Here’s what editors Nathaniel Brodie, Charles Goodrich and Fredrick J. Swanson have to say about their anthology Forest Under Story: Creative Inquiry in an Old Growth Forest:
“Two kinds of long-term research are taking place at the H. J. Andrews Experimental Forest, a renowned research facility in the Oregon Cascades. Here, scientists investigate the ecosystem’s trees, wildlife, water and nutrients with an eye toward understanding change over varying timescales up to two hundred years or more… . This anthology—which includes work by some of the nation’s most accomplished writers, including Sandra Alcosser, Alison Hawthorne Deming, Jane Hirshfield, Linda Hogan, Freeman House, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Kathleen Dean Moore, Robert Michael Pyle, Pattiann Rogers, and Scott Russell Sanders—grows out of the Long Term Ecological Reflections program and showcases insights of the program’s thoughtful encounters among writers, scientists and place.”
I am honored to have a poem included. “Hope Tour: Three Stops” takes readers to three sites in the forest on a tour with forest scientist Alan Tepley. The poem’s sections visit 1) an old clear-cut, 2) the Blue River Face Timber Sale Unit that was burned as part of the management strategy, and 3) an old growth reference plot that has been left “unmanaged.”
“… perhaps they had wanted fire to kill fewer trees. I am happy / below the charred towers. Landform on this ridge asks for risks. / Snags and seed trees—exposed spires— say design. Dare. / Darkness is the awareness: it may not have been necessary— / their acting here. In this way. … /// Further up the road within what we could have been. / Humbling. The experimental treatments not exactly / an entropy like this…. nearly all she had hoped for / here / then gone.”
Anderson Moseman, pages 154-55