This March, I attended the first annual Burning Word Festival on Whidbey Island, a 30-minute ferry ride from my home, for a day devoted to listening to poetry and instruction by Washington State practitioners.  On the way over to the island on a very early ferry, I watched high school students in brightly colored sports jerseys revving up for a day of competitions.  I thought about my own children and their sports activities during their school days in Seattle, the orange and black polyester soccer uniform I washed each week for my son and the letter my daughter sought and won in gymnastics proudly stitched onto her green and white Franklin High School letter jacket.  I thought about a young woman I had hired in 1972 to work at a day care center I was directing, my first job after moving from the East Coast to Seattle.  She had grown up on Whidbey Island and told me about her small-town childhood.  I thought about another family I knew on Whidbey Island. The children of that family had attended the day care center I directed and when they were school age, the parents decided to move to Whidbey to provide the kind of childhood they valued and dreamed of for their sons—horses to raise and to ride, farm animals to tend.

I thought about myself, usually a city girl, now living in a small seaport town on a peninsula off of a larger peninsula and watching Discovery Bay outside my window, eagles perched on tall trees and snags nearby.  I thought about the way the Northwest looked, smelled, sounded and felt like to me when I arrived from New Jersey.  I was thankful for the time I was getting to spend living in an area that has not been totally developed.

I watched the kids and wondered what they were feeling.  Ready for the experiences of the big city, I imagined, thinking of the young woman I had hired so many years ago.

At the festival I met so many poets I had known and worked with during my years in Seattle.  I remembered what the world of Northwest poetry looked, sounded and tasted like. I thought about the Northwest native plant salal, so often noted in the poetry by those in Western Washington.  I thought about my poetry teachers, David Wagoner and Nelson Bentley, at the University of Washington, about Wagoner’s love of Dungeness Spit on the Olympic Peninsula and the way he described the land, the flora and the fauna.  I thought of Nelson Bentley’s “Iron Man of the Hoh” and about that river on the Olympic Peninsula.  I also thought about my husband, his pleasure at being back in the NW and how he would love the marionberry pie for sale at the farm.  I purchased one and carried it back home on the ferry.

 In my heart, I redoubled my commitment to a group in my neighborhood alarmed at the idea of regulating the height of vegetation and of taking down tall trees in the easements.  Some people wanted views and increased property values and didn’t seem to be remembering what most of us loved about being in our neighborhood was the ability to be close to nature, to listen to song birds and quail, to see the eagles soaring, to know that animals they survived on were flourishing in the brush piles and undergrowth.

I thought on that road home that I had taken on a challenge with the pie—I had parked my car about a mile from the ferry in a park and ride and now I would have to walk that mile carefully so I didn’t ruin the pie.

About midway in the crossing, I recognized someone I’d seen at the festival.  On the ferry, he was helping the returning high school athletes with a wayward hacky sack.  I smiled at him, remembering my son’s college hacky sacking and how I’d enjoyed him teaching me several skillful maneuvers.

The fellow poet and I began a conversation.  After a little bit, he introduced himself to me. “I’m Tim McNulty.”

I should have recognized him and felt silly not to have.  We talked about the day on Whidbey, the poetry, our own kids and our lives these days.  Tim mentioned the changes in his life now that his daughter was a teen, almost ready to learn to drive.  We also talked about the pie and the mile walk I had ahead of me.

Tim McNulty drove me to the park and ride and during that time I told him about my neighborhood and learned a bit from him about how to shepherd the plants and wildlife in the 1/3 of my lot that was heavily wooded ravine property.  I learned that snags were fruitful to the forest—insects invaded the dead tree trunks and then woodpeckers and other birds and wildlife came to eat the insects and then the decaying tree fostered the soil and new trees.

When I got home, I set about purchasing several books by Tim McNulty (a prolific author with books on many environments, not just the NW environment):  Olympic National Park, A Natural History, Washington ‘s Wild Rivers:  The Unfinished Work, and In Blue Mountain Dusk (poems).

I also followed up on my good luck by interesting Tim McNulty in an email interview for Writing It Real.  Sure, he had said, email me some questions.

Here are the questions I emailed and his answers:

You are known as a nature writer and naturalist. What does it mean to be labeled as this kind of writer?

As one who is intently interested in the natural communities and process that surround me, and who spends considerable time observing, learning and writing about nature, I’ll cop to the somewhat antiquated but charming label of “naturalist.”  In my essays, articles and non-fiction books, I write mostly about wild nature, the natural world and human communities and interactions within this larger context.  My poems often find their origins in the natural world as well, and frequently include natural imagery, but they usually go where they will.

