Earth - Our Home
A Collaborative Showcase on Climate Change
Home Sick* by Karen Elias
Featured Artist:
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Featured Poet:
Marjorie Maddox
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Valiant Scribe presents an artistic showcase of Karen and Marjorie's collaboration, two friends with a shared passion for climate change advocacy. Through their artwork, they seek to raise awareness and start important conversations about environmental issues caused by human activity, and climate change, in particular the raging wildfires in North America.
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Karen and Marjorie have a wide range of projects under their belt, from photography to poetry. No matter the project, their mission is to make art that speaks to the heart and empowers people to take action.
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At Valiant Scribe, we strive to create a space where everyone feels welcome and inspired. We hope you join us on this journey and discover what we have in store below.
Interview with Marjorie Maddox
by Jaime Grookett for Valiant Scribe
Written Interview with Marjorie Maddox & Karen Elias
We had the opportunity to interview Marjorie and Karen for the Valiant Scribe Showcase. This collaboration formed from a mutual appreciation of each other’s work, resulting in a partnership that is greater than the sum of its parts. In the following interview, you’ll learn how this duo has teamed up to make an impact on the art world, social justice issues, and climate change.
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Can you start by telling us how the two of you came to work together and how you see your work as complementing each other?
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Marjorie: Having taught, at one point, at the same university, Karen Elias and I have known each other for years. However, it was not until we were paired in a community ekphrastic exercise that both our interactions and friendship deepened. The Station Gallery, a small art gallery housed in a train car in Lock Haven, Pennsylvania, hosted a Words & Images event, where poets and artists used work by each other as prompts. I was very fortunate to receive Karen’s art as inspiration (confession: I requested her composite photographs, and she requested my poetry). My work with Karen is true collaboration—mutually thought-provoking and joyful. We are both happy to share drafts and to revise here and there, but most often we understand, appreciate, and are delightfully surprised with what the other person has discovered or underscored in our own work. Truly, the pieces are stronger together than by themselves.
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Karen: As Margie says, we first came to work together after being paired (at our own request) for an ekphrastic event held at the Station Gallery in Lock Haven. When most successful, our collaborations allow us to enter a common space where we can dream together to spark additional layers of complexity and depth.
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What motivates you to create your art? How does your work complement Valiant Scribe's focus on social issues?
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Marjorie: Often, collaboration, and ekphrasis, in particular, push me into new territories. I never would have written some of the pieces I have without collaborating with Karen on this new curlew series and on our book Heart Speaks, Is Spoken For.
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Karen: As climate change has turned into a climate crisis, I have become more and more focused on using my art in service to our planetary well-being. Trained as a Climate Reality leader, I also work with a consortium of environmental activists working to change the conversation about the climate in the halls of our state capital in Harrisburg, PA. Though activism and the dissemination of facts are effective strategies, I believe we also need ways to speak to the heart. Creating photo collages has become, for me, a way of presenting the viewer with the reality of climate devastation, not for its own sake but as a way to understand the impacts our actions will have on future generations and on the life of our planet itself. I want the viewer to be stilled, to see through the lens of grief, to understand the persistence of possibility.
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Tell us a bit more about this collection. What inspired your work on climate change and the other topics reflected in the collection?
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Marjorie: The most recent collaboration, focuses even more on environmental concerns. For example, several early pieces were inspired by passages Karen discovered in Ali Smith’s Companion Piece.
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Karen: Everything is connected. Our failures around climate come from the same place as our failure to understand our responsibilities as larger caretakers of the earth and of each other.
You are both accomplished writers with extensive publication histories. In what ways is your work similar to the work you created early in your career? How has your work evolved or changed throughout the course of your career? What do you think drives those changes?
Marjorie: I write in several genres—poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, children’s literature—and on such different topics as medicine, the body, the intersection of the spiritual and natural worlds, faith and doubt, etc. I think what propels me toward all of these is curiosity, a deeper understanding, and, again, the joy of discovery. As Joan Didion once famously said, “I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.” Writing is my way of witnessing and processing the world around us and the world to come. There’s always another experience, text, idea, or work of art to spark a response.
Karen: I've always been concerned in my work with social justice issues; it's the medium that has changed over the years. And now that I think about it, although I love and will continue to use visual imagery in my work, it seems I'm reverting now to the medium I grew up with and trained in – that of words. Since retiring from teaching college English for over 40 years, I've written something like fifteen plays, most of them centred around climate. Those of us who are passionate about combating the crisis are hearing that we need to have conversations with others. A play, which happens in a room where living people are sitting, listening, and breathing together, is one good way to advance those conversations. Thanks so much to Valiant Scribe for giving us this opportunity to talk!
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Valiant Scribe would like to thank Marjorie Maddox and Karen Elias for taking the time to chat with us today. Their work demonstrates their passion for written and visual art which pushes boundaries between what is and what could be. Please enjoy the showcase!
Curlew Sends Feelers into the Future by Karen Elias
Hope Is the Thing with Feathers
- after Emily Dickinson
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The curlew is the thing
with feathers, is the beak
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wildly waving wide ribbons
that hold back the strands
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of storm. That’s the thing
about curlews,
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about hope. Red sky
in the morning...Warning
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and delight intersecting,
flag-like ribbons curling
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into another day
maybe. The curlew is
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the thing. Even in the middle
of a hurricane, even on a fragile
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bough while earth’s vast tornado
of despair keeps widening,
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widening, the curlew is the thing
with feathers, is the beak
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wildly waving its frayed
but flapping ribbons
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of persistence, of hope.
