Rewilding: A Return to the Writing Life

Rainbow Over Mesa Verde, Original Photo Renee Podunovich

I left my writing studio in 2012 after 15 years of creative reverie in the SW Four Corners region of CO and moved to a newly booming but still easy to live in city. I just wanted a break from the creative deep dive and the endless expanse of the Colorado Plateau. I wanted to play in an urban setting; I wanted to be new. I left my art supplies and writing journals in a box in my shed on my property in the high desert and showed up to my downtown apartment creatively empty-handed. I still wrote some psychology articles and did daily journaling while living there and enjoyed a rich immersion in dance and conscious movement modalities. Yet, five years later, in the middle of a mindless shopping experience, I decided that to go another year without being claimed by the vitality of poetry was unacceptable.

Therefore, I decided then and there, in Nordstrom’s lingerie department, I must re-wild my poetic self. From experience, I knew it would require me to expand in ways that would stretch my current capacity to meet all those words I had left running feral in the massive wilderness of the unconscious.

At the time, I had picked up a copy of Scatterlings: Getting Claimed in the Age of Amnesia, which is Martin Shaw’s very manly poetic and eco-philosophical meanderings. Inspired by his passionate, raw dedication to place-based writing, which had been my mainstay writing style before abandoning ship, I started contemplating in earnest what my next best option was at this mid-life juncture. It probably was not another cocktail at another newly opened restaurant in that little foodie city.

It is never with ease that I dance with poems. It requires an effort to leave the comfort of self as I have thus far imagined it. It takes a willingness to address limitations in awareness to approach the imaginal realms’ immensity. Allowing new lexis to swell up is like deciding to catch a wave one is not sure can be surfed entirely. What it wants to communicate is always uncertain at first. Still, the call, after years of being in the fallow, filled me with gratitude and awe at the creative process and its absolute unwillingness to be tamed, managed, or corralled.

Setting up writing projects for myself has been a way to keep the flow flowing. So, in early 2017, I decided that a trip to Costa Rica, written off as a business trip, of course, would be a suitable way to consider what would come next for my creative life and an excellent way to celebrate my 48th birthday. I planned to try my hand at travel writing. It seemed like a safe way to dip my toes back into the fomenting ocean of wordplay. And people make money from it, so it appeared practical too. Within a month, I had booked the trip. I headed abroad only to find my brain turning off the minute I landed on the runway in San José, Costa Rica, despite the intention to be seduced by the muse, fully and unabashedly.

Photo by Alexander Schimmeck on Unsplash

Upon checking in to the Airbnb rental in Esterillos Oeste, the cottage owner told me that if I saw any giant toads in the courtyard, I should not lick them. An unusual but fair warning. A few days later, I would find my brain in a melted state similar to the yard’s mangos. The magnificent tree was huge, abundant with fruits with thousands on the tree yet and thousands on the ground. The smell of them was a layering of fresh and ripe to overripe and rotting. It wafted into the open-air courtyard on waves of warm and warmer air steeped in humidity I had not experienced prior, even in south Florida. The smell was layered and intriguing, at first delicious, then quite sickening. In fact, the smell was absolutely distracting, such that I could not write much for the days I stayed there.

Since I had split the trip between Airbnb authenticity and a resort, I decided to spend my time interacting with the locals, both the Canadian ex-pats that have settled the steep hillside in the undeveloped, tranquilo beach town and the local Ticos. They were patient with my rickety Spanish. I wandered the beach a lot, ate breakfast each morning at an outdoor beachside cafe, enjoying the establishment’s freshest fruit smoothies amid a pack of 6 rescue dogs who had notably large smiles. It was a mangey dog love-fest, and I lingered there sipping freshly squeezed juice, letting the breezy sea air soothe me. I watched a three-foot-long iguana take a mango and haul it up a palm tree to snack on, heard the racket of the Scarlet Macaws in the local almond trees, and saw their brilliant flock many times. The town has a Mermaid! The statue (pictured above) is so far out into the surf that I did not meet her up close. She is a mystery still, a presence surrounding the place, gazing into the sea at Something Profound.

Siren of the Sea photo by Jerri Johnson on Flickr

“The heat will suck the soul out of you,” the man running the front desk at the resort told me when I checked in a few days early. I had decided to move from the Airbnb due to invisible insects that bite ankles relentlessly (perhaps some relationship to the rotting mangos). I was looking forward to proper air conditioning and poolside drinks. Still, I was hoping something more would come from this burst of rededication to my writing, to my vitality. Too bad I am not a better visual artist. In the tropics, I can see how one might enjoy painting nude bodies in bright pastel colors like Gaugin did on his “exotic” travels. That kind of effort seemed appropriate in some way that engaging my brain to organize words did not.

