Wild words: New book features creative writing on animal conservation

NINA MOINI: In a new book by the University of Minnesota Press, poets and authors take scientific studies and turn them into creative works. It's called Creature Needs-- Writers Respond to the Science of Animal Conservation. And it includes four Minnesota authors, including Claire Wahmanholm. Who joins me now. Hi, Claire.

CLAIRE WAHMANHOLM: Nice to be here.

NINA MOINI: Thanks for being here. And also joining us is Christopher Kondrich, a co-editor of the book. Thanks for being here as well Christopher.

CHRISTOPHER KONDRICH: Thanks for having us.

NINA MOINI: And I'll start with you, Christopher. You are poet in residence with Creature Conserve. That's a nonprofit that partnered on this book. Can you talk a little bit about the work, the organization does, and how it fits into this new book, into the picture?

CHRISTOPHER KONDRICH: Absolutely. So Creature Conserve is a nonprofit that was founded by one of the co-editors, Lucy Spelman. It's based in Rhode Island. And the organization is dedicated to growing a creative community that brings writers and visual artists, together with scientists, to cultivate new pathways for wildlife conservation. And part of the work that we do is to offer workshops, where students learn how to write creatively using scientific articles and studies as inspiration. So the book came out of those workshops and tries to tap into this creative energy that we all have in order to foster these new pathways for conservation that the organization is after.

NINA MOINI: So cool. And, Claire, so your piece was inspired by the scientific paper "Breeding Habitat Associations of Eastern Whip-Poor-Wills in Managed Forests" by Kimberly Spiller and David King. And I'd like to hear a bit of what you took away from that and wrote about that, if you wouldn't mind sharing.

CLAIRE WAHMANHOLM: Yeah, for sure. I didn't know anything about the article before Chris sent it to me. He had asked when he asked me to sign on to the project. The book is broken into six sections. All six things that animals need to thrive-- air, water, food, shelter, space, and community. And he said, which of these sections sounds most compelling to you? And so I chose shelter. And he's a great here's an article. See what you think. See what you can make out of it, which was actually lovely because whip-poor-wills have long been a favorite bird of mine. Their names are so beautiful. And

NINA MOINI: Oh, they're great.

CLAIRE WAHMANHOLM: Great. Mellifluous, but they're real goofy-looking. They're such goofy guys. So I did get a little thrill when I saw the article. I was like, oh, it was meant to be.

NINA MOINI: I love that. Do you want to share any of what you wrote?

CLAIRE WAHMANHOLM: Yeah, yeah, sure, I can read. It's a longer piece, but I can read some of the ending.

NINA MOINI: Yeah, yeah. just give us a little bit. That'd be wonderful. Thank you.

CLAIRE WAHMANHOLM: Sure. And the poem is called "S."

"We shelter in the study of the shepherd and steward. With science, we scissor and scoop and sample, but it is a sweetness syrup, stoic, and slow. We sift through scenarios. There is softness enough and shelter enough. There is sufficient space and sedge and salt. But we are sore, scared. Statistics shred the sinews that hold together a hopeful body. The nest is shrapneled. The holes in the sieve swell. Things spill, spilled, will spill. The stepping stones are farther and farther apart. The shore farther and farther away. Sorry. I'm sorry. They're sorry. She and he are sorry, and we. Someone should surely save us, should someday. Surely, the story shouldn't end this way."

NINA MOINI: Beautiful. Thank you. I love the alliteration, too.

CLAIRE WAHMANHOLM: Thank you. It's fun.

NINA MOINI: All of those "s" words. That's super fun.

CLAIRE WAHMANHOLM: Yeah, it's a fun one to read.

NINA MOINI: Yeah. Do you want to talk a little bit about just what you're writing there and what part science plays in it?

CLAIRE WAHMANHOLM: Yeah, for sure. So I think what I was trying to capture was human regret, at the way we've hijacked the story of the natural world and our place in it, the way we've relinquished right relation. And so the speaker is someone who is reeling from all these losses, feels overwhelmed, guilty, and also powerless. And it's too late. This is all a dangerous combination. I do not recommend it. It's one I'm sympathetic to because I've been there, obviously, and it's a very easy thing to feel right now. But it's not going to get us anywhere.

And anyway, the speaker is hoping for salvation to come from somewhere. And they mention science as one of those things that has the potential to save us. But they also talk about the limits of that. If you just read depressing statistics, you're going to be depressed. If you just read bad news with no sense of action, you're going to shrapnel your nest. You're not getting the whole story.

