Noatak National Preserve Residency Interview with Andrea Spofford (July 15th-August 15th, 2014)

Floatplane return, backcountry trip two.

Bio: Andrea Spofford's essays and poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Vela Magazine, Revolver, the Kudzu Review, the Oklahoma Review, Red Paint Hill, Town Creek Poetry, Sugar House Review, and The GulfStream: Poems of the Gulf Coast, among others. Her chapbook, EverythingCombustible, is available from Dancing Girl Press and her chapbook Qikiqtagruk: Almost an Island is forthcoming from Red Bird Chapbooks. A native Californian transplanted to the South, Andrea is Poetry Editor for Zone 3 Press.

It is the intersection of person and physical place that characterizes Andrea’s writing overall and the collaboration between science and art—the point where conservation meets poetry—that most interests her. Andrea participated in the Noatak National Preserve residency in northwestern Alaska from July 15th to August 15th, 2014.

Q: Why were you interested in participating at the Noatak National Refuge residency?

A.S. All of my work deals with nature and conservation issues, place specifically. Recently my focus has been on conservation and wilderness, but also how humans find their place in wilderness and how we define wilderness.

Alaska was particularly appealing because it is stereotypically known as this last frontier. Alaska is a wilderness area that I had never been to, and had wanted visit for a very long time.

I planned some Alaska trips, and they kept falling through, so I applied to this program thinking, “Wow, this is right up my alley.”  This is funny because Tama, Jess, and I were all recommended by friends to apply to this program. I read through the listing, and I thought that the Alaska biome sounded really perfect. It sounded like the goals of the residency—celebrating the Wilderness Act while exploring how we define wilderness and how we experience wilderness—seemed to be exactly what I was doing in my poems and essays. I am always trying to find my place in the natural world and reconcile my impact and influence upon it. That’s why I applied and was specifically interested in Alaska. I was very excited when I found out the location because there’s so much historical human interaction within the landscape of the Noatak National Preserve. Getting to see how people interacted with their landscape thousands of years ago was specifically appealing to me.

Q: Why is the intersection of Art and Science so important to you and your work?

Tundra and the onset of fall.

A.S.  Well, first I think scientific language is really interesting and I think there’s a lot of overlap between scientific thought processes and creative thought processes. I like to compare writing a formal poem like a sestina or a sonnet to something that has a very specific format—much like an equation. You want to get to a final product in as few steps as possible, but there’s an element of creativity and thinking outside the box that’s necessary as well.  There’s satisfaction with writing a sestina  that not only successfully follows the pattern but is also very creative.  I think there’s a similar thought process that happens in the sciences and I think there’s a specific part of the brain that both the sciences and the arts explore.

My writing reflects my interests. I read a lot of scientific articles and I like to steal from that language because it is foreign and exciting to me as a writer. I like to take these articles or issues and try to work through them in my poems and essays; at the same time, I like to dissect the language and make it something that I understand and that a layperson reader would understand as well. In that way I feel like a translator, beholden to the original as well as the new product.

I think there is a necessary collaboration between science and art when it comes to wilderness in that there is an element of subliminity experienced by both scientists and artists who devote their lives to wilderness issues. The overlap is great and it just makes sense that there would be collaboration.

 I write so much about environment and place that I see part of my made-up job description as being a translator for that. It seems it’s the same part of the brain that goes into vivid descriptions, and a lot of my writing is very vivid. The most exciting thing for me is to combine my personal experiences of abstractions like place and environment with very physical and concrete sciences.  

An essay I wrote about Alaska can be found in Vela Magazine; it addresses fishing but also ideas like, what is wilderness and how do we interact with wilderness? There are hard facts in the essay but it is also more thoughtful, philosophical, and tends to wander off into tangents—that’s one of the best parts about writing, the ability to wander.

I like learning, and that’s why combining science and art is especially interesting. It’s this opportunity to learn something I’m not familiar with; I mean I’m not a scientist but sometimes I wish I was. This has become a chance for me to explore something different and learn something new.

Q: What are some of your first reactions to the Noatak Wilderness?

A.S.  It is really large, and it is really, really quiet. Mike and I were the first floatplane trip out.  At camp it was just Mike, me, and the group’s gear. Tama, Jess, and Hannah were meeting us on the second flight. It was so absolutely quite out there.  When Tama, Jess, and Hannah arrived we could hear the plane from miles and miles away because there was literally no other air traffic.