And so, the inspiration I aspired to on my first days in the country, in the cooler mountain setting of Alajuela, was in the end like the mangos; simply feeding the hunger of the dialectic, changing shape and form, stewing in its own life forces and creative juices, as any good creative process must. It was more proof that I never know what the pen will spill when the creative fire takes off. And sometimes it just smolders for a long while before catching, and that’s ok, part of the process, though staying with the smoke can be a challenge. In my favorite travel memoir, The Songlines, the storyline, so wonderfully sung throughout, has entirely unraveled by the end, as Chatwin is claimed by the magic of the Australian Outback and his encounters with Aboriginal culture. In the last chapter, he appears to give up sewing it all together and lets his notes, written on bumpy roads and by firelight, be a list of loose threads. He let go, was reclaimed.

Note: the last four paragraphs were the extent of my “travel writing” attempts. From here, I can chart in my notebook how the thoughts and words spiraled off into philosophical grappling with the 6th great extinction and radical climate change theories, half-baked personal essays about existential dread, and unfinished poetry. The trip was a success in relaxation and adventure but did not produce a finished product. Until just now perhaps as I reflect upon its true success with new eyes.

Fast forward a few years, and I find myself back at my writing desk in the high desert. I moved back from the city, rededicated to settling into a quiet writer’s life. It has been a wonderful homecoming with multiple projects and collaborations that feel meaningful and challenging, including a new chapbook and a letterpress project. The global pandemic and sheltering in place have unexpectedly helped me “settle in place.” I continue to re-wild my life and let myself be thoroughly claimed by my spot on the earth without the distraction of unquenchable wanderlust. The situation has challenged me to stay grounded in my creative flow without the overindulgences and manic energy that used to accompany my creative life in my younger years.

For me, poetry is part of living an engaged life, a daily medicine that keeps me tethered to balance despite the uncertainty and anxiety of current uneven conditions. Nothing is forever or permanent, but for brief moments in this global pause, I find a connection to my writing life that felt elusive prior. As if something I was constantly chasing is right here in the end. I am grateful for the net of words holding me steady in the uncharted waters of the times.

Also published in Inedible Ink at Medium.

It is the Wild in the Pink: Poetic Essay on Eudaimonia ( A Flourishing Life)

Flourishing photo by Renee Podunovich

It is late summer, and I am sitting with Sonja in her garden lush with wild pink roses, which on some years she harvests to make rosary beads using a 100-year-old recipe whereby the petals are dried, mixed with salt and alum, then hand-rolled and baked in the heat of the oven.
She is telling me about a local band 
made up of mostly men in their eighties,
how they still play together all these years, 
how there might be funds for a bandshell at the city park,
how it would add such enchantment to this tumbleweed town
precariously perched at the edge of Western civilization, 
how such a thing of beauty might offset the fact
that this place is in a perpetual state of continually-falling-apart 
before it spills forth into the desert and Indian country.

I am half-listening, enchanted by summer’s pleasure and a bit tipsy on chilled white wine, but when she says, “so and so, who plays the euphonium…” my brain halts, like that scratch across a record kind of stop and I store the word to look up later, and in the silence of darkness thick with stars
I end up on a 2 am tangential internet exploration 
that starts with the history of brass instruments
and ends with me listening to Brian Eno.
Euphonium is not Eudaimonia,
though it is also from an Ancient Greek word:
 εὔφωνος euphōnos, 
 meaning “well-sounding” or “sweet-voiced” 
which is a kind of “well-being” I suppose, though honestly, it is merely the off-rhyme that interests me, which is strange enough for a word-lover to make a point of it.

Eudaimonia is the wild in the pink roses, the light on the wine inside the glass before you taste it, then the lingering sweetness on your tastebuds.
It is the meta-awareness of the ever-possibility of being spun off into inconsequentiality or ether
but for the mystery of gravity, 
the feeling of warm dirt under bare toes,
the essentiality and rightness of intimate conversations 
with a beloved friend about beauty and hope.
A sure path to happiness is to forget — 
sit still enough that morning glory vines tangle ankles, 
be silent long enough that pollinators think you are wild roses,
open your soul wide enough to consider what might thrive
in a place so arid and isolated it is difficult for much to take hold,
but believe it can anyway.

In the best moments, I know I belong in this universe, in this life,
and can flow with ever-shifting meaning and constant change.
What was happening last year is gone, 
gone like all of the time spent spacing out,
not being present, missing the opportunities
to touch, stargaze, dance around the fire of well-being — 
that interstice between the contentment we hope for
and what we actually engage in every day,
that pull towards our potential existing somewhere 
between the desire to make prayers out of petals,
and the commitment and wherewithal to in reality make them.
Happiness is beyond λέγω — logos; it is the sway of your body
when the music begins, as the euphonium hums and bellows
from the stage of the new bandshell in the park,
and what was once just a plan, dreamed in the garden,
is now living notes that move us flourishingly.