And I think the way our media is set up right now is not to give us whole stories. Just the way we live now is so loud. And science is a relatively quiet enterprise. I think we need to be able to hear what it's telling us. But there's so much background noise. It's like when you're out on your Merlin app, trying to hear birds and the cars keep gunning by. But I do think art is maybe something that can amplify what science is trying to say and bring it more to people's ears. And so I think that's why an anthology like this that pairs them is such an intuitive one.

NINA MOINI: Yeah, maybe to their ears and their hearts. Right.

CLAIRE WAHMANHOLM: Right, ideally.

NINA MOINI: Yeah.

And so Christopher, putting this together must have been quite a process, just with so much talent out there to choose from. And Claire had mentioned that the book is organized in this neat way with the different needs that animals have, all of us have in a way. Could you tell me a little bit about how your team chose the writers and the research papers to include within this structure?

CHRISTOPHER KONDRICH: The book has 39 writers, just a small sliver of the amazing writers in this country. We wanted to contact people whose work we already knew and loved and writers who represented a diverse range of voices and aesthetics. But what we were after with organizing the collection in this way was to demonstrate how all of these needs are interconnected and interdependent, the way-- if shelter for one species is under threat, that may also impact that species's access to the food and water that they need.

So we wanted to bring together writers to make all of this interconnected precarity, feel real to readers so that folks, hopefully, can see how they can put some of this stirring, moving literature into action by hopefully getting involved with conservation efforts near them.

NINA MOINI: And yeah. And building on those conservation efforts, I understand you wrote an introductory essay, and it's called "What Humans Owe Animals." What was the point you were trying to make there? What humans owe animals is such a powerful question to think about.

CHRISTOPHER KONDRICH: So it's a great question-- what humans owe animals. I think the point that I was trying to make is that what we owe them is not just the right to be left alone, although that is absolutely part of it. We owe them the right to thrive, whether it's a poem or a short story. These are the kinds of things that allow us to see ourselves as animals as well. We are animals. We're as precarious as any other of the 8-million-plus species on this planet.

And just like we have, agency and aspirations and hopes and love and all that stuff, we owe the animals around us the capacity to pursue those things as well. And it's by being a bit more cognizant, not just about the really well-documented things like climate change or habitat destruction, but through less notable things like light pollution or noise pollution. This book was all about trying to bring a bit more attention to some of those, perhaps, less discussed ways that humans are destroying the lives of the 8-million-plus species on this planet. And so I wanted readers to get away from that-- is that an animal's agency or ability to live a full life has to do with these smaller, less discussed things as well.

NINA MOINI: Definitely.

And Claire, building off that-- I'll give the last question to you here. What do you hope that people do gain from trying to really imagine the world through the lens of animals, rather than just, oh, that's a pretty bird? And in my world, trying to think of the world through that animal's eyes,

CLAIRE WAHMANHOLM: Right. I mean, I think defamiliarization is always going to be useful and always going to be something that enriches your world. And it's a really good exercise, like Chris was saying, to think about humans as if we were just any other species, which we are. I was jet-lagged in an airport last year and was looking around, and I was like, there are so many humans in this building.

Where is everyone else? Every living thing I'm looking at right now is a human. There are so many places that we go that literally we have made just for our species to be contained in them. No other species controls their environment like that.

And so putting yourself, like taking a big step back and taking a global perspective really helps remind us that so much of the world order is arbitrary. We just made it up. There's no rule that things have to revolve around us. We've made things that way because we're powerful, but it's not inevitable. And we don't have to keep doing that. And in fact, we shouldn't. We have everything to gain from decentering ourselves and making the world so much richer.

NINA MOINI: Fascinating. Claire and Christopher, thank you both so much for coming on and sharing this perspective and about your work. I really appreciate it.

CLAIRE WAHMANHOLM: For sure. It's been a pleasure.

CHRISTOPHER KONDRICH: Thank you.

NINA MOINI: Claire Wahmanholm is a poet based in the twin cities and featured in the new book, Creature Needs-- Writers Respond to the Science of Animal Conservation. And Christopher Kondrich is co-editor of the book and poet in residence for the nonprofit Creature Conserve. Claire and the three other Minnesota authors who were featured will be giving a reading this Thursday at Milkweed Books that's in Minneapolis.