That said, it wasn’t completely silent; we heard some loons and foxes and the sounds of grass and wind. It was quiet compared to the busy sound of Tennessee, almost painfully so.

Q: What do you believe to be a highlight to your time spent in the Noatak Wilderness?

A.S.  I think the three of us got really lucky in terms of the people we worked with in the Park Service. The Park Service employees in the Western Arctic National Parklands are some of the most generous, kind, intelligent, and wonderful people I have ever met. They went above and beyond to make sure we had an excellent experience so my trips to the backcountry became this magical time.

 In terms of the backcountry, going into the Noatak the first day, that rush of silence and how big Alaska actually is was amazing.

On the Nigu River, we got to participate in archaeological surveys. The day we dug exploratory 50 x 50 centimeter squares was such a great opportunity. In the pit Hannah and I dug, Hannah found an almost perfect atl-atl spearhead that was dated to about 4000 years old. The next day they found datable charcoal in the same pit. That time, at that place, felt like we were doing real archaeology. We were getting to learn so much about the people that worked with and lived upon the landscape thousands and thousands of years ago.

Prepping fireweed blossoms for syrup.

In town there was a day when we made fireweed syrup. We got up early, and Tama and I went with Norma Booth and Frank Hays to collect blossoms. Together we spent all day just making fireweed syrup and taste-testing it. Later, Mike and Ann and Levi came over for lunch.  It turned into this all day, hanging out in Kotzebue experience.

That night everyone came over to our house and I made the salmon I caught the day before. I caught my salmon off the seawall and it weighed about fifteen pounds after it was cleaned—it was a huge salmon and my fishing pole was broken after! It was just this enormous fish, and it didn't even fit on the cookie sheet we put it on; it was bent over in the oven.

All the kids in Kotzebue were so excited when I caught that fish. I think partially because I’m a girl and I caught a really big fish, but also because I was a visitor and I caught a really big fish.  They were giving me directions on how to reel it in because I had never used a snagger before and I didn’t even bring a knife. I mean, we weren’t planning on going fishing. It was just a group of us walking home and we decided to throw a line in and see. Once I had the fish pulled up the boat ramp, one of the boys killed the fish for me and cleaned it too.  The kid’s father said, “So next time you’ll bring a knife.”

There was also a day at the first backcountry location when we sort of took the day off to explore, read poetry, and fish. That day we caught trout. We had six trout when all was said and done. We caught them on a homemade fly. I had a lure and the fish weren’t biting so Hannah made a fly from materials from the surrounding environment. We all started catching fish with the fly that Hannah made—we were fly fishing with a spinning reel, which is pretty funny.  

This was totally the perfect residency and I kept thinking, can it get anymore perfect?

Q: Did the residency make any impact on the way you view the natural world, or facilitate ideas for future work?

 A.S. In terms of focus, my writing the past couple of years has really taken more of environmental direction. I just finished my Ph.D. in the beginning of the summer and my major areas of study were American literature and Environmental Poetics. I’m really interested in early American literature and contemporary writing about environment. I think there is a certain bigness to wilderness, and certain people are drawn to wilderness because of that. I think I’m really drawn to wilderness and gravitate toward people who are drawn to wilderness for that same reason.

Backcountry camp.

Writing about wilderness is just one of those things that is so large it is hard to put into words. I think this residency really influenced my writing. It helped me focus my ideas even more than they have been in the past. It gave me a subject that is really unique—wild in a lot of ways—but also a place people have been interacting with for a long time. There is not a separation from people and wilderness in Alaska; there are people interacting with their landscape. Ideas of ownership are really different in Alaska and I think that made me reconsider how I think about wilderness.  

Q: As an artist do you feel like you influenced the scientist that you worked with?

A.S. When we were in the backcountry we worked with Michael Holt who is the lead archaeologist and head of cultural resources as well as his assistant, Hannah Atkinson.  Having us around—the three of us who are not archaeologists—asked Mike and Hannah to explain things they may not have explained if they had been with a team of other archaeologists. I noticed the small details of things, but the types of rocks and the stories those rocks told were not as apparent to me as they are to Mike. I think the artists’ presence really asked Mike and Hannah to express these things. I think the thing they really had in common with the three of us is that we are all storytellers.  Jess tells stories through visual art, Tama tells stories though her photography, and I tell stories with my writing. Mike especially is a storyteller—a huge part of his job is telling stories about the way people interacted and experienced their landscape. I think Mike was excited to have us there; he’s so earnest and so invested in his resource and so willing to share. I think that quality can be rare.