Wildflower Feast photo by Renee Podunovich

Note: I am currently reading, The Really Hard Problem: Meaning in a Material World by Owen Flanagan. In a philosophical exploration of how modern humans make meaning, he uses the scaffolding of “Eudaimonics” — but shifts this philosophy from its roots in Eurocentric biases to include views from the East. In doing so, he helps to alleviate the cognitive dissonance experienced when we attempt to make sense of things within the old dyad of Science vs. Religion. This is a dated dyad, he claims, relevant at the time when Darwin was arguing with western religion, but not so useful to us currently. To resolve the problem of finding meaning in such a limited dialectic, he expands it to include six “spaces of meaning”. This broader sextet for considering “well-being” is made up of Art, Science, Technology, Ethics, Politics and Spirituality. He states, “Living is a psycho-poetic performance, a drama that is our own, but this is made possible by our individual intersection, and that of our fellow performers, with the relevant Space of Meaning.”
Published also at Literary Impulse at Medium

Adventures in Letterpress: Ready, Set…Type Setting

“The Platen Press” Illustration by Sonja Horoshko

In the late summer of 2018, visual artist Sonja Horoshko and I were sitting in her enchanted garden in SW Colorado, dreaming up another collaboration. This delightful conversation was the seed of the 18-month long “Paper Wings” collaboration which resulted in a series of 12 limited edition artist prints and 6 hand-bound artist manuscripts which are now available for purchase to collectors internationally.

The project was started in 2019 and completed over 14 months; first through a 12-month artist residency with Mancos Common Press in Mancos, CO, and completed during a week-long artist residency at Willowtail Springs Nature Preserve in Mancos, CO.

At the time, Mancos Common Press was restored enough to let artists use the renovated presses for fine arts projects. You can watch the story of how the press was restored on PBS. When we arrived as the first artists to have a working residency there, things were still being sorted, discovered, and learned about this lost form of printing.

When we arrived on the first day of the project, we knew we had 12 poems paired with 12 illustrations that we would use to create a limited run of artist prints. We knew we would print some of those as “signatures” or double-sided prints for hand-bound manuscripts or “livre d’artistes” to be completed at a later time. We were naive, to say the least, but inspired and willing to learn this lost art. We planned to complete one print per month, and largely stuck to that timeframe despite having other jobs and projects to tend to.

Letter of Lead photo by Renee Podunovich

The fullest set of type at the time was Garamond 24 point, meaning it had enough letters for the task at hand. However, those letters needed to be put in their proper places in a type case drawer. You can see in this picture the unsorted type and so it was this job we started on day one.

We were thus introduced to the tedious attention to detail and the “willing to get your hands dirty” dimension of working with lead type, ink, and press tools. We realized that first day that we would learn from these materials, they would inform the project as much as our own vision. The length of poems was immediately affected, which affected the flow of the visual narrative as well. On day one, we conjured the ability to be flexible and adapt language and form to the particular constraints that the letterpress presents.

Backward Words photo by Renee Podunovich

It took a long time for me to handset the first poem. Words are set by placing individual lead type letters in a cartridge, from right to left, setting the words and sentences backward. Each letter has a spacer (leading) between it and the next letter. It takes precision, dexterity, and patience. Nothing is more frustrating than setting a sentence and then realizing a “d” was used where a “b” should have been. That means loosening the carefully placed spacers, pulling out that one small letter with tweezers, all the while hoping not to knock the whole sentence amuck. So, mind your “Ps” and “Qs”!

Proof photo by Renee Podunovich

You can see in one of our first proofs these types of mistakes. We did get more proficient as we went along, but the learning curve was really steep at first. Most artists had worked with the press as a visual art medium; a few holiday cards had been set with limited type. No one had attempted a full book until we showed up with our complex vision and project.

We didn’t print as we had naively imagined on that first day. It was a tedious day, but we were satisfied to be starting on our vision. The “pressman” we had lured in to help us had studied letterpress in his industrial arts classes and had good advice and know-how, and the manager of Mancos Common Press was delighted that we were there starting to use the space. We pushed through that day, determined to face the many challenges that we knew we were to encounter during our long courtship with the platen press.

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You can visit the Paper Wings Blog to learn more. We also presented at the Bluff Arts Festival Online 2020 where we talk about our project in depth.

Illustrious for Brief Moments, Artist Print