photo by Joli Livaudais
“Nickole Brown creates a new language for our relationships with non-human animals. Her poems are founded on fully embodied listening and yield insights that unify mind, body, and emotions. At a time when such inner and outer connections are too often severed, her poems show us the possibility of wholeness.” —David George Haskell, author of The Songs of Trees and the Pulitzer-finalist The Forest Unseen
“Brown is a savior of wild creatures, a lover of animals, an angel in waiting, a rescuer, a story teller.” —Washington Independent Review of Books (January 2019 Examplars, Grace Cavalieri)
“We no longer live lives close to those necessary others who are here with us, the animals, and so there is in us a great lack—of wisdom, of empathy, of attention. For this, Nickole Brown’s book-length poem The Donkey Elegies might well be first remedy. With great wisdom and empathy, and with exquisite attention to history, culture, language, gender, memory, and the beautiful, weary world about us, Brown allows us to truly see and for a blessed moment be with that most humble of beasts, and in so doing she challenges us to turn to the holinesses in our own worlds, to hold them close—closer yet.” —Joe Wilkins, author of Fall Back Down When I Die and When We Were Birds
FREE and open to the public
DATE
Thursday, April 27
SCHEDULE
Reading: 6pm
Craft Talk — Writing in the Age of Loneliness: Eco-Literature and the Writer’s Task: 3:30pm
Book sales will follow each event.
LOCATION
Plemmons Student Union 201B, Table Rock Room
FOR MORE INFORMATION
Susan Weinberg at weinbergsc@appstate.edu
PARKING is free on campus after 5pm. We recommend the College Street Deck (from King Street, turn down College Street at the First Baptist Church). To reach the Student Union, cross College Street and follow the walkway between the chiller plant and the University Bookstore, passing the Post Office and entering the Student Union on the second floor. For further parking information or a map, please see www.parking.appstate.edu.
We are now in the throes of a sixth mass extinction of plants and animals. Some call it the Antropocene, but biologist E.O. Wilson said it may be called by scientists and poets alike the Eremozoic, meaning “The Age of Loneliness.” If we take the worries of climate change and habitat destruction seriously — and in this lonely age potentially bereft of our fellow creatures — how can we help but feel an incapacitating sense of hopelessness that threatens to render things like literature and poems utterly useless? In this session, we’ll strive together to find ways past this potentially debilitating hurdle. We’ll ask questions that instead of silencing ourselves will urge us on: What is our responsibility as writers to this epoch? Can the average working person with limited access to nature make any difference? How might we depict the suffering of non-human but sentient beings? How can one write about plants and animals without producing work that is sentimental, overly personified, flat-lined with facts, or, worse, rendered incapable of communicating from its own rage? What impact can we make with our words? Depending on the time we have together, we’ll study poems that have their own solutions to these pitfalls and may try our hands at writing through this darkness with awareness, control, and yes, even hope.
The Visiting Writers Series is named in honor of the late Hughlene Bostian Frank (class of 1968), a 2013 Appalachian Alumni Association Outstanding Service award recipient, past member of Appalachian’s Board of Trustees and ASU Foundation, long time member of the College of Arts and Sciences Advancement Board and generous supporter of Appalachian State University.