Welcome to the first episode of a special four-part edition of our Luminaries series that focuses on creative work about watersheds. This special edition has been curated by Caitlin Scarano, a recipient of the 2024-25 Public Humanities Collaboratory Watershed Fellowship.

Caitlin is a writer and poet whose current project explores cultural, political, and ecological interrelationships within the Skagit River watershed, from the dams of its upper reaches out to the Salish Sea. During this four-part series, she interviews four writers and artists whose work on watersheds are luminaries for her.

Today, Caitlin speaks with author and longtime environmental journalist, Lynda Mapes. Over the course of her 27-year career as a reporter at the Seattle Times, and as the author of seven books, Lynda has earned numerous awards, including the Kavli Gold Award for Science Journalism from the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a National Outdoor Book Award, and the Washington State Book Award for nonfiction.

In her work, Lynda centers connections between people and the natural world. Following a confluence of storylines about one of the largest dam removal projects in the world on the Elwha River, Lynda connected deeply with this watershed and the people who care about it. Caitlin talks with Lynda about her reporting and writing, and the ethic of relationality behind them, that led to the book Elwha: A River Reborn.

"Luminaries" is produced by the Spring Creek Project at Oregon State University. This series invites people to share stories about writing and art that illuminates their environmental thinking or work.

In the final episode of "The Art of Reconnection" series, co-host Daniela Naomi Molnar speaks with poet and ceremonialist Danielle Vogel about the scope, power, and possibility of language.

Danielle is an experimental poet who is committed to an embodied, ceremonial approach to poetics and relies heavily on field research, cross-disciplinary studies, inter-species collaborations, and archives of all kinds. Her installations and site-responsive works are often extensions of her manuscripts and tend to the living archives of memory shared between bodies, languages, and landscapes. She is an associate professor at Wesleyan University and the author of several poetry collections, including A Library of Light, Edges & Fray, and Between Grammars.

Daniela and Danielle's conversation is an ode to the power of language — how the written and spoken word rings throughout the body, how it connects with extremely subtle forms of language both inside and outside our bodies, and how writing, editing, and reading become a ceremony.

Their conversation ranges from darkness to lightness, from cellular activity to glacial activity, from the personal to the collective. They celebrate the way language acts as a mediating agent between our material and immaterial worlds, allowing us to connect to and therefore mend our interior lives and our environments.

Daniela and Danielle invite us to wonder: How can language help us touch time? How do syllables and syntax carry memory in the same way a human body or a geologic body might? And how can becoming aware of the embodied nature of language help us connect across time, across lives, and across bodies?

This podcast series was produced by the Spring Creek Project, an initiative of the Patricia Valian Reser Center for the Creative Arts at Oregon State University. The series was created in collaboration with The Arts Center in Corvallis, Oregon.

In part three of "The Art of Reconnection," series co-host Lee Running speaks with guest Ben Goldfarb to take us on an exploration of roads. Their conversation invites us to see these in-between places in new ways.

Ben is a conservation journalist and award-winning author. His writing has appeared in many outlets, including The Atlantic, National Geographic, and "The Best American Science and Nature Writing." His first book "Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter" won the 2019 PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award. And his latest book "Crossings: How Road Ecology Is Shaping the Future of Our Planet" was named one of the best books of 2023 by the New York Times.

Lee creates arresting objects using cast iron, enamel, glass, bone, and handmade paper. Her work intimately explores the impact of human-built systems on the natural world, often incorporating the bodies and bones of animals killed on roads. She invites her audiences to renew their sense of kinship with non-human beings.

Lee and Ben have each spent a great deal of time thinking about, walking along, and studying roads. Throughout this conversation, the two discuss this edge landscape, the species that live and die there, and how these arteries of civilization impact non-human beings and ways of life.

Their conversation invites us to wonder how systems designed to connect people and places actually function to separate us from place and from each other. And they talk about how their art and writing call on us to take notice, to see, hear, feel, consider, and connect to the places we speed past.

This podcast series was produced by the Spring Creek Project, an initiative of the Patricia Valian Reser Center for the Creative Arts at Oregon State University. The series was created in collaboration with The Arts Center in Corvallis, Oregon.