9th Annual Symposium on Wildness, Wilderness & the Environmental Imagination

THE FUTURE OF WATER: A series of invited lectures, creative readings, interdisciplinary panel discussions, book signings, receptions, and a documentary film about the secret life and turbulent future of the world’s fresh and salt water supplies.

Friday, March 29  

Memorial Union, Pioneer Room — All Day

• 9:00 AM - 11:00 AM  —  Gasland, A Documentary Film
  

Can you light your water on fire?  The largest domestic natural gas drilling boom in history has swept across the United States. The Halliburton-developed drilling technology of "fracking" or hydraulic fracturing has unlocked a "Saudia Arabia of natural gas" just beneath us. But is fracking safe? When filmmaker Josh Fox is asked to lease his land for drilling, he embarks on a cross-country odyssey uncovering a trail of secrets, lies and contamination. A recently drilled nearby Pennsylvania town reports that residents are able to light their drinking water on fire. This is just one of the many absurd and astonishing revelations of a new country called Gasland. Part verite travelogue, part expose, part mystery, part bluegrass banjo meltdown, part showdown.

• 11:00 AM - 11:50 AM  —  Elizabeth Bradfield, Approaching Ice

Elizabeth Bradfield's award-winning poetry collection, Approaching Ice, portrays the gripping history of polar exploration by channeling its most notable figures—Symmes, Mawson, Scott, Cherry-Garrard, Byrd, and Shackleton among them. From their perspectives and her own, Elizabeth Bradfield relays the wonders and dangers, physical and mental, encountered while endeavoring to reach the earth's least-hospitable regions.

Elizabeth Bradfield is a poet and naturalist.  She is the author of two poetry collections:  Interpretive Work and Approaching Ice, the second of which is a poetic investigation of polar exploration and was a finalist for the Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets.  Her poems have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Poetry, Orion, The Believer and many anthologies. As a naturalist, Bradfield considers herself an "aspiring generalist."  She works on expedition ships and tries to help deepen people’s experience of place by both in-field interpretation and formal presentations.  At home, on Cape Cod, she does field research on marine mammals.  Bradfield is founder and editor-in-chief of Broadsided Press (www.broadsidedpress.org) and current poet-in-residence at Brandeis University.

• 1:00 - 2:00 PM:  Flyway "Home Voices" Award Winners
  

Join us for a reading of the "Home Voices" Award Winners from Flyway: A Journal of Writing & Environment.  The winning pieces were selected by contest judge, Michael Martone, author of Four for a Quarter.

Megan White,"Wunderkammer" a Prezi, Lyric Essay

"I am a sucker for the lyric, the non-linear. And I think we all as writers should begin to consider this powerful typesetting tool we are now equipped with and what it will mean for the "writer" of today and tomorrow to expand beyond the definition of a producer of text alone. I really appreciated the author here discovering what we might be able to do under this emerging definition." --Michael Martone

Claire Kruesel, Selection of Poems

"I enjoyed the sonic nature of this and the, well, clumsiness of it. The mess of the poems and the attempt to revive the latinate and the scientific idiom into a poetic line. The poems themselves were like vernacular junk sequencing the poem itself speaks of. Not afraid of juxtaposition, randomness, accident, chance." -- Michael Martone

 

Megan White is a third-year MFA Candidate in Creative Writing and the Environment.  She teaches English 150: Communication and Critical Thinking at Iowa State University.   White is from Washington DC and the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains of Virginia.  Her writing investigates issues of place, landscape and architecture, as well as how writing and art can be used as tools for creating sustainable, diverse, vibrant communities. 

Claire Kruesel grew up just outside Rochester, Minnesota, then migrated South (though not too far) to Iowa State University, where she studied Biochemistry and Genetics.  Currently a first-year candidate in the MFA program in Creative Writing and Environment, Kruesel’s vision is to merge poetry with science writing to translate the awe she feels for the natural world.  Her interests include fiddling on the accordion, antiques, evolutionary psychology, French, epigenetics, and viewing the world through shifting perspectives of scale. She sings in the ISU women's ensemble Cantamus, and teaches yoga and makes music with the band, Pennyhawk.

 

  

• 2:00 - 3:30 PM — Exploration, Empire & Environmental Justice — Panel Discussion:  Elizabeth Bradfield & Sherwin Bitsui

 Poets Elizabeth Bradfield and Sherwin Bitsui will discuss the political implications as well as the ethics and responsibilities of exploration and resource management in a postcolonial world.  Who wins, who loses, who profits?  

Moderator:  Geetha Iyer was born in India, grew up in the United Arab Emirates, and moved to the United States to study biology. She has since become an MFA student at Iowa State University's Creative Writing & Environment program. She writes fiction, nonfiction, and poetry with a bent toward place-based and science writing. Her first publication is the recipient of a Gulf Coast Prize in Fiction. 

• 3:30 - 4:00 PM — MFA Program Reception

Refreshments  &  Good Conversation 

• 4:00 - 4:50 PM — Sherwin Bitsui, Flood Song
  

Sherwin Bitsui's second book of poems, Flood Song, interweaves allusions to the Native American myths and customs Bitsui was raised with and searing, felt observations of contemporary urban life. Bitsui floods his work with streams of observations of the real and the imagined, through descriptions of the seen and surreal metaphor.Native traditions scrape against contemporary urban life in Flood Song, an interweaving painterly sequence populated with wrens and reeds, bricks and gasoline. Poet Sherwin Bitsui is at the forefront of a new generation of Native writers who resist being identified solely by race. At the same time, he comes from a traditional indigenous family and Flood Song is filled with allusions to Dine (Navajo) myths, customs, and traditions. Highly imagistic and constantly in motion, his poems draw variously upon medicine song and contemporary language and poetics. “I map a shrinking map,” he writes, and I "bite my eyes shut between these songs.”

Sherwin Bitsui is the author of two books of poetry, Shapeshift and Flood Song, a recipient of a 2010 PEN Open Book Award and an American Book Award. Originally from White Cone, Arizona, on the Navajo Reservation, he is Dine of the Todich'ii'nii (Bitter Water Clan), born for the Tl'izilani (Many Goats Clan). His work explores the tensions between the worlds of nature and man as well as the challenge Native Americans face in reconciling an inherited history of lore and spirit with a postmodern civilization. Bitsui's many honors include a 2011 Lannan Foundation Literary Fellowship and a 2011 Native Arts & Culture Foundation Arts Fellowship and a Whiting Writers Award.

• 5:00 PM - 7:00 PM — Dinner Break (on your own)

• 7:00 PM - 8:00 PM — Julia Whitty, Deep Blue Home: An Intimate Ecology of our Wild Ocean
  

Deep Blue Home is a penetrating exploration of the ocean as single vast current, the watery force connected to the earth’s climate control and so to the eventual fate of the human race. Whitty’s thirty-year career as a documentary filmmaker and diver has given her sustained access to the scientists dedicated to the study of an astonishing range of ocean life, from the physiology of “extremophile” life forms to the strategies of nesting seabirds to the ecology of “whale falls” (what happens upon the death of a behemoth). No stranger to extreme adventure, Whitty travels the oceanside and underwater world from the Sea of Cortez to Newfoundland to the Galapagos to Antarctica. This book provides extraordinary armchair entree to gripping adventure, cutting-edge science, and an intimate understanding of our deep blue home.