Red sky at night,
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sailor’s delight. Sky
widening, widening into
curlews, into hope.
That’s the thing.
by Marjorie Maddox
Curlew Witnesses Curlew Fire by Karen Elias
The Witnesses
-after the 2018 wildfire in Curlew, Washington
Near the confluence
of Long Alec Creek and the Kettle River,
the curlew watches its namesake—
town of one hundred—
as residents stare toward the west,
inhale fear.
Smoke rewrites the sky
where the curlew once flew.
Flames attack its map and habitat.
Ridgelines pulse with what is singed:
feathers, pines, mountains, horizon
streaked with regret
and the burnt promises
of those not there to witness,
the incineration of branch,
the contagion of spark,
the long, slow burn of loss.
O Curlew and curlews,
obscure enough to hide
once within these safe acres,
even you Grief has found,
even you.
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by Marjorie Maddox
The poem and photo previously appeared in Still Point Arts Quarterly
This Way, That Way by Karen Elias
This Way, That Way
-after Robert Frost
For too long, even the curlew
deliberates the obvious:
restoration or destruction?
Surely, a simpler choice
than paths diverging
in yellow woods in a poem
pretty enough to frame
in Curlew, Washington,
before wildfires curl
toward the Canadian border.
In this different world and poem,
nature hesitates; amber flames
consume the fast-approaching end
of the road. Will we follow
the plain beaks on our faces
to safety? For the short-sighted,
the signs appear almost
identical. But look beyond
the bend. Ages and ages hence
is here. This way and that
are not just as fair
at all. Those first steps do
make all the difference.
There will be sighs.
About this, the dead poet’s
right: We can’t go back.
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by Marjorie Maddox
North by Karen Elias
Gerrymandering
From down here,
up there is
nowhere close to
click click there’s no place like
City Hall to haul your
cracked compass spinning,
spinning its shiny tin arrow, True North
a myth lost in the reshuffling
of district lines and Which way do the monkeys fly?
voting booths Pay no attention to yourself
behind the curtain. Or do that keep you looking
both ways, keep you crossing streets,
rivers, endless fields of deceptively sweet-
smelling poppies all the way
to the Emerald mirage you mistook
for your own backyard Toto, this isn’t
Pennsylvania anymore, the familiar still
in focus but slanted just enough
to help you see the unreal not paved
with yellow bricks, but the ordinary
cracked choices of Now, pointing someplace
not here, not home, not anywhere
close to the bright blue skies harboring
tomorrow’s tornadoes.
by Marjorie Maddox
The poem and photo previously appeared in The Coop: A Poetry Collaborative.
Locked Out* by Karen Elias
And It Was Good
Not the green-grey sludge
snaking to the river’s edge.
Not the sun’s overdone orb
baking the snake to a dry bed of dust.
Not the hands of a man cracking open
stones in a barren bed of dirt
beside a field void of crops,
or trees, or snakes, or
soul. Not the frickin’ fracking
or the culture-draining pipe.
And the morning and the evening
of the umpteenth billionth year…
And it was not good, not not good,
not not not not not not not not not not not not not
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by Marjorie Maddox
Homesick: After the Hurricane* by Karen Elias
Thank you for visiting "Earth - Our Home," a showcase about climate change. We hope you enjoyed the amazing works of art displayed by our talented artists. We encourage you to share broadly and reach out to the artist and poet to learn more about their past and future endeavors. We hope you take a second to read the short bios of the collaborators below before you exit the page.
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* "Home Sick," "Locked Out," and "Home Sick: After the Hurricane" were previously published in Cold Mountain Review (Spring/Summer 2019)
Featured Artist & Poet
Dr. Karen Elias, who taught college English for 40 years, is an artist/activist, using photography to raise awareness about climate change. Her award-winning work appears in private collections and galleries. She serves as board member of the Clinton County Arts Council, as membership chair, and as curator of the annual juried photography exhibit. Heart Speaks, Is Spoken For, an ekphrastic collaboration with poet Marjorie Maddox, appeared in 2022 from Shanti Arts. Additional collaborations have appeared in such literary, arts, or medical humanities journals as About Place, Cold Mountain Review, The Ekphrastic Review, The Other Journal, Glint, Poetry in Transit, Ekstasis, and Ars Medica. Elias, also a playwright, has work chosen by the Climate Change Theatre Action and performed in 8 countries.
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Professor of English at Lock Haven University, Marjorie Maddox has published 14 collections of poetry—including Begin with a Question (Paraclete, International Book and Illumination Book Awards Winner), and the ekphrastic collections Heart Speaks, Is Spoken For and In the Museum of My Daughter’s Mind, based on her daughter’s paintings (www.hafer.work), and including work by Karen Elias, Greg Mort, Margaret Munz-Losch, and others (Shanti Arts). She also has published the short story collection What She Was Saying (Fomite); 4 children’s and YA books, and Common Wealth: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania (co-editor with Jerry Wemple, PSU Press). Please see www.marjoriemaddox.com.
Marjorie Maddox and Karen Elias