into fatal sprouts with only distant dreams of parents flourished like a sea with white combers plowing across its surface. We treasured their wood in pianos, barn timbers, fences, smoothed their tall torsos into human shapes and desires. The blighted chestnut we sentenced to drown its white combers still bobbing on the surface."
Laura Maylene Walter (44:04):
That is such a perfect subject matter for a poem, really -- this tree that is destined to die. And also I think blight is a great poetic word. But that was beautiful. Thank you so much. Well, after hearing these lovely poems, I'm wondering if you have any advice or thoughts for listeners who maybe are feeling inspired to go out and write a nature poem, something in their backyard, or something in the park, or beyond. I don't know. Do you have any suggestions for how people could get started, if this isn't something they usually do? What can you offer them to help them get started?
Charlie Malone (44:42):
I think the most important tool, and this is something I always go back to in my teaching writing, is, we've talked about attention a lot, but it's really our senses. When we were doing a project called River Stanzas, where we're doing hike-and-writes in the park, we were working usually with fourth or fifth graders and we would just sort of get them out there. Be like, "What do you see? What do you notice? What do you hear? What do you smell? What does this feel like? What does this feel like? What is your skin picking up?" We try not to get them to taste too many things -- but just on your own time, you can. But we really wanted to waken ourselves in that way, like, open up our attention. And the more you do that, the more you perceive. And I think if you want to do this kind of writing, that's a great place to start. And I think starting there, Carrie might give you the opposite advice, but I think doing that first and then going into some of the research can be fun. But yeah, I really hope that we get to come across what the chestnut is going through in the park. I think there's a balance between those two things, between the research element. There are other ways into this work. Like Kortney's poem with the splendid earth-boring beetle, just the name of that beetle opens doors. Star jellies, too. So, there are a lot of ways in, but for me, the poems are more successful when I start with my senses.
Carrie George (46:02):
Something that's really generative for me is language. So, if language to me is odd or unfamiliar, it makes me really think over the words and get a rhythm, which is often an opening to a poem. So, one thing that I really like to do is to go on guided hikes with people who kind of speak a different language than me. And some at Metroparks where I live, you can go on a lot of free programs with naturalists, and they're trained in the language of the ecosystem and in words that are super unfamiliar and just different, and sometimes, poetic. A recent hike I went on, the naturalist explained that you could see that this one tree was bigger than all of the others, which probably meant that at one time it was alone on the farmland. And the trees like that are called witness trees, or lone wolf trees. And so, I didn't know that. But now I went on this hike, and I had this image of a witness tree or a lone wolf tree. I don't know if these are as common in the National Park, just because those are so much bigger, and it's harder for them to do programs like this. But if you live in Summit County, or if you're close, Cleveland Metroparks also has programs like this, just going on hikes with people who know different things and paying attention to that language and bringing a notepad and taking note of the words that are unfamiliar, and then, employing those senses that Charlie was talking about -- I find that really, really generative.
Laura Maylene Walter (47:30):
I have to thank both of you for sharing these poems and your process for creating this fabulous anthology. Just a reminder, everyone, that LIGHT ENTERS THE GROVE will represent Ohio at the National Book Festival in Washington, DC, on September 6th. So, we're all very excited for that. But in the meantime, do you have any favorite, maybe independent bookstores that you would encourage people to order the anthology from?
Carrie George (47:58):
I believe Elizabeth's Bookshop & Writing Centre in Akron has it. You can get that at Northside Marketplace in Akron or on bookshop.org. You can get it on bookshop.org, supporting any local bookstore. I think Loganberry and Mac's Backs also have some copies, so if those are your preferred stores, we love those too.
Charlie Malone (48:17):
That's a pretty good list. I think maybe the Learned Owl in Hudson had some at some point too, but those are all. Mac's Backs has been a good supporter, as well as Elizabeth's, and Loganberry had us up for an event, too. That's maybe one of the other surprises. We had so many events around this book that I feel like we're reaching a tail end to that, which is kind of a relief. They've been a joy, but they've been a lot. We've gotten to read from this collection and gather with the writers from it in so many wonderful places that the celebrations around this have been almost a part-time job in itself.
Laura Maylene Walter (48:49):
I'm sure. I'm sure, no doubt, it's definitely a big project, but a really wonderful one. I feel proud, as a Northeast Ohio writer, that we have the anthology for our National Park and for so many of our local poets. Listeners, I'll be linking to everything, including the book on Kent State University Press's website and the Traveling Stanzas site -- everything else you need. So please, everyone, I encourage you to not only read these poems, but to get out in a favorite park of your own and connect with nature. Carrie and Charlie, thank you so much for being here and for discussing your work with us. It has been a delight. Thank you.
Charlie Malone (49:27):
Thank you.
Carrie George (49:28):
Thank you so much.
Laura Maylene Walter (49:35):
Page Count is presented by the Ohio Center for the Book at Cleveland Public Library. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, rate, and leave a review for Page Count wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more online, or find the edited transcript for this episode at cpl.org/podcast/page count. Follow us on Instagram at Ohio Center for the Book, or find us on Facebook. If you'd like to get in touch, email ohiocenterforthebook@cpl.org, and put "podcast" in the subject line. Thanks for listening, and we'll be back in two weeks for another chapter of Page Count.
