Aurora Levins Morales — Berkely, CA
River Resident, writer & historian, April 2005
When I saw the description of the River Residency in an online newsletter (Funds for Writers) I knew right away I wanted to go. The Mississippi River has haunted me my whole life, although until this spring I had only seen its upper reaches in Minnesota. I knew that a residency at A Studio in the Woods would allow me to do an important piece of work blending my sense of history and ecology, and the Caribbean and North American worlds between which I move; that it would be an integrating experience. What I didn't know was how it would fill my dreams.
My central image was about silt, the residues of rock and leaf and bone, but also of cultures and histories. So my first day at the Studio, when Joe Carmichael took me for a walk along the levee, I filled jars with river mud and water to set on my desk. It became my daily habit to go and sit there in the afternoons, to think, and watch the muddy water, the immense freighters and spiffy little tugboats, ducks and geese and egrets, all traveling up and down the watercourse. The late mornings and evenings I spent in the studio, where the owls became accustomed to my presence, and graced the trees outside the windows, barking and hooting. Moths brushed the glass, torrential rain made my tropical heart sing, and over the course of a month, I watch the half-bare branches erupt into full leaf. After a while my over-stimulated city-dwelling brain settled down into the green peace. I sat at the end of the dock, looking into the glassy reflection of a world of leaves, empty and ready.
As a poet, I am always sampling the world for the raw ingredients of metaphor. I went on collecting trips: into the French Quarter to run my fingers across old walls, watch people, and listen to jazz leaking out of every opening; into the swamp, with environmental curator Dave Baker who loves the wetlands and forests with intimate knowledge and fury at their reckless destruction, and who introduced me to water locusts, ibis, resurrection fern, and a graceful multitude of
snakes; down to the Gulf with CBR staffer Dan Etheridge and visiting scientist Orrin Pilkey to see for myself the ragged, drowned edges of the marshes; across the river to a day-long Latin American environmental film festival at Tulane one day, and to watch Mardi
Gras Indians with anthropologist Helen Regis on another. There was good food and conversation and information galore.
But the shining heart of the residency was silence and solitude; the opportunity to wrestle with visions and fasten them to the page, to face myself, reflected in a window opening into wildness. This is the astonishing gift Lucianne and Joe Carmichael, and now Tulane University, have made available to a fortunate community of guests. For me, the time at the Studio was a turning point in a lifetime of writing. In the midst of struggling with the perpetual self-doubts and uneven leaps forward of every artist's life, I came to a place of clear certainty about the power and trustworthiness of what I do. I had a writer's birthday. The green, shaded, owl-crossed pond, and the long, wide, sunlit elevation of the levee, have become touchstone images for a kind of inner balance I found there. The river that haunted my imagination now flows across my desk, leaving rich deposits of poetry I know I will work for years.
Aurora Levins Morales, Berkeley, CA
Biography
Aurora Levins Morales is a poet and historian. Born and raised in rural Puerto Rico, the daughter of a prominent ecologist father and an intellectual and artist mother, she was well supplied with books, paint and microscopes. As a child of activists, she has always worked from a sense of deep social passions, as a poet, essayist and historian. Her first book, Getting Home Alive, written with her mother, Rosario Morales, is considered a landmark in US Puerto Rican literature. Remedios, published in 1998, is revisioning of the history of the Atlantic world through the lives of Puerto Rican women and their kin. She also has a collection of essays, Medicine Stories, about history and activism. Whether she is writing poetry about deforestation, marriage or her Jewish and Puerto Rican ancestry, conducting community oral history projects, researching Caribbean land use and migration, speaking on Latina women's health, or the role of Jews in building Middle East peace, all of her work is about the power of story to transform how we think about ourselves and each other. While at the Studio, she has been working on Silt, a prose poem cycle tracing the connections between the ecology, history and cultures of the River and the Caribbean Islands. She lives in Berkeley, California with her daughter. She can be reached at aurora@historica.us.