Stone tools.

I think there is a question, especially in archaeology, about what we present to the public and what we hide away. I think when we present something to the public a lot of times the public wants to destroy it. But if we don’t present it to the public they don’t know that they should care about it; it’s a catch-22. Because they were so willing to share, I think Mike and Hannah took on the role of teacher more than they would have otherwise. I like to think that maybe they experienced the backcountry a little differently, not just from the lens of an anthropologist, but also from the lens of a writer, photographer, and visual artist.

I think we realized we were telling similar stories in different ways. We don’t do exactly the same thing but there is a lot of overlap in our goals and in what we value. 

Q: What were some of the beneficial outcomes of your experience?

A.S. I think the amount of work I produced is a hugely beneficial outcome. There’s so much more to say! I think experiencing this place, a place most people don’t get the opportunity to experience, was hugely beneficial to my creative process as well.  I also think that getting to work with Tama and Jess was fantastic. I don’t get to work with people who are visual artists very frequently, which is a shame. I think there should definitely be more collaboration across mediums and I really admire what both of them do. Just seeing and getting to hear about things from their perspective and observing what they noticed compared to what I noticed became very eye-opening. Tama is a writer (in addition to being a photographer) so I feel like she and I really bonded; we will always have this shared experience.

I also think getting to work with the Park Service was great.  Like I said earlier, everyone we encountered was dedicated, generous, and excited to share—that is really refreshing. The level of care for these parks demonstrated was admirable. 

Paddling for Invasive Plants in the Boundary Waters

Photograph by Artist Troy Nickle

After 17 hours of driving from Canada I finally arrived in Ely, (pronounced Elee) Minnesota, a town filled with canoe enthusiasts, canoe outfitters, outdoor enthusiasts, fishermen and hunters all taking advantage of the nearby Superior National Forest and the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. My first impression of this little town reminded me of mountain towns in Alberta and British Columbia, Canada, although instead of seeing mountain bikes on the car roof rack you would usually see canoes.  Our journey into the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness would involve a 4 day trip with fellow artist Anaya Cullen, Forest Service ecologist Jack Greenlee and biological technician and wilderness ranger Becca Orf. Jack and Becca are working in the Boundary Waters to monitor and mitigate invasive plants. The work that they undertake involves paddling out to the many camp sites along the network of lakes within the Boundary Waters to check the progress of invasive plants, map the locations with GPS and pull the plants. The plants that they target are not native to the area, and were usually introduced during European settlement. Many of these plants overtake an area and are hard to remove due to large interconnecting root systems. Plants like Canada thistle can shade out native plants and knapweed releases a toxin in their roots that affects most native plants, hence the name invasive. Some of these plants include Canada Thistle, Common Tansy, Hawkweed, Knapweed, Ox Eye Daisy, Leafy Spurge and Purple Loosestrife to name a few.

Photographs by artist Troy Nickle

On this trip we were looking at an area that had burned in the Pagami Fire. The area had a unique beauty to it as the bright red and orange bind weed that covered the forest floor was creeping up the black charred pines. Many of the new growth included a large number of Jack Pine whose seeds stay dormant until the heat of a fire burst the seeds open. Jack took notes of the new vegetation occupying the burned area.

Photographs by artist Troy Nickle

On our trip we would travel through more than 5 lakes and portage canoe and gear more than 8 times, some portages as long as half a kilometer. We camped and paddled in pouring rain and while trying to wait the rain out sat under a tarp, shared chocolate and  played cribbage on a homemade crib board with Forest Rangers Chris and Terry who were working at our site. It turned out to be a great rain day!

Troy Nickle portaging. Photograph by Becca Orf

Paddling through the area was a delight; some of the exposed rock in the Boundary Waters, part of the Canadian Shield, is some of the oldest rock on the planet. We often saw common loons, ducks, Canada geese, bald eagles, squirrels, and a variety of interesting mushrooms and vegetation.

Photograph by artist Troy Nickle

Photograph by artist Troy Nickle

Photograph by artist Troy Nickle

The work that Jack and Becka do made me consider what is the relation of my art to the environment, and how can I utilize invasive plants in my work to build on an awareness of these plants and perhaps even mitigate these populations. Part of mitigating invasive weeds involves pulling them so I intend to immerse myself in areas with invasive plants to collect them for my work. I am interested in my art playing a role in mitigating invasive plants and the aesthetics of creating something visually interesting from them.