Unlike many of my fellow nature writers, who are put off by the limitations and perceived monotonality of the label (“first person rhapsodic”, etc.), I embrace it.  Depending on how you define it, “nature,” which of course, includes the human, covers a lot of ground.

I’ve been called a “wilderness writer” and “poet of place.”  No gripes with either of these, but “outdoor writer,” I resist.  These are writers usually associated with the “hook and bullet” press, or who do popular “outdoor getaway” stories.  That stuff doesn’t interest me.

When did you begin writing about the natural world?

I didn’t start writing poetry seriously until I was in college.  My first poem, as I recall, contrasted the night street of the city where I lived with a wetland/park a block away.  So you could say I started writing about nature from the beginning.  My first nature-inspired nonfiction was a series of advocacy pieces written in the mid-1970s in an attempt to save some federal wildlands in the Northwest that were at risk of being logged.  They were published mostly in environmental newsletters and pamphlets.  In trying to convey the value of these lands, I began to describe their ecological functions and how they fit into the bigger picture of nature reserves around them.  I didn’t start writing natural history, per se, until several years later when I was asked to contribute an essay to book.  My background as a poet and “pamphleteer” helped make the transition fairly seamless.

How has this defined your lifestyle?

When I finished college, rather than join my writing friends in various MFA programs, I chose to find a wild, beautiful and inspiring place, live there, explore it, and see where my writing might go.  The place I chose (after some wandering) was Washington’s Olympic Peninsula.  I think of my early years here, learning about this place and developing a voice, as an apprenticeship of sorts.  Since then I’ve found I need to be in close contact with wild natural communities, not so much to write about them because I frequently travel to assignments, but for my spiritual well-being.  A certain frugality and simplicity of lifestyle is a natural result.

How has the natural world shaped your writing?

My practice has been to keep a journal and take notes, images, observations, in the field.  Going back over these later, I find that they sometimes open into poems.  Often a poem will grow out of an experience or observation, its shape reflecting the essence of the encounter while noting something of the creative process that gave birth to it (as in Denise Levertov’s definition of organic form).  By relying heavily on images, I invite a reader to participate in the experience on a personal level.

My essays are more structured and preconceived, but they, too, rely on first-person narrative, often in nature, to set tone and theme.

What is the place of poetry in your life?

Poetry is my first love.  It is the form in which I can share my deepest insights and feelings.  I read it almost daily.  Since I’ve been working full-time as a freelance writer, I have been spending less time writing it.

What prompts the poems and what prompts the non-fiction?

Poems are usually prompted by moments of epiphany, nonfiction, to put it prosaically, by ideas I think I can sell.  Both must be sustained by enthusiasm for my subject.  With nonfiction, I feel I can bring something to light that may make a difference in the world of events; poetry is aimed more toward the heart.  With poems I engage more deeply with the process of creation.  With nonfiction I look toward the finished piece out in the world.

Do you feel more whole as a consequence of writing in both genres?

I feel as if I’m able to exercise two sides of my creative expression. But I don’t think there is anything unusual about that.  Nearly all the writers I know work in different genres.  It is a happenstance of the market that pegs one as “poet,” “essayist,” or “novelist.”  Many of my favorite writers work in all three genres.

I have always felt that poetry is something that could be a natural part of everyone’s expression.  I am somewhat mistrustful of the tradition that labels some of us as poets and not others who may be doing just as important work.  The critical thing for any writer is to have an outlet for one’s deepest thoughts and feelings, be it a journal, letters, essays or poems.  If one writes exclusively for the market, their task may become tedious in the extreme.

 

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I want this poem to go back
and do what I didn’t have the grace to do:
lay its thin shirt over your shoulders,
whisper we’ll be there
into your sleep,
and watch the first shadows
begin to cool the deep jade of valleys

  -Tim McNulty
“Mount Mystery”
In Blue Mountain Dusk

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Since meeting him, I am reading more and more of Tim McNulty’s poetry and lyric as well as informative essays, I am standing firm at home with those who want trees of the height that eagles need.  I am meeting with these others, who believe what Wallace Stegner, another writer from America’s West wrote:

Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed…so that never again can we have the chance to see ourselves single, separate, vertical and individual in the world, part of the environment of trees and rocks and soil, part of the natural world and competent to belong to it.

Tim McNulty shows us in his writing and conversation what it means to be “competent to belong to the world.”