Pulled Canada thistle wrapped around pines
Artwork by Troy Nickle

dear Scientist by erogerscello

dear Scientist,

Yesterday my painter co-artist and I went up to the Las Platas. We walked partway up the trail head road after becoming anxious about protruding stones on tires, and panting from high altitude we sat in an alpine meadow and had lunch. After lunch I sat and wrote in my journal, and Leslie scrambled and crawled around 'shooting' rocks and grass and things.

I wrote and drew stick figures in my journal. And I became fixated on one of the pictures. There are two stick people holding a circle split in half, and they represent to me the idea of collaboration.

Collaboration to me, is at least two participants, each fully present in all that they bring to the table - as people, as professionals, as thinkers, as doers, as questioners... holding an equal part of an undertaking. The circle split in half is the 'ation' of collaborate. The acting/making, the process of whatever topic, goal, or aim is on the table.

To me, true collaboration is only possible to the extent that the participants involved hold the same fraction of the circle. ( More to discuss on that in a future PHD I hope... )

Scientist, I don't think you have seen my half of the circle, and I'd like to tell you about it...

Scientist, my side of the circle is yes, about me as the hiker, the one that's afraid of snakes, the one that is quiet a lot and wears a red bandana sometimes, the one that asks simpler questions about your job and needs a kid definition of those geologic words I can't remember, the one who held the camera clicker for you... but there's also that part of the circle that says ARTIST; the part of the circle that says CELLIST, the part of the circle that in this residency you are labeled to be interacting with...

Scientist, I think you might actually be interested in more of this part of my circle...

Actually, I don't really think its important if you are interested, but it is important for me to show up with my entire half of the circle and there is a big chunk of my half that you haven't seen.

Last night I declined an invitation to a party. I'm not really a party person and I wanted some quiet space. I also wanted to do some work. Work for me last night meant going to the museum and sketching shapes from the ceramic work that inspired me, sitting in the Englehart exhibit with my Nascam and earphones to transcribe music I had already recorded, working on emails to contact parents and set up performance dates for my work in Rochester, and finally sitting down with Scubba the cello.

When I sat down with Scubba my hands felt awkward and achy from all the hiking, dehydration, and lack of working out and stretching. I played some scales, worked out my left thumb muscle for a bit, tried to improvise and got irritated, and ended up working on a little project I started my first week here.

My project is to explore hand shape possibilities in microtonal music.

It is rooted in topics including pythagorean chains of ratios, anatomy of the hand, sound waves... In current traditional western music the octave is split into 12 semitone intervals. These intervals are represented for cellists in two basic hand positions. We call them open and closed, or regular and extension. In the regular hand shape we have semitone steps between each of our fingers pointer to pinky. In extension, we have two semitone steps between pointer and middle and one semitone between the other fingers. These two positions form the basis of the way we approach music physically in first to seventh position. It seems to be the best way to avoid injury, and the most effective way to get around the instrument.

In microtonal music the scale is split into other divisions rather than 12. The microtonal set I am working with splits the octave into 24 pitches. While I have played music which included notation for "quarter tones" it was never clear to me which pitch division the composer had in mind, and more practically, how I was supposed to play those notes with my hand. Usually the method used is some kind of pitch bending- a loose method of playing slightly higher or lower than the 12 tone pitch. I wanted to explore how I could cohesively finger pitches within a 24 note division.

Last night I discovered that for quarter tone spaces, within the same physical distance there are multiple hand shapes possible. This sort of blew my mind. To spend 24 years studying the management of two hand shapes and then to discover that there are at least 5 (I'm still working on this) was pretty amazing. I'm not sure what research is out there about this, but look at this quote from wicki:
       "Bowed string instruments (notably violin/viola/cello/bass) can easily and almost unlimitedly play microtonal music, and in fact are easier to retrofit due to the lack of frets. Unfortunately, most trained players of the instruments are going to be finnicky about playing in any way other than the way they're used to, thanks to the pedagogy. There are two important tools in making microtonal string music work, scordatura and fingerboard marking." ( In other words the only way to play other pitch sets is either to re-tune the strings, or draw a line on the fingerboard so you can find the spot. )
I'll have to talk to cellists about it and see who is playing microtonal music and how they are fingering it, if anyone has ever written the pedagogy of this stuff down...

There now, Scientist, I feel better because I've told you about what I did yesterday. I'm not sure this actually makes any difference to you, and it may just be me trying to prove that I can be smart and sciency too, but maybe I feel better because my part of the circle went from an eighth to a quarter.